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The Untold Story of Russiagate and the Road to War in Ukraine<\/i>,\u00a0The New York Times Magazine, 11.7.22,<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n UPDATE: 11.12.22.<\/p>\n Today, two historic and connected events happened that may determine the future of freedom and human rights for humanity.<\/p>\n First, in the U.S., vote counting from Tuesday’s election revealed the Democrats have retained control of the Senate. The count for the House continues, where Republicans will likely take control by a very small margin. Nothing like this has happened in modern American history in a mid-term election. The party in the White House under these circumstances has routinely been routed, which is what had been predicted.<\/p>\n Second, in the front line of the war for freedom and democracy against tyranny and human rights atrocity, which is and will impact the entire world and its future, Ukrainian troops entered the liberated city of Kherson.<\/p>\n Much more will be commented on regarding these events as they unfold further.<\/p>\n Against the backdrop of the mid-term elections in the U.S., and the continued increasingly successful (so far) fight by Ukraine againsnt Russian aggression, a fight for freedom and against autocracy effectively on behalf of the entire planet, a singularly extraordinary article appeared last Sunday in The New York Times Magazine.<\/p>\n No characterization can begin to describe its importance. It will be one of the documents that, at what arguably may be the most critical crossroads for humanity to date given the stakes, is like turning on the light in a pitch dark room.<\/p>\n Here it is:<\/p>\n “The Untold Story of \u2018Russiagate\u2019 and the Road to War in Ukraine”<\/a>,\u00a0By <\/span>Jim Rutenberg,\u00a0<\/span>Updated Nov. 7, 2022, The New York Times Magazine.<\/p>\n Russia\u2019s meddling in Trump-era politics was more directly connected to the current war than previously understood.<\/em><\/p>\n On the night of July 28, 2016, as Hillary Clinton was accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in Philadelphia, Donald J. Trump\u2019s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, received an urgent email from Moscow. The sender was a friend and business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik. A Russian citizen born in Soviet Ukraine, Kilimnik ran the Kyiv office of Manafort\u2019s international consulting firm, known for bringing cutting-edge American campaign techniques to clients seeking to have their way with fragile democracies around the world.<\/p>\n Kilimnik didn\u2019t say much, only that he needed to talk, in person, as soon as possible. Exactly what he wanted to talk about was apparently too sensitive even for the tradecraft the men so fastidiously deployed \u2014 encrypted apps, the drafts folder of a shared email account and, when necessary, dedicated \u201cbat phones.\u201d But he had made coded reference \u2014 \u201ccaviar\u201d \u2014 to an important former client, the deposed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who had fled to Russia in 2014 after presiding over the massacre of scores of pro-democracy protesters. Manafort responded within minutes, and the plan was set for five days later.<\/p>\n Kilimnik cleared customs at Kennedy Airport at 7:43 p.m., only 77 minutes before the scheduled rendezvous at the Grand Havana Room, a Trump-world hangout atop 666 Fifth Avenue, the Manhattan office tower owned by the family of Trump\u2019s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Shortly after the appointed hour, Kilimnik walked onto a perfectly put-up stage set for a caricature drama of furtive figures hatching covert schemes with questionable intent \u2014 a dark-lit cigar bar with mahogany-paneled walls and floor-to-ceiling windows columned in thick velvet drapes, its leather club chairs typically filled by large men with open collars sipping Scotch and drawing on parejos and figurados. Men, that is, like Paul Manafort, with his dyed-black pompadour and penchant for pinstripes. There, with the skyline shimmering through the cigar-smoke haze, Kilimnik shared a secret plan whose significance would only become clear six years later, as Vladimir V. Putin\u2019s invading Russian Army pushed into Ukraine.<\/p>\n Known loosely as the Mariupol plan, after the strategically vital port city, it called for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine\u2019s east, giving Putin effective control of the country\u2019s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded and -directed \u201cseparatists\u201d were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead. The new republic\u2019s leader would be none other than Yanukovych. The trade-off: \u201cpeace\u201d for a broken and subservient Ukraine.<\/p>\n The scheme cut against decades of American policy promoting a free and united Ukraine, and a President Clinton would no doubt maintain, or perhaps even harden, that stance. But Trump was already suggesting that he would upend the diplomatic status quo; if elected, Kilimnik believed, Trump could help make the Mariupol plan a reality. First, though, he would have to win, an unlikely proposition at best. Which brought the men to the second prong of their agenda that evening \u2014 internal campaign polling data tracing a path through battleground states to victory. Manafort\u2019s sharing of that information \u2014 the \u201ceyes only\u201d code guiding Trump\u2019s strategy \u2014 would have been unremarkable if not for one important piece of Kilimnik\u2019s biography: He was not simply a colleague; he was, U.S. officials would later assert, a Russian agent.<\/p>\n Their business concluded, the men left by separate routes to avoid detection, though they continued to text deep into the night, according to federal investigators. In the weeks that followed, operatives in Moscow and St. Petersburg would intensify their hacking and disinformation campaign to damage Clinton and help turn the election toward Trump, which would form the core of the scandal known as Russiagate. The Mariupol plan would become a footnote, all but forgotten. But what the plan offered on paper is essentially what Putin \u2014 on the dangerous defensive after a raft of strategic miscalculations and mounting battlefield losses \u2014 is now trying to seize through sham referendums and illegal annexation. And Mariupol is shorthand for the horrors of his war,<\/a> an occupied city in ruins after months of siege, its hulking steelworks spectral and silenced, countless citizens buried in mass graves.