incidents that they have perpetrated. we saw that recently with the united kingdom in the russian secret services attack on a former spy, mr. skripal and his daughter in salisbury, in england, where you may recall the russians accused the british government of perpetrating this themselves. this falls into a long pattern of deflection and of the russian government tryingle to pin the blame on someone else. as my colleague mr. holmes here has laid out, the russians have a particular vested interest in putting ukraine and ukrainians and ukrainian leaders in a bad light. all of the issues that we started to discuss today and that you on the committee have been deeply involved in, began with russia s illegal annexation of the peninsula of crimea from ukraine in 2014 in response in 2015 and all of the different acts of aggression that russia has engaged in since starting a war in the donbass, shooting down russian operatives and the blame over a later period
democracy and example to other post-soviet countries and beyond from moscow to hong kong. how we respond to this historic opportunity will set the trajectory of our relationship with ukraine and will define our willingness to defend our bedrock international principles and leadership role in the world. ukrainians want to hear a clear and unambiguous reaffirmation that our long-standing, bipartisan policy of strong support for ukraine remains unchanged and that we fully back it at the highest levels. now is not the time to retreat from our relationship with ukraine. but rather to doubleio down on . as we sit here today, ukrainians are fighting a hot war on ukrainian territory against russian aggression. this week alone, since i have been here in washington, two ukrainian soldiers were killed and two injured by russian led
u.s. embassy in russia, why would it be to vladimir putin s advantage to promote this theory of ukraine interference. to u deflect from the allegations of russian interference. to drive a wedge between the united states and ukraine, which russia wants to essentially get back into its atmosphere of influence. thirdly, to besmirch ukraine and is leadership and degrade and erode support for ukraine from other key partners in europe and elsewhere. dr. hill, promoting this theory of ukrainen interference in the election, was president trump adopting vladimir putin s view over his own senior advisors and intelligence officials? i think we have to be very careful about the way that we phrase that. this is a view that president putin and the russian security services and many actors in russia have promoted. i think this view has also got some traction perhaps in