(Bloomberg Opinion) -- It was William Taylor who got the U.S. government to spell “Kyiv” the way Ukrainians do — not “Kiev,” Russian style — more than a decade before major U.S. media made the switch. He’s a rare beast in the U.S.: a bona fide Ukraine expert. It would be best for both the U.S. and Ukraine for him to keep his job as the top U.S. diplomat in Kyiv regardless of what happens next in the impeachment inquiry, in which Taylor has become embroiled.

Taylor first served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine between 2006 and 2009. He didn’t just work in that role for two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who pursued vastly different foreign policies. He also caught Ukraine during a messy, critical period, and did a good job trying to understand it. I’m saying this with some confidence because a fair number of Taylor’s cables to Washington were published by WikiLeaks in 2010, long before that resource became notorious for its role in revealing U.S. Democrats’ stolen emails during the 2016 presidential election campaign. 

In the final days of 2004, Viktor Yushchenko was elected president of Ukraine, defeating Viktor Yanukovych in an additional round of voting forced by powerful street protests, the so-called Orange Revolution. Taylor wasn’t there when it happened, but he later became ambassador to Yushchenko’s Ukraine, during which hopes of an economic and cultural revival modeled on the country’s Eastern European neighbors were killed by corruption and mismanagement. Yushchenko’s term was a key period for understanding what’s wrong with post-Soviet Ukraine.

Taylor made an effort to do that. He traveled widely, listening to complaints of neglect from pro-Russian politicians in Crimea and taking in western Ukraine’s European aspirations. He met with Yushchenko’s inept ministers and reported their inconsistent meanderings with a healthy dose of skepticism. He picked the brains of former presidents Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma, both still knowledgeable about Ukrainian politics today. He held frank conversations with oligarchs — notably energy middleman Dmytro Firtash, who now is fighting extradition to the U.S. in Vienna and whose lawyers have fed presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani some of the ammunition for his attacks on former Vice President Joseph Biden.

Taylor’s time in Kyiv was marked by an open conflict between Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was harboring her own presidential ambitions. Taylor’s cables tracked the minutiae of their struggle — perhaps too closely. I followed the dogfight as a journalist and I can’t recall all the twists and turns described in the cables. But one nugget from Taylor’s conversation with a Ukrainian envoy to Russia was still relevant in the run-up to the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election. 

The Ukrainian diplomat, Taylor reported, said “the Kremlin wants a ‘regency’ — someone in power in Kyiv who is totally subservient. He noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘hates’ Yushchenko and has a low personal regard for Yanukovych, but apparently sees Tymoshenko as someone, perhaps not that he can trust, but with whom he can deal.” (Tymoshenko came in third in the 2019 election, and is a senior legislator today.) Unlike many analysts talking and writing about Ukraine today, Taylor understands that the relationship between Putin and Yanukovych was far from a bromance.

Taylor’s work as ambassador focused on energy issues. During his tenure, Russia cut off natural gas to Ukraine, to punish Yushchenko for his pro-European stance and to extract a higher price. Meanwhile, U.S. companies were vying for the right to supply and service Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, displacing Russian competitors. Taylor became an expert on Ukrainian energy issues, writing in a sober dispatch in 2008: “A lack of political will, shortsightedness, bad policies, a shortage of capital and distrust of foreign investment, combined with a negotiating partner that has proven to be far savvier than its Ukrainian counterparts, have prevented Ukraine from reducing its dependence on Russia.”

After he left Ukraine in 2009, Taylor kept following events there. He’d seen the Ukrainian hope-to-dejection cycle under Yushchenko, so it was easy for him to understand what happened under President Petro Poroshenko, the oligarch who won the presidency in 2014. He also knew how rotten Ukraine’s political elite was, which made him cautiously optimistic about the election of the comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy as president this spring. 

Sent back to Ukraine by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as the stand-in top U.S. diplomat after Zelenskiy’s victory, Taylor hit the ground running. In his testimony to Congress on Tuesday, he explained that he discovered a “highly irregular” channel of “U.S. policy-making and implementation” on Ukraine, through which some Donald Trump appointees were trying to push Zelenskiy into opening investigations into Biden and putative Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. As the Ukraine expert he is, he knew that such meddling would be extremely counterproductive for Zelenskiy and his prospects of turning Ukraine around. Taylor knew Zelenskiy had made an election promise not to interfere with criminal investigations, and he understood that the Ukrainian leader would need bipartisan support in the U.S. — something he’d ruin by taking sides.

So Taylor fought for the U.S. to stick to a policy tenet he formulated just before he left Kyiv in 2009:

Ukrainian-American relations don’t depend on any personality. They don’t depend on the personality of George Bush, they don’t depend on the personality of Viktor Yushchenko, they depend on common interests and common values.

That’s how he ended up a key witness to a U.S. political scandal. To me, though, the most important part of his testimony to impeachment investigators in Washington on Tuesday came at the very end. Taylor urged legislators to separate the Ukraine-related scandal in Washington from U.S. policy toward the post-Soviet nation. “There’s another Ukraine story — a positive, bipartisan one,” he said — the story of an emerging nation that has a lot in common with the U.S. in both spirit and values.

“It is this second story that I would like to leave you with today," Taylor said. He’s so right that Pompeo would be hard put to find a better person to fill Taylor’s shoes in Kyiv — no matter what conflicting partisan emotions his testimony may have excited.

To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at lbershidsky@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

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