WASHINGTON (AP) — For all the talk about Ukraine in the House impeachment inquiry, there’s a character standing just off-stage with a dominant role in this tale of international intrigue: Russia.

As has so often been the case since President Donald Trump took office, Moscow provides the mood music for the unfolding political drama.

“With you, Mr. President, all roads lead to Putin,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared last week, and not for the first time.

The impeachment investigation is centered on allegations that Trump tried to pressure Ukraine’s new leader over the summer to dig up dirt on Trump political rival Joe Biden, holding up U.S. military aid to the Eastern European nation as leverage.

In her testimony before the House impeachment panel last week, diplomat Marie Yovanovitch suggested that the president’s actions played into the hands of Vladimir Putin, whose government has backed separatists in a five-year-old war in eastern Ukraine.

Yovanovitch, a 33-year veteran of the State Department known for fighting corruption in Ukraine and elsewhere, was ousted from her position as ambassador to Ukraine after Trump and his allies began attacking her and claimed she was bad-mouthing the president.

Her ouster, she and several Democratic lawmakers argued, ultimately benefitted Putin.

“How is it that foreign corrupt interests can manipulate our government?” Yovanovitch asked House investigators. “Which country’s interests are served when the very corrupt behavior we’ve been criticizing is allowed to prevail? Such conduct undermines the U.S., exposes our friends and widens the playing field for autocrats like President Putin.”

After two days of public testimony and the release of thousands of pages of transcripts from witnesses who’ve met with investigators behind closed doors, Democratic and Republican lawmakers seem further entrenched in their partisan corners about whether the president abused his powers.

Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to do him a “a favor” and investigate Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine. At the same time, Ukraine was awaiting nearly $400 million in U.S. military aid.

While Democrats say the request to investigate the Bidens represented a quid pro quo, Trump insists he was within his rights to ask the country to look into corruption. Democrats, trying to make their accusations more understandable, have now settled on framing the president’s actions as a matter of bribery, which, as Pelosi noted, is mentioned in the Constitution.