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Ukraine Seeks to Move On With U.S. Now That Impeachment Is Over

(Bloomberg) -- Ukraine wants to move on in its relationship with the U.S. after the country was pulled into domestic politics during the impeachment process of President Donald Trump, the country’s foreign minister said.

The Ukrainian government is “happy that the whole investigation, the whole impeachment part, is over,” Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko said Wednesday in an interview with Bloomberg Television in New York. “We hope that nobody will poke their nose in our elections. That’s what we are trying to do here, staying away from your local affairs, with your elections, especially in the electoral year.”

Ukraine was pulled into a bitter U.S. political fight after a phone call between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy set the impeachment process in motion. The president was acquitted by the Senate last month for pressuring the Ukrainian government to announce investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden to help his re-election.

Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, said in Kyiv last week after meeting Zelenskiy that it was time for Republicans and Democrats to get past the crisis and support Ukraine with security assistance. Murphy spoke during a visit along with Republican Senators Ron Johnson and John Barrasso. Witnesses in the House impeachment inquiry said Trump held up such aid for months last year to pressure Zelenskiy to announce probes into Biden and the Democrats.

The Ukrainian government doesn’t believe its relationship with the U.S. needs to be “reset,” Prystaiko said. Ukraine was “dragged” into this affair but “we don’t believe that it affected our relations,” he added.

Ukraine remains locked in a bitter struggle with Russia after President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 in a conflict that has claimed more than 13,000 lives. Talks mediated by Germany and France have yielded some progress, including prisoner exchanges, but there’s still no resolution in sight.

A Ukrainian soldier died Tuesday as Russian-backed fighters sought to advance beyond territorial lines established under a five-year-old peace accord, Ukraine’s military said. The incident comes just days after the Kremlin offered grounds for encouragement by handing control of Ukraine policy to Dmitry Kozak, a senior official with a reputation for pragmatism.

Ukraine has been at war with Russia for six years because “we are making the same choice as American people did -- market-driven economy and the just democratic freedoms,” Prystaiko said.

Ukraine will use international pressure to persuade Iran to cooperate to provide more information on the circumstances that led to the shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger plane in January, the same night Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps fired a barrage of missiles at a U.S. base in Iraq.

“We do have some instruments in our power to push them, maybe, if they are not cooperating enough,” Prystaiko said. “We believe that they don’t have the technical capacity to do it in a way that everybody in the world will believe that this is” helping the investigation.

Ukraine is pressing Iran to send the so-called black box recorders from the Boeing Co. plane that was shot down after taking off from Tehran last month, Prystaiko said earlier this month. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said his country won’t let the flight recorders leave Iran and be decoded without the presence of Islamic Republic envoys.

--With assistance from Daryna Krasnolutska.

To contact the reporters on this story: Glen Carey in Washington at gcarey8@bloomberg.net;Vonnie Quinn in New York at vquinn@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert

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