<\/p>\n Putin\u2019s assault on Ukraine and his attack on American democracy have until now been treated largely as two distinct story lines. Across the intervening years, Russia\u2019s election meddling has been viewed essentially as a closed chapter in America\u2019s political history \u2014 a perilous moment in which a foreign leader sought to set the United States against itself by exploiting and exacerbating its political divides.<\/p>\n Yet those two narratives came together that summer night at the Grand Havana Room. And the lesson of that meeting is that Putin\u2019s American adventure might be best understood as advance payment for a geopolitical grail closer to home: a vassal Ukrainian state. Thrumming beneath the whole election saga was another story \u2014 about Ukraine\u2019s efforts to establish a modern democracy and, as a result, its position as a hot zone of the new Cold War between Russia and the West, autocracy and democracy. To a remarkable degree, the long struggle for Ukraine was a bass note to the upheavals and scandals of the Trump years, from the earliest days of the 2016 campaign and then the presidential transition, through Trump\u2019s first impeachment and into the final days of the 2020 election. Even now, some influential voices in American politics, mostly but not entirely on the right, are suggesting that Ukraine make concessions of sovereignty similar to those contained in Kilimnik\u2019s plan, which the nation\u2019s leaders categorically reject.<\/p>\n This second draft of history emerges from a review of the hundreds of pages of documents produced by investigators for the special<\/a>counsel<\/a>, Robert S. Mueller III, and for the Republican-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence;<\/a> from impeachment-hearing transcripts and the recent crop of Russiagate memoirs; and from interviews with nearly 50 people in the United States and Ukraine, including four hourlong conversations with Manafort himself.<\/p>\n For Trump \u2014 who today is facing legal challenges involving the cache of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, his finances and his role in efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat \u2014 the Russia investigation was the original sin, the first of many politically motivated \u201cwitch hunts,\u201d since repurposed into weapons in his expansive arsenal of grievance. The Russia investigation and its offshoots never did prove coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow, though they did document numerous connections.<\/a> But to view the record left behind through the blood-filtered lens of Putin\u2019s war, now in its ninth month, is to discover a trail of underappreciated signals telegraphing the depth of his Ukrainian obsession \u2014 and the life-or-death stakes that America\u2019s domestic travails would have for some 45 million people nearly 5,000 miles away.<\/p>\n Among the episodes that emerge is the Grand Havana Room meeting, along with the persistent, surreptitious effort to bring the Mariupol plan to life. The plan was hardly the only effort to trade peace in Ukraine for concessions to Putin;<\/a> many obstacles stood in its way. And its provenance remains unclear: Was it part of a Putin long game or an attempt by his ally, Yanukovych, to claw back power? Either way, the prosecutors who uncovered the plan would come to view it as potential payoff for the Russian president\u2019s election meddling.<\/p>\n The examination also brings into sharper relief the tricks of Putin\u2019s trade as he pressed his revanchist mission to cement his power by restoring the Russian empire and weakening democracy globally. He pursued that goal through the cunning co-optation of oligarchs and power brokers in the countries in his sights, while applying ever-evolving disinformation techniques to play to the fears and hatreds of their people.<\/p>\n No figure in the Trump era moved more adroitly through that world than Manafort, a political operative known for treating democracy as a tool as much as an idea. Though he insists that he was trying to stanch Russian influence in Ukraine, not enable it, he had achieved great riches by putting his political acumen to work for the country\u2019s Kremlin-aligned oligarchs, helping install a government that would prove pliant in the face of Putin\u2019s demands. Then he helped elect an American president whose open admiration of the Russian strongman muddied more than a half-century of policy promoting democracy.<\/p>\n In the end, Putin would not get out of a Trump presidency what he thought he had paid for, and democracy would bend but not yet break in both the United States and Ukraine. But that, as much as anything, would set the Russian leader on his march to war.<\/p>\n Long before the<\/strong> Trump-era investigations, Manafort had established himself in Washington and abroad as a grand master of the political dark arts. Together with Roger Stone, Manafort helped develop the slashing style of conservative politics, pushing \u201chot buttons\u201d to rile up base voters and tar opponents. They served in Ronald Reagan\u2019s presidential campaigns and started their own firm, taking on international clients seeking favor in Reagan\u2019s Washington. The firm specialized in covering over the bloody records of dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines with copious coats of high-gloss spin, presenting them as freedom-loving democrats.<\/p>\n By 2005, Manafort had emerged as a central figure in Ukraine\u2019s often-snakebit experiment in democracy. He was introduced to the country\u2019s politics by one of Russia\u2019s most powerful oligarchs, the aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska. Oligarchs don\u2019t survive in Putin\u2019s Russia<\/a> without continually proving themselves useful to the motherland. And when Putin had an urgent problem in Ukraine, Deripaska, who had various holdings there, stepped in to help: He brought in Manafort\u2019s firm, which he had hired earlier to assist in overcoming a block on his U.S. visa, based on allegations that he had gained his position through ties to organized crime (which he denies).