Russia's meddling in Trump-era politics was more directly related to the current war than previously thought.
On the night of July 28, 2016, when Hillary Clinton became the presidential candidate from the Democratic Party in Philadelphia, the head of the campaign of Donald Trump Paul Manafortreceived an urgent e-mail from Moscow. The sender was a friend and business partner Kostyantyn Kilimnyk, a Russian citizen who was born in Soviet Ukraine. Kilimnyk managed the Kyiv office of Manafort's international consulting firm, known for providing American election campaign services to clients seeking victory in fragile democracies around the world.
The rug maker didn't write anything: only that he needed to talk to him in person as soon as possible. What he actually wanted to talk about was obviously too sensitive even for the case these people were so delicately implementing: encrypted programs, a shared email account's drafts folder, and, if necessary, dedicated secure phone lines. But he called the code word – “caviar” – which made it clear that he was talking about an important former client, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovychwho fled to Russia in 2014 after authorizing the killing of dozens of pro-democracy protesters. Manafort responded within minutes, and within five days a plan was in place.
The rug cleared customs at JFK at 7:43 p.m., just 77 minutes before the meeting was scheduled to take place at the Grand Havana Room at 666 Fifth Avenue in the Manhattan office tower owned by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner's family. Before long, the Carpet entered a perfectly prepared stage for a caricatured drama of secret figures harboring secret agendas with dubious intentions—in a dark cigar bar, with mahogany paneled walls and floor-to-ceiling windows, with thick velvet draped columns, in a comfortable leather chair sat a respectable man without a tie who drank whiskey and smoked elite cigars.
That man with the slicked back hair was Paul Manafort. There, hidden by thick cigarette smoke, Kilimnyk shared with him a secret plan, the content of which would become apparent only six years later, when Putin's Russian army invaded Ukraine.
Known as the “Mariupol Plan“, named after the strategically important port city, it envisaged the creation of an autonomous republic in the east of Ukraine. This was supposed to give Putin effective control over the country's industrial heartland, where armed, Kremlin-funded and controlled separatists had by then been waging a two-year war that had killed nearly 10,000 people. Yanukovych was to become the new leader of the republic. Compromise: “peace” for broken and enslaved Ukraine.
This scheme ran counter to decades of US policy to support a free and united Ukraine, and President Hillary Clinton would undoubtedly have supported, or strengthened, that position. But Trump was already preparing to change the diplomatic status quo. If elected, according to Kilimnyk, Trump could help turn the Mariupol plan into reality. However, first he would have to win, which was unlikely at the time.
That led the men to the second leg of their agenda that evening, a discussion of closed-door polling data that tracked the path to victory in statewide polls. Sharing this information with Manafort, who managed Trump's election campaign, would not be significant if it were not for one important part of Kylimnyk's biography: he was not just a colleague; he was, as US representatives would later claim, a Russian agent.
After discussing the cases, the men went their separate ways and went their separate ways to avoid detection, although federal investigators said they were still exchanging text messages late that night. In the coming weeks, operatives in Moscow and St. Petersburg will step up their hacking and disinformation campaigns to damage Clinton and help swing the campaign in Trump's favor. This would later become the basis for the scandal known as Russiagate. The Mariupol plan became an almost forgotten draft. But exactly what that plan proposed on paper is, in fact, what Putin — on the defensive after a series of strategic miscalculations and mounting battlefield losses — is now trying to do through sham referendums and illegal annexation. And Mariupol — an occupied city in ruins after months of siege, with silent huge metallurgical plants and countless citizens buried in mass graves — became his business card, a textbook on warfare.
Putin's attack on Ukraine and his attack on American democracy have so far been largely seen as two separate storylines. In recent years, Russian election meddling has been seen as essentially a closed chapter in American political history — a dangerous moment when a foreign leader tried to turn the United States against itself by exploiting and exacerbating political divisions among citizens.
And yet on that summer night, in a cigar-smoke-filled room, these two narratives converged. And the essence of this meeting is that Putin's American adventure should be understood as a down payment for a geopolitical Grail closer to home: a vassal Ukrainian state.
Underneath this whole election saga, another story was unfolding – about Ukraine's efforts to establish a modern democracy and, as a result, its transformation into a hot spot of a new cold war between Russia and the West, autocracy and democracy. The protracted struggle over Ukraine has largely been the main chord of upheaval and scandal in the years of Trump's presidency, from the early days of the 2016 campaign through his election to office, Trump's first impeachment, and the election in late 2020. Even now, some influential American politicians, mostly, though not always, right-wing, are proposing to Ukraine to make concessions on sovereignty, similar to those contained in the Kilimnyk plan, which the country's leadership categorically rejects.
Read also: Mariupol becomes the “second Aleppo”: photo gallery
This second part of the storyis based on a review of hundreds of pages of documents prepared by investigators for special counsel Robert Mueller and the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee; from impeachment hearing transcripts and a recent Russiagate memoir; as well as interviews with nearly 50 people in the United States and Ukraine, including a four-hour conversation with Manafort himself.
For Trump, who today faces legal challenges over the storage of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, his financial dealings and his role in trying to reverse his 2020 election defeat, the Russia investigation was an original sin. which he seeks to expose as a “witch hunt,” an unfair accusation.
The Russia investigation and its offshoots have indeed so far failed to establish a link between the Trump campaign and Moscow, although they have documented numerous clues. But looking at the records left behind through the blood-filtered lens of Putin's war, now in its ninth month, reveals a host of understated signals that demonstrate the depth of his obsession with Ukraine—a survival game for some 45 million people located nearly 5,000 miles, which is causing domestic unrest in America.
Among the episodes that emerge are a meeting in the Grand Havana Room, as well as persistent secret attempts to implement the Mariupol Plan. This plan was almost the only attempt to exchange peace in Ukraine for concessions to Putin; there were many obstacles in his way. And its origin remains unclear: was it part of Putin's long game, or perhaps an attempt by his ally Yanukovych to regain power? In any case, prosecutors who uncovered the plan will view it as potential payment for the Russian president's meddling in the election.
The study also highlights episodes of Putin's bargaining as he pushed for his revanchist mission to consolidate his power by rebuilding the Russian Empire and weakening democracy around the world. He pursued this goal by cunningly co-opting oligarchs and lobbyists into countries he targeted, while employing ever-improving methods of disinformation to play on the fears and hatreds of the citizens of those countries.
