From the moment that Volodymyr Zelensky was sworn in as Ukraine’s President, in May, he and his team focussed on achieving a single goal when it came to President Donald Trump: an Oval Office meeting between the two leaders. For any Ukrainian President, the symbolism of a White House visit and a bilateral summit with his American counterpart is of great political value, a way to signal bona fides at home and geopolitical stature abroad. Given Ukraine’s war of attrition with Russia-backed separatists, which is now in its fifth year, it is also a way to convey strength and security.

A member of the Zelensky administration said that the need for a state visit by the leader to Washington was clear: to send a warning to the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. “The answer is Russia,” the official said. “If Russia were to continue its aggression, the only one who could stop it is the United States. Europe is not enough.” The United States is currently the only Western nation that is providing military aid, including sophisticated weaponry, to Ukraine. “What Zelensky needs to prove to his people, and also to signal to Moscow, is that he has juice with Trump,” a former senior Obama Administration official said. “For Zelensky, all forms of U.S. support are matters of national life or death. In that context, a meeting at the White House that signals Trump’s support for Ukraine is not just a normal P.R. event—it is existential.”

Another factor was the political style of Zelensky, a forty-one-year-old former comic actor, whose rapid and surprising ascent to the Presidency was fuelled by a preference for the grand gesture. “His style of politics is blitzkrieg,” Volodymyr Fesenko, a veteran political analyst in Kiev, said. “He wants the quick, positive result.”

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Like Trump, Zelensky was eager to outdo his predecessor in office. Petro Poroshenko, the incumbent President whom Zelensky defeated last spring, had failed to arrange an official White House visit since Trump took office. A brief “drop in” encounter between Poroshenko and Trump, in June, 2017, had been without any of the fanfare usually rolled out for visiting heads of state. (Trump was convinced that an unproven conspiracy that had circulated on Fox News and other conservative media outlets was true: Ukraine, under Poroshenko, had intervened against him in the 2016 American Presidential campaign.) For Zelensky, achieving in a matter of weeks what Poroshenko had failed to do in two years would be further proof of his magic touch and status as a political prodigy.

In May, Trump’s Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations, Kurt Volker, told the BBC that the White House intended to send “a high-level delegation” to Zelensky’s inauguration. Initially, some Ukrainian officials thought the delegation would be led by Mike Pence, the Vice-President. Instead, the White House opted to send Rick Perry, the Energy Secretary. The choice of Perry was intended to signal to Zelensky and his team that Trump wasn’t ready to send a delegation at the highest level. Before a higher-level meeting could be arranged, the Trump White House wanted Zelensky to know that he needed “to start proving himself” and to demonstrate what “sort of leader he’s going to be.” The official said that the White House was interested in seeing Zelensky tackle “corruption writ large.”

Shortly after Zelensky’s inauguration, the new Ukrainian President dispatched a small coterie of advisers to Washington to lay the groundwork for an Oval Office visit. The response from the Trump White House was decidedly noncommittal, a stance that confused the Ukrainians, who continued to believe that such a meeting was just around the corner.

In Kiev, as the weeks went by, the question of whether a meeting would take place became a fraught topic among Zelenksy’s aides and in Ukrainian political circles. “It starts to look strange if it doesn’t happen,” the member of the Zelensky administration said. As the summer dragged on, Ukrainian officials noticed the lack of preparations for a meeting. “It wasn’t confirmed, and kept not being confirmed, and so before long the question arose: What’s going on?” the source from the Zelensky administration said.

According to a whistle-blower complaint filed by an American intelligence officer, the Ukrainian leadership was led to believe that a meeting depended on Zelensky’s willingness to “play ball” by investigating dubious allegations against Biden. Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani wanted the Ukrainian government to open an investigation into unproved claims that Biden pushed for the dismissal of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect his son Hunter, who had a lucrative seat on the board of Burisma, a leading Ukrainian gas company. (In fact, the Obama Administration supported an investigation of Burisma, including after Hunter joined the board, and the Ukrainian prosecutor, whom Biden singled out for dismissal, was widely seen by American, European, and Ukrainian officials as an obstacle to anti-corruption efforts.)

After waiting several months for an invitation from the Oval Office, officials in Kiev came to wonder whether the prospects for such a meeting hinged on a Ukrainian commitment to investigate allegations against Trump’s political rivals. The source in the Zelensky administration said that the message from one group of U.S. officials was that, if the Zelesnky administration showed a willingness to launch the investigations, “that would help.”

Zelensky and his advisers heard a different message from a second group of U.S. officials, who warned them against launching the investigations and becoming ensnared in American politics. “The first was saying, ‘Here’s what you need to do in order to get acceptance, so to say, and support,’ ” the member of the Zelensky administration said. “The second was saying, ‘You cannot do this, it will put you in danger.’ ” The cacophony of voices and agendas emerging from Washington was disorienting and dispiriting. “Different people made different shit up and told different Ukrainians,” a U.S. official said. According to Fesenko, the Ukrainian political analyst, “Zelensky and his team were stuck between a rock and an anvil. You need Trump to like you, and you need this visit, but you also need to retain bipartisan support for Ukraine. You can’t get involved in a conflict between Democrats and Republicans.”

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Before and after the July 25th phone call between Trump and Zelensky, the short-lived freezing and then release of two hundred and fifty million dollars was not immediately seen by Ukrainian officials as being linked to Trump’s desire to see the Zelensky administration pursue Biden-related investigations. Ukrainian officials were concerned that the aid was put on hold, but, as the person in the Zelensky administration said, “We did not link military aid to this particular conversation.” (The senior Trump Administration official said, “It was never supposed to be leverage on them.” Democratic congressional investigators say they suspect otherwise and have made the freezing of the aid a focus of their impeachment inquiry.)

Fesenko said that, at the time, many people in Kiev believed that the freeze in aid was an effort by the now former national-security adviser John Bolton to pressure Ukraine to halt the sale of a Ukrainian aerospace company to a Chinese concern. Bolton feared that the sale of Motor Sich—one of the world’s leading manufacturers of helicopter and airplane engines—would give Beijing advanced military technology. Others believed that, unlike the withholding of a meeting with Trump, the aid freeze was a technical formality. “One was considered primarily a bureaucratic problem, the other a symbol and question of big political success,” Fesenko said.

On September 25th, at the United Nations General Assembly, in New York, Zelensky was finally given his personal audience with Trump. Their meeting was overshadowed by events much larger and noisier than Zelensky could have imagined during the months that he and his aides had worked to make it happen. The emergence of the whistle-blower complaint and the spiralling political scandal in Washington have transformed the political calculus for the young Ukrainian leader. “Before, the No. 1 priority was to organize a trip and be liked by Trump,” Fesenko said. “Now the No. 1 priority is to lessen and neutralize the risk coming from this whole story. But that will be very difficult.”

Joshua Yaffa reported from Kiev, and Adam Entous from Washington.