<\/p>\n What had Putin in a lather was a pro-Western and youth-led democracy movement that had caught fire just as Ukraine\u2019s second post-Soviet leader, the dictatorial and Kremlin-aligned Leonid Kuchma, prepared to step down. To succeed him, the reformists had lined up behind a politician named Viktor Yushchenko. Pro-American and married to a former State Department official, Yushchenko vowed to join NATO and the European Union. To the Kremlin, as one influential Russian defense analyst put it at the time, a Yushchenko victory would represent \u201ca catastrophic loss of Russian influence throughout the former Soviet Union, leading ultimately to Russia\u2019s geopolitical isolation.\u201d<\/p>\n Putin had gone all in for Kuchma\u2019s handpicked successor, Yanukovych, who had risen to power in Ukraine\u2019s eastern Donetsk region and had the backing of the country\u2019s leading oligarchs. But working with some of Putin\u2019s top political operatives, the Yanukovych campaign had gone horribly awry. First, an assassination attempt had left Yushchenko permanently scarred but very much alive. (A culprit was never identified; Yushchenko suspected the Kremlin.<\/a>) Then the Yanukovych team resorted to an election heist worthy of Trump\u2019s 2020 voter-fraud fantasia, with reports of ballot stuffing, disappearing ink<\/a> and bused-in voters. With thousands protesting in Kyiv\u2019s central Maidan square, Ukraine\u2019s high court declared Yanukovych\u2019s \u201cvictory\u201d marred<\/a> by \u201csystemic and massive\u201d election violations. Yushchenko then won in a new vote, a triumph of democracy known as the Orange Revolution.<\/p>\n Now Deripaska asked Manafort if he could restore Yanukovych\u2019s political organization, the Party of Regions, to power. Manafort\u2019s prescription is contained in a June 2005 memo to Deripaska that was quoted in the Senate Intelligence Committee\u2019s report. Yanukovych and his party, he argued, should work to win elections legitimately by dressing up as democrats in a Western mold \u2014 using the tools of the West \u201cin ways that the West believes is in concert with them,\u201d even if they weren\u2019t. By embracing the West, Yanukovych and his party would \u201crestrict their options to ferment an atmosphere that gives hope to potential advocates of a different way.\u201d In talking points that played to Putin, Manafort added, \u201cWe are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin Government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success.\u201d<\/p>\n Manafort insisted throughout our interviews that Putin would come to dislike him and his strategy, and that the memo was intended as a tutorial of sorts for Deripaska. \u201cI was basically teaching him democracy,\u201d he said. Deripaska\u2019s office did not respond to an interview request. But in a failed libel suit against The Associated Press<\/a> over a 2017 article<\/a> that revealed their discussions about Ukraine, Deripaska said he hired Manafort<\/a>solely for his own business interests and \u201cnever had any arrangement, whether contractual or otherwise, with Mr. Manafort to advance the interests of the Russian government.\u201d<\/p>\n Regardless, with financing from Deripaska\u2019s oligarch allies in Ukraine, Manafort began to put the plan into action. He brought in international elections consultants and American strategists from both sides of the partisan aisle. For local knowledge, Manafort brought in Kilimnik, who even then was trailed by suspicions that he was a Russian mole. Five feet tall with a disarmingly boyish mien, Kilimnik had last worked at the International Republican Institute, a democracy-promotion outfit affiliated with Senator John McCain of Arizona, who was a client of Manafort\u2019s longtime partner, Rick Davis. Kilimnik had studied at a Soviet military language academy known for minting future intelligence officers and had served as a Russian Army translator. His colleagues at I.R.I. came to suspect <\/a>he was passing secrets to Russian intelligence, and he was fired when the institute learned he was working for Yanukovych\u2019s backers.<\/p>\n Under Manafort\u2019s tutelage, Yanukovych<\/a> took on a new look, swapping out his blocky, gray apparatchik apparel for custom suits, Manafort-style, and taming his Soviet-vintage bouffant with a tighter-cropped cut. Then, from a new office just off Maidan square, Manafort worked up a Party of Regions platform promising to make Ukraine a \u201cbridge\u201d between Russia and the West \u2014 by striking an economic partnership with the European Union (popular in the west) but rejecting NATO membership (popular with Russian speakers in Ukraine\u2019s east). Skeptical American diplomats titled the Manafort project \u201cExtreme Makeover.\u201d<\/p>\n For all the talk of extending a bridge to the West, Manafort soon began plying his battle-tested and poll-driven politics of division \u2014 exploiting fissures over culture, democracy and the very notion of nationhood to excite the Party of Regions base, the Russian-speaking voters in the east and south. Speech drafts and talking points, unearthed in Manafort\u2019s criminal cases, portrayed the Orange Revolution as a \u201ccoup\u201d and the \u201corange illusion.\u201d They attacked the Yushchenko government\u2019s harder line toward Moscow and homed in on a simmering issue in Ukrainian politics \u2014 a regional split over whether to make Russian the second official language.