No figure in the Trump era has moved. in this world as clever as Manafort, a political figure known for treating democracy more as a tool than an idea. Despite his insistence that he was trying to contain rather than promote Russian influence in Ukraine, he has made a fortune by applying his political acumen to the country's oligarchs and Kremlin supporters, helping to install a government more accommodating to Putin's demands. He also helped elect an American president whose open admiration for the Russian strongman nearly destroyed more than half a century of democracy promotion policies.
In the end, Putin did not get what he thought he paid for from the Trump presidency, and democracy will falter but not collapse in both the United States and Ukraine. But this, like nothing else, will push the Russian leader to war.
Read also: Russia offered Poland, Hungary and Romania to divide Ukraine< /p>
Long before the Trump-era investigations Manafort established himself in Washington and abroad as a master of the dark political arts. With Roger StoneManafort has helped develop a hard-hitting style of conservative politics, pushing “hot buttons” to anger the base electorate and condemn opponents. They participated in Ronald Reagan's presidential campaigns and started their own firm, working with international clients seeking Reagan's favor in Washington. The firm specialized in wrapping up the bloody regimes of dictators such as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Ferdinand Marcosfrom the Philippines, in shiny wrappers, presenting them as freedom-loving democrats.
By 2005, Manafort had become a central figure in the black strip of Ukraine's desire for democracy. He was introduced into the country's politics by one of the most powerful Russian oligarchs, aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska. Oligarchs do not survive in Putin's Russia if they do not constantly prove their usefulness to the motherland. And when Putin had an urgent problem in Ukraine, Deripaska, who had a number of holdings there, rushed to the rescue: he enlisted Manafort's firm, which he had previously hired, to help him overcome the blocking of his American visa based on allegations that he had ties to organized crime. criminality (which he denies).
Putin was then worried about the pro-Western and youth-led democratic movement that emerged just as Ukraine's second post-Soviet leader, the pro-Kremlin dictator Leonid Kuchma, was preparing to leave resignation To become his successor, reformists rallied around a politician named Viktor Yushchenko. Pro-American, married to a former State Department official, Yushchenko promised that Ukraine would join NATO and the European Union. For the Kremlin, as one influential Russian defense analyst put it at the time, Yushchenko's victory would mean “a catastrophic loss of Russian influence throughout the former Soviet Union, which would ultimately lead to Russia's geopolitical isolation.”
Putin bet on Kuchma's chosen successor — Yanukovych, who came to power in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine and had the support of the country's leading oligarchs. But despite working with some of Putin's leading politicians, Yanukovych's campaign went horribly wrong. First, the attempt to kill Yushchenko, although it disfigured his face, left him alive. (The culprit was never identified; Yushchenko was suspected by the Kremlin.)
Then Yanukovych's team resorted to vote-stealing worthy of Trump's 2020 election-fraud fantasy: ballot-stuffing, disappearing ink, and buses transporting voters. Thousands of people protested in Kyiv's central square, and ultimately the Supreme Court of Ukraine declared Yanukovych's “victory” falsified due to systemic and massive election violations. Subsequently, Yushchenko won a new vote, which became a triumph of democracy, known as the Orange Revolution.
Then Deripaska turned to Manafort with the task of returning Yanukovych's political power to power – Party of Regions. Manafort's recipe is contained in Deripaska's June 2005 memo, which is cited in a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Yanukovych and his party, he argued, should work for a legitimate victory in the elections, align themselves with the democrats according to the Western model – using the tools of the West “in ways that the West thinks , are consistent with his values”, even if they are not.
By adopting the Western Way, Manafort added, Yanukovych and his party “would limit their opportunities to fuel sentiments that would give hope to potential supporters of a different path.” Speaking of Putin, Manafort added: “We are convinced that this model can bring significant benefits to Putin's government if it is used at the right level with the appropriate commitment to success.”
Throughout our interviews, Manafort insisted that Putin did not like him and his strategy, and that the memo was a kind of textbook for Deripaska.
“I mostly taught him about democracy,” he said.
Deripaska's office did not respond to a request for an interview. But in an unsuccessful defamation lawsuit against the Associated Press over a 2017 article that revealed their discussions about Ukraine, Deripaska said he hired Manafort solely for his own business interests and “never had any arrangements with Manafort to advance the interests of the Russian government.”
Despite this, thanks to financing from oligarchs allied to Deripaska in Ukraine, Manafort began to implement the plan. He brought in international election consultants and American strategists from both American parties. To obtain information on the ground, Manafort engaged Kilimnyk, who was already suspected of working for Russia. Short, with a disarmingly boyish appearance, Kylimnyk worked at the International Republican Institute(IRI), a democracy promotion organization linked to Arizona Senator John McCain, who was a client of Manafort's longtime associate Rick Davis. Kilimnyk studied at the Soviet military language academy, which is known for training future intelligence officers, and worked as a translator in the Russian army. His colleagues at IRI suspected him of passing classified information to Russian intelligence, and when the institute found out that he worked for Yanukovych, he was fired.
Under Manafort's tutelage, Yanukovych has taken on a new look, swapping his rough, gray apparatchik clothes for custom-made Manafort-style suits and his vintage Soviet hairdo for a more modern one. Then, from a new office near the Maidan, Manafort developed the Party of Regions platform, which promised to make Ukraine a “bridge” between Russia and the West — through an economic partnership with the European Union (popular in the West), but rejecting NATO membership (popular among Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine idea). Skeptical American diplomats called Manafort's project “extreme rebranding.”
For all the talk of building bridges with the West, Manafort soon began applying his battle-tested, poll-driven < strong>separation policy— using differences in culture, democracy and the very concept of the nation to upset the base of the Party of Regions on the topic of the Russian language, which was mainly used by voters in the east and south. In drafts of speeches and theses found in Manafort's criminal cases, the Orange Revolution was depicted as a “coup” and an “Orange illusion.” They criticized the Yushchenko government's tougher stance toward Moscow and focused on a sore point in Ukrainian politics — the regional split over whether to make Russian the second official language.
“In US politics,” says Tetyana Shevchuk, a lawyer at the Anti-Corruption Center, “it's called 'culture wars', when an issue is chosen that is not currently a priority for society but can easily become one.” He pushed something like that there are two types of Ukrainians: Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking.”
