WASHINGTON, May 1 - President Donald Trump intends to nominate Keith Dayton to be the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the White House said on Friday, a year after Trump removed the previous envoy, Reuters reported.

Dayton, a retired Army lieutenant general, currently serves as the senior U.S. defense adviser to Ukraine and director of the George C. Marshall Center in Germany.

Dayton served in the U.S. Army for 40 years, including stints as security coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and the director of strategy, plans and policy at the Pentagon.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Dayton would replace Marie Yovanovitch, a career diplomat who was recalled in May 2019.

In November, Yovanovitch told a House of Representatives impeachment inquiry of Trump that she was ousted from her post after coming under attack from the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

The U.S.’s relationship with Ukraine has been the focus of intense scrutiny after Trump’s dealings with Kyiv sparked impeachment proceedings in Congress.

Democrats slammed Trump after a whistleblower and a subsequent reconstructed transcript of a call between Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky showed Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. Witnesses later testified in front of Congress that Trump withheld millions of dollars in military aid to Kyiv to try to force it to conduct the requested probes.

Among the details revealed during Congress’s impeachment investigation a conspiracy by Trump associates, including Giuliani, to try to get Yovanovitch removed from her post, believing that her anti-corruption stance would hinder their efforts to get Zelenskiy to authorize the investigations Trump wanted, The Hill reported.

The Senate ultimately acquitted Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and the president has repeatedly cast the proceedings as a “witch hunt.”

Russian troops seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and annexed it after a referendum that Kyiv and its Western allies say was illegal. The Ukrainian government has also been embroiled in a conflict with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine since 2014 that has killed more than 13,000 people. (rt/th/ez)