<\/p>\n \u201cIn U.S. politics,\u201d says Tetiana Shevchuk, a lawyer with the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a reform group based in Kyiv, \u201cit\u2019s called \u2018culture wars,\u2019 when they pick some issue which is not the high priority for society right now but can easily be made into something. He was pushing something like the idea that there are two types of Ukrainians \u2014 there are Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the course of our interviews, Manafort maintained that the reformers had forced the issue by pushing the pre-eminence of Ukrainian in a country where many primarily spoke Russian. If anything, he argued, his strategy gave Yanukovych the credibility with \u201cethnic Russian\u201d voters needed to unite the country while turning it westward. (He says he is \u201cstrongly\u201d on Ukraine\u2019s side in the war.) Still, Manafort\u2019s line of attack coincided with a budding Russian intelligence operation that was engaging in \u201cmanipulation of issues like the status of the Russian language\u201d to stoke a separatist rebellion in the Crimean Peninsula and \u201cprevent Ukraine\u2019s movement west into institutions like NATO and the E.U.,\u201d according to a leaked U.S. Embassy cable<\/a> from the time. Nearly two decades later, Putin would employ similar messaging over language and national identity as justifications for his war and illegal annexations in the east.<\/p>\n The Manafort strategy was a smashing success. The Party of Regions won the parliamentary elections in 2006, and four years later Yanukovych reclaimed the presidency in elections that passed international muster. The Orange revolutionaries, or at least their elected leadership, had done much of the work themselves \u2014 alienating voters through paralyzing infighting and a failure to deliver reform. But Manafort won the credit, becoming as well known in Ukrainian political circles as Karl Rove or James Carville in America. He was living the oligarch\u2019s life, collecting jackets of python and ostrich skin, Alan Couture suits and properties in SoHo, the Hamptons, Trump Tower and brownstone Brooklyn. He was also growing closer to Yanukovych, playing grass-court tennis \u2014 always letting the client win \u2014 and soaking in the hot tub at the new president\u2019s 350-acre Mezhyhirya Residence<\/a>, with its petting zoo, golf course and grotesquerie of a mansion, whose shambolic mix of architectural influences was known locally as \u201cDonetsk Rococo.\u201d<\/p>\n It did not take long<\/strong> for Yanukovych to begin backsliding on his democracy pledges. He jailed his opponent, the former Orange leader Yulia Tymoshenko; ratcheted back press freedoms by criminalizing defamation and bringing trumped-up investigations of opposition media outlets; presided over the plundering of public funds; rigged the 2012 parliamentary elections; and reversed a plan to end Russia\u2019s lease on the Crimean port of Sevastopol,<\/a> where its naval fleet was viewed as a stalking horse for a Putin takeover.<\/p>\n Soon several of Manafort\u2019s democracy consultants dropped out in disappointment. For his part, Manafort expanded his role with Yanukovych, becoming something of a shadow foreign-policy adviser and emissary to the West. He was also, prosecutors later charged, working as an unregistered foreign agent, running secret lobbying campaigns in Washington and Brussels to stave off sanctions over the Tymoshenko jailing while insisting that Yanukovych was still pursuing his economic deal with Europe.<\/p>\n But that tenuous bridge to the West could not hold. Under pressure from Putin, Yanukovych abruptly reversed course in late 2013, breaking off talks with Europe and deepening his economic commitment to Russia. By the tens of thousands, protesters again streamed into Maidan square. Weeks of standoff, punctuated by violence, came to a deadly denouement over three days in February 2014, when a government crackdown left dozens dead,<\/a>mere yards from Manafort\u2019s office.<\/p>\n In the backlash, with his political coalition in pieces, Yanukovych fled to Russia. Within weeks, claiming Yanukovych had been ousted not in a homegrown swell of democracy but in a Western-backed coup, Putin moved on Crimea and the east. To this day, Manafort, too, maintains that Maidan was essentially a coup against a duly elected president. It was also a personal financial disaster \u2014 he had lost his cash cow. Still, he managed to find work, helping former Party of Regions members start a new party called Opposition Bloc and consulting on mayoral races.<\/p>\n The last one came in late 2015, in Mariupol. The port city, in Ukraine\u2019s southeast, was part of a potential land bridge for arms between occupied Crimea and the war-torn Donbas and would be a commercial hub for a Potemkin republic beholden to Moscow. It was also a fief of Ukraine\u2019s richest citizen, the metals and mining magnate Rinat Akhmetov, for whom both Russia and Europe were important markets. An early political godfather to Yanukovych, Akhmetov was also an original financier of Manafort\u2019s work for the Party of Regions.<\/p>\n With a concentration of industrial holdings in the Donbas, Akhmetov kept a tight hold over the region\u2019s politics, governance and media. Even as Putin\u2019s proxies advanced on Mariupol and held a sham independence referendum in 2014, Akhmetov struck a neutral-seeming posture<\/a> that gave the \u201cseparatists\u201d an opening to claim they had his support. \u201cRinat,\u201d read graffiti in Kyiv\u2019s Independence Square,<\/a> \u201care you with Ukraine or the Kremlin?\u201d Akhmetov ultimately came out harshly against the \u201cseparatist\u201d violence, dispatching workers to patrol the streets and help repel Russia\u2019s proxies. But even then, his mixed messages continued to feed suspicion that he was hedging his bets. After \u201cseparatists\u201d shelled a civilian area in early 2015, killing 30 people \u2014 the attack, it later became clear, was directed by Russian military officials<\/a> \u2014 his largest news outlet, Segodnya, stood out for articles that avoided ascribing blame. \u201cThe impression was, \u2018It\u2019s not man-made shelling but some kind of earthquake; it just happened,\u2019\u201d Eugenia Kuznetsova<\/a>, a Ukrainian media analyst who studied the coverage of the attack, told me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Jock Mendoza-Wilson, a spokesman for Akhmetov, said the oligarch had never been neutral and had always supported a united Ukraine. (Akhmetov is now suing Russia for destroying his largest steelworks in Mariupol, the site of Ukrainian soldiers\u2019 desperate 80-day<\/a> holdout this year.) But to hold the country together, he said, Akhmetov believed at the time that \u201cit would not be constructive to come out guns blazing\u201d against Russia.