During our interviews, Manafort argued that reformers were forcing the issue by promoting the preference for the Ukrainian language in a predominantly Russian-speaking country. In any case, he argued, his strategy of unifying the country guaranteed Yanukovych the trust of voters who saw themselves as “ethnic Russians.” According to him, it was the united country that had to reorient itself towards the West (Manafort insists that he is “resolutely on the side of Ukraine” in the war).
Still, Manafort's line of attack coincided with a new Russian intelligence operation that, according to a US embassy cable leaked on social media, was aimed at “manipulating issues such as the status of the Russian language” to fuel a separatist insurgency in the Crimean peninsula and “prevent the advancement of Ukraine to the west to institutions such as NATO and the EU.”
About two decades later, Putin would use similar messages about language and national identity to justify his war and illegal annexations in the east.
Manafort's strategy was a resounding success.The Party of Regions won parliamentary elections in 2006, and four years later Yanukovych regained the presidency in internationally supervised elections. The Orange Revolutionaries, or at least their leadership, did much of the work themselves — alienating voters through infighting and failure to reform. And Manafort gained fame, becoming as popular in Ukrainian political circles as Karl Rove or James Carville in America. He lived the life of an oligarch: collecting python and ostrich jackets, Alan Couture suits and real estate in Soho, the Hamptons and Trump Tower. He also grew close to Yanukovych, playing tennis with him — always letting the client win — and bathing in the hot tub at the new president's Mezhyhirska residence, complete with a petting zoo, golf course and grotesque estate, a chaotic mix of architectural styles that locals called “Donetsk Rococo.”
Yanukovych did not need much time, to start backing away from their promises of democracy. He imprisoned his opponent, the former leader of the Oranges, Yulia Tymoshenko; dramatically weakened press freedom by criminalizing defamation and conducting fabricated investigations against opposition media; managed the embezzlement of state funds; falsified the 2012 parliamentary elections; and canceled a plan to end Russia's lease of the Crimean port of Sevastopol, which housed the Black Sea Fleet, which was a disguised means of Putin's takeover of the country.
Soon, several of Manafort's democracy consultants, disappointed by this development, refused to cooperate. Manafort himself expanded his role and became something like a shadow foreign policy adviser and agent in the West for Yanukovych. Later, prosecutors also accused him of working as an unregistered foreign agent, conducting secret lobbying campaigns in Washington and Brussels: he protected his boss from sanctions due to Tymoshenko's imprisonment, insisting that Yanukovych still continues to move to Europe.< /p>
But that fragile bridge to the West did not last. Under pressure from Putin, Yanukovych reversed course in late 2013, cutting off negotiations with Europe and increasing his economic commitments to Russia. Tens of thousands of protesters again went to the Maidan. Weeks of standoff, punctuated by violence, culminated in a deadly three-day stretch in February 2014, when a government crackdown left dozens dead right outside Manafort's office.
Frightened Yanukovych, whose political team disintegrated, fled to Russia. In a few weeks, Putin attacked Crimea and eastern Ukraine, claiming that Yanukovych had been ousted not as a result of the democratic will of Ukrainians, but as a result of a coup d'état supported by the West. To this day, Manafort has also argued that the Maidan was essentially a coup against a legitimately elected president. It was also his personal financial disaster—he lost his milk cow. Still, he managed to find work helping former members of the Party of Regions to found a new party called the Opposition Bloc» and advise them on issues of mayoral elections.
His last project was Mariupol at the end of 2015. The port city in southeastern Ukraine was part of a potential land corridor for the transfer of weapons from occupied Crimea to war-torn Donbas and could become a commercial center for the Moscow-backed Potemkin republic. In addition, Mariupol was the feudal possession of the richest citizen of Ukraine, metallurgical and mining magnate Rinata Akhmetov,for which both Russia and Europe were important markets. Akhmetov is considered to be Yanukovych's political godfather, and he initially paid for Manafort's work for the Party of Regions.
Thanks to the concentration of industrial holdings in Donbas, Akhmetov firmly controlled the region's politics, leadership, and mass media. Even as Putin's minions advanced on Mariupol and held a sham independence referendum in 2014, Akhmetov took a neutral stance, giving the separatists an opportunity to say they had enlisted his support.
“Rinate,” graffiti on Kyiv's Maidan Independence, are you for Ukraine or for the Kremlin?”
Ultimately, Akhmetov came out strongly against separatist violence, sending his staff to patrol the streets and help repel Russian proxies. But even then, his mixed messages continued to fuel suspicions that he was raising rates. After separatists shelled a civilian area in early 2015, killing 30 people (an attack later revealed to have been carried out by Russian military officials), its largest news outlet, Segodnya, featured stories that they did not name the culprits.
“The impression was this: “This is not man-made shelling, but some kind of earthquake; it just happened,” Evgenia Kuznetsova, a Ukrainian media analyst who researched coverage of the attack, told me.
Jock Mendoza-Wilson, Akhmetov's press secretary, stated that the oligarch was never neutral and always supported a united Ukraine. (Akhmetov is now suing Russia for the destruction of its largest steel plant in Mariupol, where Ukrainian soldiers held out for 80 days this year.) But, he says, Akhmetov believed that in order to keep the country united, “to oppose Russia was not constructive”.
As the 2015 mayoral and city council elections approached, several revolutionary candidates came forward, promising to defend Mariupol more vigorously against Russia and its proxies. Akhmetov's chosen mayoral candidate, former head of a steel company Vadim Boychenko, was a clear supporter of the neutral status quo.
Manafort's role in the campaign was revealed in an email unearthed by Senate investigators. was largely hidden; in an interview he described his role as secondary. One of the reformist candidates, Aleksandr Yaroshenko, was even surprised to learn that Manafort was involved in the campaign, although in retrospect, he sees hints of his presence.
“The role of the Americans at the time was negligible,” he told me in a video interview in May that was interrupted from time to time by the need to coordinate the besieged city. “They had the technology: how many people do we need to bring from each street, what percentage.”
He took this as an imitation of the turbulent activity, given that Akhmetov's control over the city extended to the contract for printing bulletins.
After Boychenko's victory, Yaroshenko rallied the city council to force it to make a decision to recognize Russia as an aggressor country. The mayor postponed the measure.
