But Trump was hardly sympathetic to Ukraine. In June of 2017, Trump even told the president, Petro Poroshenko, to his face in an Oval Office meeting that he considered Ukraine a corrupt country—“because a Ukrainian friend at Mar-a-Lago had told him,” as the American ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, who sat listening in stunned silence, later recounted—and also that Crimea was really Russian anyway, because the locals spoke the Russian language.[9]