<\/p>\n With the 2015 mayoral and City Council elections approaching, several insurgent candidates stepped forward, pledging to turn Mariupol more decisively against Russia and its proxies. Akhmetov\u2019s chosen mayoral candidate, a former executive with his steel company, Vadym Boychenko, was a clear advocate for the neutral status quo.<\/p>\n Manafort\u2019s hand in the campaign, revealed in an email unearthed by Senate investigators, was largely hidden; in interviews, he described his role as minor. One reformist candidate, Oleksandr Yaroshenko, was surprised to learn that Manafort had been involved, though, in retrospect, he did see hints of his presence. \u201cThe Americans came with little counts,\u201d he told me during a video interview in May that was occasionally interrupted by his efforts to coordinate evacuations from the besieged city. \u201cThey had technology: how many people we need to bring from each street, which percent.\u201d He saw it as so much window-dressing, given that Akhmetov\u2019s control of the city extended to the contract to print the ballots.<\/p>\n After Boychenko won, Yaroshenko organized a City Council campaign to force him to renew a proclamation declaring Russia an \u201caggressor country.\u201d The mayor shelved the measure.<\/p>\n Manafort\u2019s move<\/strong> to the Trump campaign, in March 2016, was a boon for the candidate, giving him one of the Republicans\u2019 savviest intramural strategists just as Senator Ted Cruz was beginning to cut into his delegate lead, spurring talk of a contested convention.<\/p>\n It was also a boon for Manafort, who was poor in cash if rich in luxury goods. He had wired a large portion of his Ukraine earnings \u2014 a total take of some $60 million, investigators found \u2014 into his real estate, automobile and suit purchases from shell companies in Cyprus, part of what prosecutors said was a money-laundering scheme. A $2.4 million bill to Akhmetov and another client remained unpaid. Financial threats loomed. He was being sued by Deripaska, who claimed that Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, had lost nearly $20 million in a joint business venture gone bad.<\/p>\n Manafort went to great lengths to get the job with the Trump campaign, according to the Senate intelligence report. He lobbied Roger Stone and the fund-raiser Tom Barrack and clinched the deal, Barrack told prosecutors, by saying \u201cthe magic words\u201d \u2014 he would work without pay. After all, Manafort reasoned, the job could be a way to get his back pay from Akhmetov and patch things up with Deripaska, who would no doubt see value in Manafort\u2019s association with a potential president. \u201cHow do we use to get whole,\u201d Manafort wrote to Kilimnik. Manafort told me he believed he would have greater influence with Trump as a supportive volunteer than as a member of his staff.<\/p>\n Manafort\u2019s new job also held promise for Putin. The inner circle of the leading Republican candidate for the American presidency now included an adviser who was the mastermind behind Ukraine\u2019s most successful Russia-friendly party and was close to a man, Kilimnik, whom American officials have identified as a Russian agent.<\/p>\n The day after the Trump campaign announced his appointment as chief convention strategist, Manafort worked with Gates and Kilimnik to send copies of the announcement to his main patrons in Ukraine, along with personal letters promising to keep them in the loop throughout the campaign. The recipients included Deripaska, Akhmetov and another wealthy Ukrainian, a former Yanukovych chief of staff named Sergiy Lyovochkin. A conduit for oligarchs\u2019 money to Manafort during the Party of Regions years, Lyovochkin also had a close working relationship with Kilimnik, according to Senate investigators.<\/p>\n As Manafort rose to become Trump\u2019s campaign chairman \u2014 and as Russian operatives were hacking Democratic Party servers \u2014 the candidate took stances on the region that were advantageous to Putin\u2019s ambitions for Ukraine. Ahead of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July, Trump shocked the American foreign-policy establishment by voicing only tepid support for NATO.<\/a> He also told aides that he didn\u2019t believe it was worth risking \u201cWorld War III\u201d to defend Ukraine against Russia, according to the Senate intelligence report released in the summer of 2020.<\/p>\n That would be followed by the only platform fight of the convention. After a Texas delegate added a plank pledging \u201clethal defensive weapons\u201d for Ukraine, a Trump national security adviser, J.D. Gordon, swept in to block it; it would be downgraded to a softer pledge of \u201cappropriate assistance.\u201d The Texas delegate would tell the Senate Intelligence Committee that Gordon had told her he was acting in consultation with \u201cNew York,\u201d specifically with Trump. Gordon denied that, saying he acted on his own initiative because the \u201clethal aid\u201d pledge appeared to contradict Trump\u2019s position on Ukraine. Two other very invested players were on hand at the convention \u2014 the Ukrainian and Russian ambassadors to the United States; the Russian spoke with Gordon days after the plank was softened. In the end, investigators did not conclude that Russia was involved in the platform wrangling. Nor did they find any evidence to contradict Manafort\u2019s insistence that he had been wholly removed from the process, though one campaign official later told investigators that Manafort had to \u201cmollify\u201d the \u201cupset\u201d Ukrainian ambassador.<\/p>\n The Ukrainians would have reason to be upset, and the Russians pleased, all over again a few days later, on July 27, when Trump, at a news conference, said he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory, effectively ending Obama-administration sanctions and normalizing relations that had been strained since the illegal annexation. He also, famously, invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton\u2019s emails.<\/p>\n The following day, Kilimnik flew to Moscow, travel records obtained by Mueller\u2019s office show. In his email to Manafort that night, he wrote that he had met with \u201cthe guy who gave you your biggest black caviar jar several years ago\u201d \u2014 the guy being Yanukovych, who once gave Manafort $30,000 worth of fine caviar. Kilimnik needed to meet in person. He had \u201ca long caviar story to tell.