WASHINGTON, May 26 - Seven former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine on Tuesday condemned efforts to use the country as a vehicle to “sow division” during the 2020 presidential election campaign, the Washington Post reported.

The letter does not specify what prompted concern among the former ambassadors. But John Herbst, the U.S. envoy to Kyiv from 2003 to 2006 and now director of the think tank’s Eurasia Center, said it was motivated by leaked recordings of years-old phone conversations between then-Vice President Joe Biden and Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president at the time.

The heavily edited tapes were released this month by a Ukrainian lawmaker associated with Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer.

The recordings, which offered little new insight into Biden’s actions in Ukraine, show that Biden — as he has publicly acknowledged — linked U.S. loan guarantees for Ukraine to the removal of a prosecutor general in 2015. But the tapes allowed Trump’s allies to resurrect allegations against the presumptive Democratic nominee.

“We have worked over the years to build and strengthen the US-Ukrainian strategic partnership established in 1996,” the diplomats, who served during Republican and Democratic administrations, said in the letter.

“We thus are disheartened by efforts to inject Ukraine into America’s domestic politics as the 2020 US presidential election approaches. Those efforts advance a false and toxic narrative, one with no basis in the reality of US-Ukraine relations, in order to weaken the relationship between the United States and Ukraine and sow division within our two countries.”

Herbst said the release of the tapes was probably linked to pro-Russian interests and could undermine U.S. efforts to root out rampant corruption in Ukraine and institute sweeping reforms for good governance.

“This is a ploy by various vested interests,” he said. “The vested interests are, on one hand, the Kremlin, Kremlin-friendly Ukrainians and corrupt interests in Ukraine that realize the sorts of things those tapes describe in distorted and sensationalist fashion is bad for them.”

Andriy Derkach, an independent member of Ukraine’s parliament who previously aligned with a pro-Russian faction, last week released the edited snippets of the phone conversations between Biden and Poroshenko.

The recordings have caused a sensation in Ukraine, where President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for an investigation into their release. The resulting political turmoil there was what was intended, Herbst said.

“The one thing corrupt interests in Ukraine want from this is to say the dynamic of U.S.-Ukrainian relations over the past six years, where we exhorted them to do the right things with reform, is undercut,” he said. “Because these guys don’t want reform to take place.” (wp/ez)