Sideration. The surrealist diplomatic scene which took place on Friday, February 28, in the Oval Office went around the world. Donald Trump and JD Vance both raised his tone against Volodymyr Zelensky. The American president and his vice-president found him guilty of having publicly contradicted him on the war in Ukraine and not having been quite grateful to Washington. During this altercation at the White House, Donald Trump surprised somewhat by evoking a case far removed from the war in Ukraine, but which could explain, at least in part, the resentment of the American president with regard to his Ukrainian counterpart: the Hunter Biden affair.
“Let me tell you, Vladimir Putin drooled with me. He went through a false witch hunt where they used it, as well as Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia,” said the American president. “Have you ever heard of this affair? It was a lie. He was a scam involving Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, the sneaky Adam Schiff. He was a scam of Democrats. And he had to cross this. And he did it,” continued the American billionaire. “We did not finish in war. And he had to bear it. He was accused of all these things. He had nothing to do with that. It was out of Hunter Biden’s bedroom. It came from Hunter’s bedroom. It was disgusting. And then they said: ‘Oh, the laptop of hell was made by Russia’. The 51 agents. that.”
The July 2019 telephone call
Donald Trump seems to refer to several cases, including that on the suspicions of Russian interference during the 2016 US elections. In addition, the American president quotes Hunter Biden. The son of Joe Biden, also pardoned by his father in December 2024, just before leaving the White House, sat between 2014 and April 2019 on the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, one of the largest private producers of natural gas in Ukraine. At the start of 2019, Hunter Biden was accused of corruption activities concerning his trade relations in Ukraine. During a telephone call in July 2019, Donald Trump seemed to ask Volodymyr Zelensky to open an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter, while the republican billionaire was campaigning for his re -election against the Democratic candidate.
“We talk a lot about Joe Biden’s son and the fact that Joe Biden has stopped the investigation and many people want to know more about the subject, so that would be great if you could look at you,” Donald Trump told Volodymyr Zelensky, according to the report of the telephone conversation between the two men disclosed in September 2019. But the wish of the American manager seems to have been a dead letter.
Donald Trump, who accused on September 23, 2019 “Joe Biden and his son” of being “corrupt”, was targeted by a first attempted dismissal following this call for abuse of power and obstruction in the Congress. He avoided the “Impeach” and the Hunter Biden file was buried for a few months, before reappearing in the last weeks of the American campaign, in 2020, fueled by questionable revelations.
“I do not take the words of JD Vance seriously”
Did Donald Trump want to take revenge publicly from Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday? Questioned by The Swiss daily BlickPhilipp Adorf, scientific assistant at the University of Bonn, does not exclude him. “Donald Trump has never forgiven Volodymyr Zelensky for refusing in 2019 to open an investigation into Hunter Biden and his commercial activities in Ukraine,” he said. In addition, as recalled Blick, The American president is irritated by the fact that his Ukrainian counterpart visited a armaments factory in Pennsylvania with the Democratic Governor, Josh Shapiro, during the last American electoral campaign in September 2024.
Furthermore, if, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Ukrainian president had taken care not to interfere too much in American political life, he seemed to have ended this restraint by criticizing Donald Trump and especially JD Vance during an interview given to the journal The New Yorkerpublished on September 22, 2024, upstream of his visit to the United States. “I do not take the words of JD Vance seriously, because if that were the case, America would go to a world conflict,” lambasted Volodymyr Zelensky. Always with the New Yorkerthe Ukrainian president tried to calm Donald Trump’s ardor, the Republican candidate indicating at the time regularly that in the event of a victory in the presidential election, he would settle the Russian-Ukrainian conflict “in 24 hours”. “I have the feeling that Donald Trump does not really know how to stop war, even if he thinks of knowing it,” said the Ukrainian head of state.