\u201d<\/p>\n At the Grand Havana Room,<\/strong> Kilimnik delivered Yanukovych\u2019s urgent message: A \u201cpeace\u201d plan for Ukraine was coming together that he hoped Manafort would help effect.<\/p>\n As described by Kilimnik in messages and memos over the next several months, the envisioned autonomous republic in the east would nominally remain part of Ukraine; with Yanukovych as its leader, it would then negotiate a settlement. But what became known as the Mariupol plan<\/a> was, as Manafort later acknowledged to prosecutors, a \u201cbackdoor\u201d route to Russian control of eastern Ukraine \u2014 remarkably similar to what Putin has now declared accomplished through his gun-barrel annexations.<\/p>\n The plan was based on Putin\u2019s maximalist interpretation of accords, signed in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, in late 2014 and early 2015, that tied a cease-fire in the east to a new Ukrainian constitutional provision granting \u201cspecial status\u201d to the two main territories there. Russia interpreted that<\/a> fuzzy term as giving the territories autonomy \u2014 under its proxies \u2014 with veto power over Ukraine\u2019s foreign policy. Ukraine viewed it as a more limited expansion of local governance. Even then, a majority of Ukrainians saw the provision as capitulation,<\/a> polls showed, and it struggled to gain acceptance in Parliament.<\/p>\n For the United States, which was not a party to the Minsk talks, any plan that gave the east outsize autonomy and influence ran counter to longstanding support for what William Taylor, a former American ambassador to Ukraine, described as \u201can independent, sovereign Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019ve said that over and over and over,\u201d he told me. Now, though, Trump\u2019s rhetoric on Russia was suggesting a break from that policy.<\/p>\n In the Russia investigation, the meeting at the Grand Havana Room would become better known for the other piece of business conducted that night: the discussion of polling data that traced how Trump might achieve the position of power to make that momentous diplomatic break. Manafort and Gates had been passing that data to Kilimnik since the spring; produced by Manafort\u2019s go-to pollster, Tony Fabrizio, it was among the campaign\u2019s more closely held assets, according to the Senate intelligence report. Manafort and Gates have insisted that the data was only of the most basic sort, some of it publicly available. But it also showed exactly what the campaign was looking at as it formed its strategy and spread its message in new ways across social media. And as Manafort told Kilimnik at the club, according to testimony from Gates and another witness briefed on the meeting, the polling was picking up something that Clinton pollsters and mainstream prognosticators were not \u2014 a path to the White House through traditionally blue states like Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Of course, Manafort explained, that would require a relentless assault on Clinton\u2019s public image.<\/p>\n By the end of summer, vicious anti-Clinton social-media operations were intensifying, not only by the Trump campaign and its American allies but also by Russian trolls posing as Americans, who spread a raft of conspiracy theories about Clinton\u2019s health and alleged criminality. The operations included the states that Manafort had identified as key, investigators found.<\/p>\n The polling data would become a major focus of the Mueller team and Senate investigators. Neither could directly link the Russian operations to the data; they reported only that Gates believed that Kilimnik was sharing it with Deripaska and his Ukrainian counterparts \u2014 an apparent fulfillment of Manafort\u2019s pledge to keep his patrons in the loop. But last year a Treasury Department communiqu\u00e9 concluded that Kilimnik had passed the data directly to Russian military intelligence,<\/a> calling him a \u201cknown Russian agent.\u201d<\/p>\n The document provided no underlying evidence, and Manafort and Gates have used that to question the assessment and all that flows from it. As Gates told me, \u201cIf Kilimnik is a G.R.U. agent, show us the proof, and I\u2019ll be the first to say that\u2019s accurate.\u201d Kilimnik declined to speak with me, but in a text message, he dismissed his work on the Mariupol plan as \u201cinformal discussions\u201d regarding \u201cone of 10,000 various options of peace solution.\u201d (It was \u201cnot the right time to discuss these matters,\u201d he told me, given the \u201cstruggle of Ukrainians for their life and freedom.\u201d) Last year, Kilimnik told an interviewer with RealClearInvestigations<\/a> that the assessment was \u201csenseless and false,\u201d noting that he was a regular source of information for U.S. Embassy officials in Kyiv, which documents and former officials confirmed.<\/p>\n Of course, building trust inside a rival nation\u2019s embassy is what spies are supposed to do. One very plugged-in Westerner, a fixer who interacted with Kilimnik regularly in Kyiv, told me that while he harbored doubts about the intelligence assessment, he considered the question academic: As a Russian citizen with family in Russia and a history with the military, Kilimnik would have been under pressure to do Putin\u2019s bidding, and often seemed to. For that matter, emails obtained by Mueller showed Kilimnik referring to his interactions with high-level players in Moscow, including some with clear intelligence ties. Among them was a top Deripaska aide, Viktor Boyarkin, whom the U.S. Treasury Department has described<\/a> as a former ranking official with the G.R.U., which took the lead in Putin\u2019s meddling operation.