Manafort's move to the Trump campaign in March 2016 benefited the candidate and made him the frontrunner among Republicans, although his rival is Senator Tom Cruz< /strong>counted on the fact that the delegates of the party congress would choose him. However, Manafort technically worked out the delegates so that Cruz ended up far behind, prompting talk of a contentious convention.
It also benefited Manafort, who was used to luxury, but at that time did not have the funds for his lifestyle. Investigators found that he spent a significant portion of his earnings in Ukraine — about $60 million in total — to buy real estate, cars and suits from front companies in Cyprus, which prosecutors say was part of a money-laundering scheme. The bill for 2.4 million dollars to Akhmetov and another client remained unpaid. Manafort had financial problems. He was sued by Deripaska, who alleged that Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, lost nearly $20 million in a joint venture that failed.
According to a Senate intelligence report, Manafort went to great lengths to get a job in the Trump campaign. He lobbied Roger Stoneand fundraiser Tom Barrack and struck a deal, Barrack told prosecutors, with the “magic words” that he would work for free. Manafort believed the job could be an opportunity to collect a debt from Akhmetov and patch things up with Deripaska, who would no doubt see value in Manafort's communication with the would-be president.
“We will use this to get everything,” he wrote to Kilimnik. Manafort told me he believed he would have more influence with Trump as a volunteer than as a member of his staff.
Manafort's new job also opened up prospects for Putin. The inner circle of the leading US Republican presidential candidate now included an adviser who was the main ideological mastermind of Ukraine's most successful pro-Russian party and was close to a man named Kilimnyk, who US officials have identified as a Russian agent
The day after Trump announced his appointment as the convention's chief strategist, Manafort, Gates, and Kilimnik immediately sent copies of the message to their top patrons in Ukraine, along with personal letters in which the political strategist promised to keep them informed throughout the campaign. Among the recipients were Deripaska, Akhmetov and another wealthy Ukrainian, a former head of Yanukovych's administration named Serhii Lyovochkin. According to Senate investigators, Lyovochkin, through whom money from oligarchs went to Manafort during the years of the Party of Regions' rule, also had a close working relationship with Kilimnyk.
When Manafort became Trump's campaign chairman — and when Russian operatives hacked the Democratic Party's servers — the candidate took a Putin-friendly stance on Ukraine.
Ahead of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July, Trump shocked the American foreign policy establishment by expressing only tepid support for NATO. According to an intelligence report released to the Senate in July 2020, he also told aides that he did not believe it was worth risking “World War III” to protect Ukraine from Russia.
At the congress, there was another ideological dispute regarding the party platform. After a delegate from Texas included in the program a clause on the provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine, Trump's national security adviser J. Gordonundertook to block it, so the wording was changed to a softer promise of “appropriate assistance”. A delegate from Texas told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Gordon said he was acting in concert with “New York,” particularly Trump. Gordon denied this, saying he acted on his own initiative because the promise of lethal weapons contradicts Trump's position on Ukraine. Two other very interested players were present at the congress — the Ukrainian and Russian ambassadors to the United States; the Russian had a conversation with Gordon a few days after the clause on aid to Ukraine was changed. Ultimately, investigators did not conclude that Russia was involved in the platform controversy. They also found no evidence to contradict Manafort's insistence that he was removed from the process entirely, although one campaign official later told investigators that Manafort was supposed to “calm down” the upset Ukrainian ambassador.
Ukrainians had reason to be upset, and the Russians were satisfied again within a few days. On July 27, when Trump announced at a press conference that he would consider the possibility of recognizing Crimea as a territory of Russia, effectively stopping the sanctions of the Obama administration and taking a course to normalize relations with Russia, which were strained after the illegal annexation. He also suggested that Russia hack Hillary Clinton's email.
According to travel records obtained by Mueller's office, Kylimnyk flew to Moscow the next day. In his email to Manafort that night, he wrote that he had met with “the guy who gave you the biggest can of black caviar a few years ago” — that guy was Yanukovych, who had once given Manafort $30,000 worth of selective caviar. Kilimnyk wanted to meet in person, because he had to “tell a long story.”
In the Grand Havana Room, Kilimnyk conveyed an urgent message from Yanukovych: a “peaceful” plan for Ukraine is being prepared, so he hopes that Manafort will help implement it.
According to Kilimnyk's reports and notes over the next several months, it was assumed that the autonomous republic in the east of Ukraine would nominally remain part of it, headed by Yanukovych, and would continue to negotiate a settlement. But what became known as the “Mariupol Plan” was, as Manafort later admitted, a “black” path to Russian control of eastern Ukraine — remarkably similar to the one Putin is now pursuing by annexing occupied territories.
The plan was based on Putin's own interpretation of agreements signed in the Belarusian capital of Minsk in late 2014 and early 2015, which tied the ceasefire in the east to new provisions in the Ukrainian Constitution granting the two territories “special status.” Russia has interpreted this vague term as granting the territories autonomy — under the control of its proteges — with veto power over Ukraine's foreign policy. Ukraine viewed it rather as an expansion of local self-government. Even then, polls showed that the majority of Ukrainians perceived this provision as capitulation, so it was difficult to get the consent of the parliament.
For the United States, which was not a party to the Minsk talks, any plan that gave the East broad autonomy and influence ran counter to longstanding support for what William Taylor, the former American ambassador to Ukraine, described as “an independent , sovereign Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.”
“We've said it over and over and over,” he told me. However, Trump's rhetoric towards Russia at the time hinted at abandoning this policy.
Amidst the Russia investigation, the meeting in the Grand Havana Room became more prominent because of another event that occurred that night: a discussion of polling data that traced how Trump needed to gain a position of power to make this major diplomatic breakthrough. Manafort and Gates have been sharing this data with Kilimnik since the spring.
According to a Senate intelligence report created by Tony Fabrizio, Manafort's chief pollster, polling analysis was one of the campaign's assets.
< p>Manafort and Gates insisted that this data was primitive, some of it in the public domain. But it also showed what exactly the campaign was focused on at the stage of strategy formation and spreading messages in a new way – through social networks. And as Manafort told Kilimnik at the club, according to testimony from Gates and another witness briefed on the meeting, the poll showed what Clinton pollsters and mainstream analysts had not seen — a path to the White House through traditionally blue states like Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin Of course, Manafort explained, this would require relentless attacks on Clinton's public image.
