Russia providing mood music for House impeachment drama

For all the talk about Ukraine in the House impeachment inquiry, there's a character standing just off-stage with a dominant role in this tale of international intrigue: Russia.

As has so often been the case since President Donald Trump took office, Moscow provides the mood music for the unfolding political drama.

"With you, Mr. President, all roads lead to Putin," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared last week, and not for the first time.

The impeachment investigation is centered on allegations that Trump tried to pressure Ukraine's new leader over the summer to dig up dirt on Trump political rival Joe Biden, holding up US military aid to the Eastern European nation as leverage.

In her testimony before the House impeachment panel last week, diplomat Marie Yovanovitch suggested that the president's actions played into the hands of Vladimir Putin, whose government has backed separatists in a five-year-old war in eastern Ukraine.

Yovanovitch, a 33-year veteran of the State Department known for fighting corruption in Ukraine and elsewhere, was ousted from her position as ambassador to Ukraine after Trump and his allies began attacking her and claimed she was bad-mouthing the president.

Her ouster, she and several Democratic lawmakers argued, ultimately benefitted Putin.

"How is it that foreign corrupt interests can manipulate our government?" Yovanovitch asked House investigators.

"Which country's interests are served when the very corrupt behaviour we've been criticising is allowed to prevail? Such conduct undermines the US, exposes our friends and widens the playing field for autocrats like President Putin."
A key ally on Capitol Hill, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., casts the impeachment inquiry as a continuation of the Democrats' "spectacular implosion of their Russia hoax."