<\/p>\n Kilimnik\u2019s best connection to the Trump campaign would not be around as that operation came into full flower. Less than three weeks after the Grand Havana Room meeting, Manafort was out of a job. In mid-August, The New York Times had reported that a new Ukrainian anti-corruption agency had obtained a Party of Regions \u201cblack ledger,\u201d<\/a> listing earmarked, off-the-books payments to Ukrainian officials \u2014 and to Manafort. A few days later, at a news conference in Kyiv, a former journalist turned reformist parliamentarian, Serhiy Leshchenko, highlighted 22 handwritten ledger entries listing $12.7 million in payments designated for Manafort. With Clinton\u2019s campaign calling the ledger evidence of ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Manafort resigned.<\/p>\n The discovery of the ledger seemed to have been lifted straight from the plot of a hit sitcom, \u201cServant of the People.\u201d A Ukrainian riff on \u201cMr. Smith Goes to Washington,\u201d it starred the comedic actor Volodymyr Zelensky as a humble and idealistic history teacher who is unexpectedly thrust into the presidency, constantly fighting off a Manafort-esque agent of the oligarchs trying to package and manage him. In the 2015 season finale, he finds a black ledger of secret payments kept by his predecessor and vows to cleanse the \u201coff-the-book company called \u2018Ukraine\u2019\u201d of its endemic corruption.<\/p>\n Speaking with reporters, Leshchenko used similar rhetoric when discussing why he helped publicize the real-world ledger. He had another reason too. \u201cThe more exposure there is of Trump and Trump\u2019s circle,\u201d he told Tablet magazine<\/a> several months later, \u201cthe more difficult it will be for Trump to conclude a separate deal with Putin, thereby selling out both Ukraine and the whole of Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n From the start of his presidential transition, Trump did appear to give Russia every indication that its political bet had paid off. He nominated as national security adviser a retired lieutenant general, Michael J. Flynn, who had accepted $33,750 to speak at a 2015 Moscow celebration of Russia\u2019s state-financed propaganda outlet, RT. Even before taking office, Flynn was speaking with Putin\u2019s ambassador in Washington, in apparent violation of federal law, about lifting sanctions over election meddling. (Flynn twice pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the F.B.I. about those discussions but was pardoned by Trump.) The new secretary of state would be Rex W. Tillerson<\/a>, who as Exxon Mobil\u2019s chief executive had criticized the Obama administration\u2019s decision to sanction Russia over Crimea and the shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines flight.<\/p>\n And in the days around the inauguration, promising signals came from across the Potomac in Virginia, where Manafort met with Kilimnik and Lyovochkin at the Westin Alexandria Old Town hotel. (The two men obtained inauguration tickets through a Manafort associate who would later plead guilty to failing to register as a foreign agent<\/a> and illegally buying the tickets \u2014 a violation of rules against foreign political donations.) As most of their communications took place over encrypted messaging apps, investigators had little visibility into the agenda, but Manafort acknowledged one item to prosecutors: the Ukraine \u201cpeace\u201d plan.<\/p>\n With no official position, Manafort continued to advise the Trump camp, according to the Senate report. At the same time, Kilimnik was shuttling between Moscow and Kyiv, working out the \u201cpeace\u201d plan\u2019s details. Communicating through a draft email in a shared account before the Virginia meeting, Kilimnik told Manafort that he and Yanukovych \u2014 code named BG for Big Guy \u2014 had met in Russia and discussed the plan. \u201cRussians at the very top level are in principle not against this plan,\u201d Kilimnik wrote, \u201cand will work with the BG to start the process.\u201d A public endorsement by Trump, he added, would overcome resistance in Kyiv. \u201cAll that is required to start the process is a very minor \u2018wink\u2019 (or slight push) from DT saying, \u2018he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine\u2019 and a decision to be a \u2018special representative\u2019 and manage this process,\u201d Kilimnik wrote. Trump\u2019s representative would apparently be Manafort, who, Yanukovych could guarantee, would have entree at \u201cthe very top level\u201d in the Kremlin.<\/p>\n Manafort was hardly<\/strong> the only figure in the Trump orbit engaging with people who knew people in Moscow. The early months of the administration brought a head-spinning procession of disclosures. Flynn, the national security adviser, was fired over his back-channel conversations with the Russian ambassador. There was the revelation that a foreign-policy adviser to the campaign named George Papadopoulos, at a bar in London, had told an Australian diplomat that Russia had dirt on Clinton,<\/a> weeks before Russia\u2019s hacking of Clinton\u2019s emails was publicly known. His loose talk sparked the first meddling investigation, which evolved into the Mueller inquiry. There was the news that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Manafort met at Trump Tower in June 2016 with a well-connected Russian lawyer who, they were told, wanted to pass along incriminating information about Clinton as \u201cpart of Russia and its government\u2019s support for Mr. Trump.\u201d By all accounts, the lawyer, more interested in the lifting of sanctions, failed to deliver. And there was the Mueller team\u2019s disclosure in court papers in the fall of 2017 that Kilimnik was \u201cassessed to have ties to a Russian intelligence service.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n By then, though, Manafort had emerged as a primary target of the investigation, his interactions with Kilimnik, Deripaska and pro-Russian Ukrainians viewed as a potential link between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. Yet even after his indictment in late October 2017, prosecutors reported, he and Kilimnik continued to seek the Trump administration\u2019s \u201cwink\u201d for the Ukraine \u201cpeace\u201d plan. To that end, as late as March 2018, he and Kilimnik were working on a survey of Ukrainians. A draft of the poll asked whether Donbas should stay under the governance of Kyiv in one of two alternative arrangements; break off as an autonomous region; or join Russia outright. Devised with input from the pollster Fabrizio, it also asked if Yanukovych could be accepted as a leader in the east.