By the end of the summer, a crackdown on Hillary Clinton had intensified on social media, not only from the Trump campaign and its American allies, but also from Russian trolls posing as Americans and spreading a series of conspiracy theories about Clinton's health and alleged corruption. Investigators found that the operations were carried out in states that Manafort identified as key.
The polling data will be the main focus of Mueller's team and Senate investigators. None of them could directly link Russian operations to this data; they reported only that Gates believed Kilimnyk had shared information with Deripaska and his Ukrainian counterparts — apparently in fulfillment of Manafort's promise to keep his patrons informed. But last year the Ministry of Finance concluded that Kilimnyk gave the data directly to Russian military intelligence, after which he was labeled a “known Russian agent.”
Since the document did not provide any basic evidence, Manafort and Gates used it to cast doubt on themselves assessment and everything that follows from it. As Gates told me, “If Kilimnyk is a GRU agent, show us the evidence and I'll be the first to say it's true.”
Kylimnyk refused to talk to me, but in a text message he called his work on the Mariupol plan “informal discussions” regarding “one of 10,000 different options for a peaceful solution.” (It was “an inappropriate time to discuss these issues,” he told me, given “the fight of Ukrainians for their lives and freedom.”) In an interview with RealClearInvestigations last year, Kylymnyk said the assessment was “ridiculous and false,” noting that he was a regular source of information for officials of the US Embassy in Kyiv, which is confirmed by documents and testimony of former officials.
Of course, spies must have the confidence of a rival country's embassy. One very active Westerner who spoke regularly to Kilimnyk in Kyiv told me that while he had doubts about the intelligence assessment, he considered the question rhetorical: a Russian citizen with family in Russia and a military history, Kilimnyk was definitely under pressure to perform Putin's instructions, and it often seemed to be true.
Emails obtained by Mueller prove that Kilymnyk had his own interactions with high-ranking players in Moscow, including some intelligence connections. Among them was Deripaska's top aide Viktor Boyarkin, described by the U.S. Treasury Department as a former high-ranking GRU official who led Putin's operation to interfere in the U.S. election.
However, a tighter connectionTrump's campaign did not run the gamut. Less than three weeks after the Grand Havana Room meeting, Manafort was out of a job. In mid-August, The New York Times reported that a new Ukrainian anti-corruption agency had obtained the “black book” of the Party of Regions, which lists targeted unaccounted for payments to Ukrainian officials — including Manafort. A few days later, at a press conference in Kyiv, former journalist Serhiy Leshchenko, who became a reform lawmaker, showed 22 handwritten ledger entries that showed $12.7 million in payments to Manafort. Since the Clinton campaign called the ledger as evidence of ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Manafort was forced to resign.
The discovery of the ledger seemed to be taken straight from the plot of the popular sitcom Servant of the People” — a Ukrainian remake of the American film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, in which the comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy played a modest and idealistic history teacher who was unexpectedly flattered to become the president and who was constantly fending off a Manafort-like agent of the oligarchs who tried to take the president on hook to control it. In the 2015 season finale, he finds a black book of secret payments kept by his predecessor and vows to purge “an informal company called Ukraine” of all-encompassing corruption.
When talking to reporters, Leshchenko used similar rhetoric, explaining, why he helped make the real ledger public. But he had another reason:
“The wider the coverage of Trump's activities and his entourage,” he told Tablet magazine a few months later, “the harder it will be for Trump to make a separate deal with Putin, thus selling Ukraine and all of Europe.”
On At the beginning of his presidential term, Trump really gave Russia all the signals that its political bet paid off. He appointed retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser.who in 2015 accepted $33,750 from the state-funded Russian propaganda outlet RT to speak at a Moscow celebration. Even before taking office, Flynn spoke to Putin's ambassador in Washington, in violation of federal law, on the application of sanctions for election interference. (Flynn twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about these discussions, but Trump pardoned him.)
Rex Tillerson became the new secretary of state., who during his tenure as the executive director of Exxon Mobil criticized the Obama administration's decision to impose sanctions against Russia over Crimea and the downing of the Malaysia Airlines plane.
And in the days before the inauguration, promising signals came from Virginia, where Manafort met with Kilimnyk and Lyovochkin at the Westin Alexandria Old Town Hotel. (The two men received inauguration tickets through an associate of Manafort, who later pleaded guilty to failing to register as a foreign agent and illegally buying tickets in violation of rules against foreign political donations.) Because most of their communications were via encrypted messages, investigators don't have much information on the matter, but Manafort admitted one point to prosecutors: a “peaceful” plan for Ukraine.
Even without an official position, Manafort continued to advise the Trump camp, according to the Senate report. At the same time, Kilimnyk shuttled between Moscow and Kyiv, working out the details of the “peaceful” plan. Communicating via a draft email on a joint account before the meeting in Virginia, Kilimnyk told Manafort that he and Yanukovych — who went by the code name BG for Big Guy , — ed.) — met in Russia and discussed the plan.
“The Russians at the highest level are not opposed to this plan in principle,” Kilimnyk wrote, “and will work with BG to begin this process.” Trump's public support, he added, will overcome resistance in Kyiv.
“All that is needed to start the process is a slight nudge from DT (Donald Trump) with a message saying “he wants peace in Ukraine and the return of Donbas”, and also wants to appoint a “special representative” who should lead this process” — wrote Kylimnyk. Manafort, who would have access to the “highest level” in the Kremlin, was probably supposed to be Trump's representative.
Manafort was almost the only figure in Trump's orbit who communicated with people who knew people in Moscow. The first months of the administration brought heart-breaking processes of disclosure of information. Flynn, the national security adviser, was fired because of his closed-door conversations with the Russian ambassador. It was also revealed that a campaign foreign policy adviser named George Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat in a bar in London that Russia had dirt on Clinton. This happened a few weeks before the Russians became aware of the Clinton email hack. Those careless conversations sparked the first meddling investigation that grew into Mueller's investigation. There was also information that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Manafortmet at Trump Tower in June 2016 with a well-connected Russian lawyer who, they said, wanted to turn over incriminating information about Clinton “regarding her funding by people who had ties to the Russian government” in exchange for improvement of sanctions within the framework of the “Magnitsky list”, however, cooperation did not take place. In court documents in the fall of 2017, Mueller's team reported that Kilimnyk “was believed to be connected to Russian intelligence.” However, at the time, the main target of the investigation was Manafort, specifically his interactions with Kilimnyk, Deripaska and pro-Russian was viewed by politicians in Ukraine as a potential link between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. However, even after he was indicted at the end of October 2017, as the prosecutor's office reported, he and Kilimnyk continued to seek “hints” from the Trump administration regarding a “peaceful” plan in Ukraine.
