Volker's very bad adventure

When Kurt Volker agreed to work for the Trump administration in 2017, he told colleagues he hoped to navigate the president’s mercurial nature and his evident attachment to Vladimir Putin, and still pursue a traditional US policy of upholding Ukrainian independence and pushing back against Moscow.

[...]

Volker resigned last week and now finds himself giving testimony to Congress as the first witness in the rapidly evolving impeachment scandal. By agreeing to set up a meeting between Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and an Ukrainian presidential aide, he thought he could stop Trump cutting off ties with the new government of Volodymyr Zelenskiy and keep US military aid flowing,

It was a calculated gambit, but it did not come off. Volker is now fighting to defend his reputation against the impression – enthusiastically conveyed by Giuliani – that Volker was an integral part of Trump’s parallel policy, which centered on digging for compromising material on former vice-president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

“He really tried to have his cake and eat it, thinking he could operate inside the administration with one foot outside, that would give him some flexibility. But those two things were incompatible,” a former official said.

  Guardian

And to think, he wasn't even getting paid.

Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine, said: “Giuliani playing on the sidelines made the job much more difficult, with two policies, one in the US national interest, and the other aimed at promoting Trump’s re-election prospects.”

Further complicating the picture, Volker had remained a senior international adviser to a Washington lobbying group, BGR. BGR and the McCain Institute had financial ties to Raytheon Co, which makes the Javelin anti-tank missile that the US supplied to Ukraine. BGR has said he had recused himself from any issues related to the company’s work on Ukraine.

Ultimately it was not conflict of interest questions that brought Volker down, but the incompatibility of seeking to pursue conventional Republican foreign policy in the midst of the chaos of the Trump administration, where at least two policies were being pursued on Ukraine.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.