Ukraine is a long way from Washington and not merely in terms of distance. Politics in the United States of America has rarely been murkier and the fact that Donald Trump has had the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, on board to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden, has raised the stakes in an impeachment inquiry against the US President which began on Wednesday.

The transcript of the call between the two worthies at the helm has been condemned as a “devastating betrayal” of America. Indeed, favours, dirt and investigations are the critical takeaways from the Trump-Ukraine memo.

The episode has served to accentuate the murk that is almost integral to this presidency. To put it succinctly, the memo reveals that Trump has pressed the Ukraine leader to ‘look into’ Biden in parallel to the impeachment inquiry that has been launched against the US President. The disclosure that has astonished America as much as the world, comes a day after Nancy Pelosi, the ebullient Democrat Speaker of the House of Representatives, announced an official impeachment inquiry following a whistleblower’s complaint regarding alleged violations by Trump.

This has set the stage for a prolonged conflict in the run-up to the Presidential election 2020. The complaint was handed over to the US Congress on Wednesday, but the details remained classified.

Lawmakers who reviewed the document described it as “deeply disturbing” and “very credible”, and called for it to be made public.

This is bound to render the President wobbly at the knees before the campaign begins, let alone the first vote is cast. The plot thickens ever more. Having tacitly condoned Russian meddling in Election 2016, it is now fairly established that Trump had involved another foreign country to debunk a potential political rival, indeed the Vice-President of America when Barack Obama was President.

It is surprising that the White House had agreed to release such a damaging memo detailing the 30- minute call between Trump and Zelenskiy on 25 July.

It showed that, after being congratulated on his victory in the Ukrainian election, Zelenskiy thanked the US for its military support and said he was almost ready to buy more American weapons. It turned out to be an interaction of one leader thanking another with wholly different compulsions. “I would like you to do us a favour, though,” Trump replied and went on to discuss possible joint investigations.

He told Zelenskiy that he should work with his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and the US attorney general, William Barr, to look into unsubstantiated allegations that Biden, the former Vice-President, helped remove a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son, Hunter, who was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

There is, however, no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden, the current frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. The cocktail is awesome ~ Elections 2020, Trumpian governance, Ukraine’s involvement, the probe into Biden’s dealings, the unidentified whistleblower, and the Democratic edge. Altogether it is a grim prologue to the swelling act of the impeachment theme.