To do this, in March 2018, he and Kilimnyk worked on a survey of Ukrainians. The draft survey discussed whether Donbas should remain under Kyiv's administration in one of two alternative options; secede as an autonomous region, or immediately join Russia. The poll, developed with the participation of sociologist Fabrizio, also suggested investigating whether people in the east would perceive Yanukovych as a leader.
But while Manafort and Kilymnyk worked to refine the survey, prosecutors filed new criminal charges against Manafort. Now he faced two courts: in Virginia and in Washington. Then came the news about a new key witness — Manafort's deputy Gates, who detailed how Manafort used front companies to hide millions of dollars in income from the tax authorities.
In August 2018, a Virginia jury found Manafort guilty on eight of 18 counts, including tax and bank fraud. During his second money-laundering trial in Washington, Manafort struck a deal with investigators, pleaded guilty and cooperated with the government in hopes of receiving a reduced sentence. (Manafort now says that the guilty plea was disingenuous, that he did not believe he was guilty, and that he entered it only because he did not believe in a fair jury trial and wanted to protect the family's financial assets.) But at the last minute, the chief prosecutor Andrew Weissmannstopped the deal. The Senate report said it learned that Manafort lied repeatedly “about one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilymnik, a Russian intelligence officer.” One of the points of this interaction is the “Mariupol plan”.
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Weissmann only learned of the plan's existence after the trial in Virginia, when the FBI obtained a package of Kilimnyk's emails. Faced with this new information, Manafort told prosecutors that he immediately rejected the plan as soon as it first appeared in the Grand Havana Room in August 2016. He insisted even after Weissmann announced that he had correspondence dated December 2016 discussing “BG” and desired “hints” of support from Trump, as well as emails about the March 2018 poll.< /p>
In our interviews and in his book, Political Prisoner, published this August, Manafort calls the idea that he supported the plan “crazy” and claims the poll was designed to help a Ukrainian presidential candidate he does not name While he doesn't deny that Kilimnyk pushed through the plan — at Yanukovych's behest, not Putin's — he accuses Weisman of creating a “fabricated narrative” out of unrelated facts.
For Weissman, the discovery was an epiphany. The partition plan, he understood, was what Putin wanted in exchange for helping the Trump campaign.
“On August 2nd, if not earlier,” he wrote in his 2020 memoir, “Russia made it clear to Manafort — and by extension the Trump campaign — what it wanted from the United States: a 'hint', a nod from President Donald Trump for Putin to take over the richest region of Ukraine”.
Putin tried to justify his war in Ukraine with a flurry of propaganda — that Ukraine is ruled by Nazis with a Jewish president; that the Russian atrocities recorded in photographs, videos and eyewitness accounts are actually the actions of Ukraine itself, organized to slander Russia; that Ukraine is preparing to detonate a “dirty bomb”, although it is Moscow that is fueling fears of a Russian nuclear attack. In fact, Putin's propaganda forces have been using such fabrications for years to sow discord and drug people in Crimea and Donbas — this is how he tested a new doctrine of hybrid warfare: a combination of weapons and words.
These messages from Behind the Looking Glass echo the creation and development of the counter-narrative about the Russia investigation that took root in Trump's election campaign and eventually culminated in his first impeachment: it was Ukraine, not Russia, that meddled in the 2016 election. strong>
According to Mueller's report, Kilimnyk and Manafort began promoting the theory after news broke in June 2016 that a private cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrikeestablished that Russian hackers were responsible for hacking the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee. Later, Gates told investigators that Manafort convinced Trump's staff that Ukraine was actually behind the hack. In doing so, Gates reported, Manafort “repeated a narrative that, according to FBI memos cited in the Senate report, was frequently supported by Kilimnyk.” Manafort denies Gates' information.
After the release of Manafort's name in the black book, Kilimnyk defended his boss's reputation by pushing a new version of the counternarrative — that Clinton's Ukrainian allies fabricated the ledger to expose Manafort and compromise Trump. Like any effective disinformation, it had close ties to reality — the Ukrainian government believed that Trump's presidency could become potentially destructive and recognized that the authenticity of “black bookkeeping” was not 100% confirmed. An FBI agent who reviewed the ledger told me that it would be extremely difficult to forge hundreds of pages of handwritten notes, and they could be useful investigative tools, if not ready-made evidence for a court.
Kilimnyk's first effort was subtle: an August 2016 Financial Times article about how prominent Ukrainians were choosing sides in the US election, breaking with traditional neutrality, to oppose a “Proputinian Trump.” Prosecutors learned that prior to publication, Kylimnyk had exchanged several emails with the reporter, so the article included a quote from a source once loyal to Yanukovych who suggested not only that the ledger was released to damage Trump, but that journalists who covered the leak, worked for Hillary Clinton.
Carpet sent the article to Gates with the hope that “DT would see it.” Then, after three phone calls with Manafort, Roger Stone posted a link to the material on Twitter. “The only interference in the US elections is Hillary's friends in Ukraine,” he emphasized.
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A few months later, Kylimnyk helped clarify the matter in an article for US News & World Report. He wrote it on behalf of his old associate, Dmytro Lyovochkin, who was a member of the Ukrainian parliament from the Party of Regions, which later became known as the “Opposition Bloc”. Accusing anti-corruption officials of “fabricating a case” against Manafort, the author defended those who offer “painful concessions” in exchange for peace with Russia.
The counternarrative was actively supported in the Kremlin, which wasted no time and used it to inflame Trump's anger against his enemy. Noting how important American sponsorship was to Ukraine's future, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters in Moscow: “It seems that maintaining this sponsorship is a big challenge for the Kyiv authorities,” who have “behaved uncivilized and rudely with President-elect Donald Trump” and information about Manafort. In February, Putin joined this chorus, declaring that the Ukrainian government had taken a position in support of one candidate — Clinton. “Moreover,” he added without any evidence, “certain oligarchs, certainly with the approval of the political leadership, financed this candidate, or rather, the female candidate.”
Russian online resources in Ukraine and America also joined this campaign. In July, CyberBerkut, a hacking group linked to Russian military intelligence and previously involved in Russian propaganda efforts in Ukraine, advanced Putin's theory that Ukrainian oligarchs were secretly funding Clinton. The next day, the pro-Trump @USA_Gunslinger Twitter account in St. Petersburg, later identified as active in the 2016 meddling, tweeted: “Where is the outrage over Clinton and her campaign team colluding with Ukraine to interfere in the US election?”
In the months that followed, Trump's views on Ukrainians only seemed to worsen, as a more outlandish version flourished in pro-Trump communities on the Internet: his supporters claimed that the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike was owned by a Ukrainian (not true) and that the physical servers were hidden somewhere in Ukraine (not really). In other words, all this, they say, was a Ukrainian campaign to compromise Trump and Russia. Trump endorsed the idea at his press conference with Putin in Helsinki in July 2018, when he said he believed Putin's words that Russia was not involved in the hack. “Where are those servers? he asked. – They are not there.”
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Trump's mistrust threatened Ukrainians with fatal consequences. According to the memoirs of his former national security adviser John Bolton, when Russian sailors seized three Ukrainian naval ships that November in a potentially escalating move, Trump's first reaction was to suspect that Ukraine had provoked Russia.< /p>
That same month, prosecutors told a federal judge that Manafort violated his plea agreement because he gave false testimony. A judge later sentenced him to seven and a half years at the Loretto Federal Correctional Institution, Pennsylvania, as inmate #35207-016. What might have been Putin's best hope for a Trump-endorsed plan for a weakened and divided Ukraine appeared to have vanished with him.
But Trump's insane insult to Ukraine, which also played in favor of the Russian leader, will cause the next big scandal during his presidency.
Manafort should have been in prison, but in the search for a pardon, he offered something of value to the president — his unsurpassed knowledge of Ukrainian politics and government. He actually passed the baton to Trump's personal lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who in the fall of 2018 prepared the ground for finally calling the special prosecutor's investigation politically motivated after his final report failed to prove collusion.
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The main thing in Giuliani's mission was to try to build a counter-narrative “Ukraine did it.” Giuliani and Manafort did not communicate directly, but through the latter's lawyers. When I asked Manafort what exactly he had passed on, he was vague, but noted that Giuliani had “talked to some people in Ukraine who were friends of mine” and said that his lawyers had briefed Giuliani on the details of what he called “a conspiracy to frame him.” Giuliani declined to speak to me about their discussions, but told The Washington Post in 2019 that his question to Manafort was whether the “black ledger” actually existed. The answer was no.
What happened next is now exclusively Trump court history, as Giuliani toured Europe turning that original counternarrative into an elaborate conspiracy theory that implicated the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, its ambassador < strong>Marie Jovanovitch, as well as Joe and Hunter Biden. In a simplified version, the impeachment case that followed was about the president's abuse of power — schemes to provide essential military aid in exchange for Ukrainian investigations into CrowdStrike, “hidden servers” and the Bidens' alleged corruption deals with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
However, the American audience failed to notice how Trump's pressure campaign and Giuliani's freelance diplomacy were dealing a blow to a country that, whether it knew it or not, was on the verge of war. Their machinations were directly based on the so-called principle of “soft power” and, in the end, it was then that the question was decided whether Ukraine would lay the true foundations of an independent Western-style democracy or remain captive to Moscow and its proteges.
All this was difficult to see through the fog of Ukrainian politics. Everyone I talked to who had any experience in Kyiv — regardless of their political beliefs — warned against seeing anything in black and white, good guys and bad guys. It was impossible to tell how many seemingly conflicting plans the big player in Ukraine could juggle – the only reliable link through was the pursuit of money and power. In the same spirit, the oligarchs, who are most often characterized as “pro-Russian” in the Western press, refuse this label.
“I've never been pro-Russian,” gas tycoon, billionaire Dmytro Firtash explained to NBC News, “but you have to understand that I'm a businessman.”
In pre-war Kyiv, the pursuit of money and power and serving Putin's interests often meant the same thing.
“The Americans played the basic game – 'Trump wants dirt on Biden,'” says Suriya Jayanthi, head of the energy policy department of the American Embassy in Kyiv. “What was really happening in Ukraine was this crazy web of shifting alliances and pockets of oligarchs, horse trading and backstabbing, and in our American myopia we had a limited understanding that if you don't see a gopher, it doesn't mean it isn't there.” .
If there was one place where this seething panorama could be seen relatively clearly, it was the embassy, and in particular the events that led to Ambassador Jovanovych's release. In Trump's first impeachment, Yovanovych was somewhat of a supporting character, she was a central figure in the geopolitical contest unfolding in Kyiv. In general, she represented American diplomatic resistance to everything that Putin and his Ukrainian proteges wanted from Trump.
A reserved and focused diplomat who Obama sent to Kyiv months before Election Day, Yovanovitch was the daughter of immigrants whose families fled the Soviet Union and the Nazis. She came to Ukraine at a time of need. In the wake of the 2014 Maidan uprising, the people's will for democracy again proved unstoppable. Billions of dollars poured in from the West. But efforts to develop democracy in Ukraine have failed because the new administration, like the post-Orange Revolution government, has failed to deliver on its reform promises. The new president Petro Poroshenkoleft no doubt about the seriousness of his anti-Russian rhetoric when he unsuccessfully pressed the Obama administration on defensive weapons. But as a classic Ukrainian oligarch politician—he made his fortune in the chocolate trade—he was also part of the system he was being asked to destroy.
Jovanovych immediately set about strengthening the two pillars of American democracy >: free the Ukrainian economy from the pressure of oligarchs, and its justice system from the corrupt imperatives of politics. This inexorably brought her into conflict with two powerful people.
One of them was the energy tycoon Firtash— the embodiment of the oligarchic system, which turned out to be so beneficial to Putin. He made an extraordinary fortune through a partnership with Gazprom, Russia's leading energy concern: Gazprom sold gas at deeply discounted prices to an intermediary company he co-owned with Firtash, who in turn resold it at a substantial profit in Ukraine and all of Europe. Firtash, in turn, used part of these profits to support Russian politicians. He was a major sponsor of the Party of Regions and, according to prosecutors, was an important backer of Manafort. The men were also potential business partners: a decade earlier, they had discussed a deal to buy a Manhattan hotel. (Firtash did not respond to questions sent to the representative.)
At the time of Trump's inauguration, Ukraine excluded Firtash from the gas agreement. He himself was in Austria fighting extradition to the United States on bribery charges, which he denies. But he maintained beneficial ties with Ukraine's energy industry through ownership of regional distribution companies that are associated with the national gas concern Naftogaz. Despite the fact that Yovanovych assumed pressure from Firtash, she nevertheless convinced Poroshenko to keep his promise to introduce new rules that would violate “Firtash's business model,” as the ambassador put it in his memoirs.
First Yovanovych placed her hopes on the main Ukrainian law enforcement officer – Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko. But almost immediately she argued with him. Lutsenko was appointed in the spring of 2016 after Western allies demanded the resignation of his predecessor Viktor Shokin for failing to investigate corruption cases. One of the most blatant examples, often cited by Americans, is the energy company Burisma. She escaped prosecution despite charges she denied of embezzling public funds. When State Department officials called for an investigation by the attorney general's office, Joe Biden, as vice president, issued a stark ultimatum: $1 billion in loan guarantees would be contingent on the attorney general's firing. Biden turned out to be an imperfect communicator. A year before, Burisma gave a favorable seat on the board of directors to Biden's son Hunter, who had a famous name, but had no experience in the energy industry. Even State Department officials were cautiously worried that his position on the board would create the appearance of conflict.
On paper, Lutsenko seemed like a person who would professionally administer justice. Although he had no formal legal education, he was a leader of the Orange Revolution, then was imprisoned by Yanukovych and joined the 2014 Maidan protests.
The black ledger was one test of whether he would succeed where Shokin had failed, and he pledged to support an investigation into its contents that extended not only to Manafort but also to apparent bribes to judges and election officials. However, a few months later, reformers complained that Lutsenko's office was too slow to conduct investigations related to the book. One of the office's top lawyers has publicly complained that the attorney general is barring him from interviewing witnesses and issuing subpoenas in four cases related to Manafort's work.
Yovanovych argued with Lutsenko over the lack of enthusiasm for investigating a number of corruption cases. She was also angered by the fact that he tried to sabotage or even remove the powers of the independent anti-corruption bodies, NABU and SAP, which the West pushed Ukraine to create. She lectured him on the need for a depoliticized justice system, but they soon stopped regular communication.
“We thought he would be different. But he didn't become that,” she told me.
When Trump won the presidential election in 2016, Ukrainians and Russians believed that the American push for change in Kyiv would subside. However, Trump, convinced that Ukraine is behind the “deception” with Russia, did not show much interest in the country, allowing Yovanovych to continue his course.
The situation changed dramatically when Giuliani emerged at the end of 2018. Firtash will be a vital part of Giuliani's case against the Bidens, with Shokin testifying in a September 2019 affidavit that Biden forced him to release Burisma, a company whose board included Hunter Biden, as part of a corruption scheme. Despite abundant evidence that he was handling the case against Burisma, Shokin claimed that he actually conducted a “large-scale” investigation. Firtash also obtained an affidavit from the ex-prosecutor as part of his own legal battle — in which Shokin suggested that Firtash's bribery case was politically motivated — and apparently all of this found its way to Giuliani through mutual partners. Firtash himself stated that he never met Giuliani and did not allow the use of affidavits in his operation.
But this operation would not have been possible without Lutsenko, who continued it with additional twist, drawing Jovanovitch into an alleged conspiracy to help Clinton and hurt Trump.
Although Lutsenko had his own political ambitions, he owed his position at the time to Poroshenko, who wanted one thing from Trump above all else: more anti-tank missiles. People in Kyiv and beyond already suspected that this was the case, as the investigation was deadlocked, and instead the United States delivered the first batch of missiles. As one Ukrainian official told The Times in 2018, Poroshenko's government has shelved the ledger issue to “not spoil relations with the administration.” And in March 2019, after meeting with Giuliani in his Park Avenue office, Lutsenko appeared to give Trump at least part of what he wanted.
He told The Hill, a political publication, that he was opening a new investigation into the ledger — but already examining information that anti-corruption activists and investigators had released to help Clinton. Then he will say that he has evidence of possible wrongdoing by the Bidens.
But despite all this intrigue, there was one force that even the most cynical Kyiv businessmen do not doubt – the sincerity of the calls of Ukrainian protesters for democracy, independence and freedom from corruption. And on April 21, Poroshenko was dismissed from office in favor of Zelensky, a political neophyte who modeled himself after the character he played on television.
Suddenly, Lutsenko changed course, saying that he saw no evidence of illegal actions by the Bidens. (He did not respond to attempts to get a comment.) The scheme reached a dead end. While Trump and Giuliani worked to get things back on track under the new administration in Kyiv, Trump finally ousted Yovanovych, making her the central figure in a fantasy story that said she hindered his 2016 victory.
Now the president and his lawyer were trying to achieve an outcome that would embody everything the former ambassador sought to overcome in Ukraine: the massive politicization of the justice system, openly articulated in Trump's “perfect phone call” asking Zelensky to trade a bogus investigation for guns, and which led to to the third impeachment attempt in American history.
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In March 2021, US intelligence agencies declassified a report outlining their view that Kylimnyk and others linked to Russian intelligence had used various Americans — including Giuliani — to promote the idea of Biden corruption in Ukraine in order to impact on the 2020 Campaign. The report states that Russian leaders view the potential election of Biden as “unfavorable to Russia's interests” — especially in relation to Ukraine.
At the start of his presidency, Zelenskyi demonstrated a willingness to compromise with Russia on autonomy in the east, an issue at the heart of the Mariupol Plan. But after thousands of protesters returned to the Maidan in late 2019, he rejected Putin's demands for concessions on Ukrainian sovereignty. Zelensky prioritized joining NATO and signed a law that curbs oligarchs.
Before leaving the White House, Trump pardoned Manafort. If he had remained in office, the former president said in a statement earlier this year, “the desecration of Ukraine would not have happened.” But after Biden's inauguration in January 2021, Putin faced a new American president who took a tough line on his imperial plans for Ukraine — and with no obvious unofficial channels through which to manipulate him or his policies.
Thirteen months later, Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border.
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Jim Rutenberg — author The Times newspaper and Sunday magazine. Previously, he was a media commentator, White House reporter and national political correspondent. Also was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2018 for exposing sexual harassment and violence.