<\/p>\n But as Manafort and Kilimnik worked to refine the poll, prosecutors brought new<\/a> criminal charges against Manafort. He was now facing two trials, one in Virginia and one in Washington. Then came news of a new star witness \u2014 Manafort\u2019s deputy, Gates, who laid out in detail how Manafort used shell companies to hide millions of dollars in earnings from the tax collectors.<\/p>\n In August 2018, a Virginia jury found Manafort guilty of eight of 18 counts, including tax and bank fraud. With his second trial, for money laundering, looming in Washington, Manafort struck a deal to plead guilty and cooperate with the government, in hopes of receiving leniency at sentencing. (Manafort now says he did not believe his sworn admission of guilt, and entered it only because he did not think he would face a fair jury and wanted to protect family financial assets.) But at the last minute, the lead prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, scuttled the deal. Manafort, he learned, had consistently lied \u201cabout one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik, the Russian intelligence officer,\u201d as the Senate report put it. Among those interactions: the maneuverings for the Mariupol plan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Weissmann discovered the plan only after the Virginia trial, when the F.B.I. obtained a batch of Kilimnik\u2019s emails. Confronted with that new information, Manafort told the prosecutors that he had dismissed the plan out of hand when it first came up, at the Grand Havana Room in August 2016. He stuck to that insistence even after Weissmann disclosed he was in possession of the December 2016 correspondence discussing \u201cthe BG\u201d and the desired \u201cwink\u201d of support from Trump \u2014 and again when presented with the emails about the poll in March 2018.<\/p>\n In our interviews and in his book, \u201cPolitical Prisoner,\u201d<\/a> published this August, Manafort calls the idea that he supported the plan \u201ccrazy\u201d and maintains that the poll was designed to help a Ukrainian presidential candidate he would not name. Though he does not deny that Kilimnik pushed the plan \u2014 at the behest of Yanukovych, not Putin, he says \u2014 he accuses Weissmann of crafting a \u201cmade-up narrative\u201d from unconnected facts.<\/p>\n For Weissmann, the revelations made for an aha! moment. The partition plan, he realized, was the \u201cquo\u201d Putin wanted for the \u201cquid\u201d of helping Trump\u2019s campaign. \u201cOn August 2, if not earlier,\u201d he wrote in his 2020 memoir<\/a>, \u201cRussia had clearly revealed to Manafort \u2014 and, by extension, to the Trump campaign \u2014 what it wanted out of the United States: \u2018a wink,\u2019 a nod of approval from a President Donald Trump, as it took over Ukraine\u2019s richest region.\u201d<\/p>\n Putin has sought<\/strong> to justify his war in Ukraine with a barrage of propaganda \u2014 that Ukraine, with a Jewish president, is ruled by Nazis; that Russian atrocities, amply captured in photographs, videos and witness accounts, are Ukrainian false-flag attacks, staged to smear Russia; that Ukraine is preparing to detonate a \u201cdirty bomb,\u201d even as Moscow stokes global fears of a Russian nuclear attack. Putin\u2019s propaganda forces, in fact, had been employing such fictions for years to sow division and confusion in Crimea and Donbas, as he road-tested a new doctrine of hybrid warfare, a mix of weapons and words.<\/p>\n That through-the-looking-glass messaging echoes in the fashioning and evolution of a counternarrative to the Russia investigation that took root in Trump\u2019s campaign and ultimately bled into his first impeachment: Ukraine, not Russia, had meddled in 2016.<\/p>\n According to the Mueller report, Kilimnik and Manafort began spinning the theory after news broke in June 2016 that a private cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike had determined that Russian hackers had been responsible for breaching the Democratic National Committee\u2019s computer systems. Gates later told investigators that Manafort had told people inside the campaign that Ukraine was actually behind the hack. In doing so, Gates reported, Manafort had \u201cparroted a narrative Kilimnik often supported,\u201d according to F.B.I. notes quoted in the Senate report. Manafort denies Gates\u2019s account.<\/p>\n After the disclosure of Manafort\u2019s name in the black ledger, Kilimnik mounted a reputational defense of his boss by surfacing a new iteration of the counternarrative \u2014 that Clinton\u2019s Ukrainian allies had fabricated the ledger to tar Manafort and undermine Trump. Like all effective disinformation, it had some thread-thin ties to reality \u2014 the view within the Ukrainian government that a Trump presidency would be potentially ruinous, and the admission that the ledger had not been fully authenticated and did not prove actual payments made to Manafort. An F.B.I. agent who viewed the ledger told me that its hundreds of pages of handwritten entries would have been prohibitively difficult to forge and were a worthwhile investigative tool if not court-ready evidence. (Manafort has denied receiving off-the-books payments and was never a subject of criminal inquiry by Ukrainian prosecutors, who were focused on investigating whether payments to Manafort and others had been improperly drawn from public funds.)<\/p>\n Kilimnik\u2019s initial foray was subtle, involving an August 2016 Financial Times article about prominent Ukrainians\u2019 picking sides in the American election,<\/a> breaking with traditional neutrality to oppose the \u201cpro-Putin Trump.\u201d Kilimnik had exchanged several emails with the reporter before publication, prosecutors learned, and the article included a quote from a \u201cformer Yanukovych loyalist\u201d suggesting not only that the ledger had been leaked to harm Trump but also that journalists covering the leak had been \u201cworking in the interests of Hillary Clinton.\u201d Kilimnik sent the article to Gates with the hope that \u201cDT sees it.\u201d Then, after three phone calls with Manafort, Roger Stone posted a link to the piece on Twitter. \u201cThe only interference in the US election is from Hillary\u2019s friends in Ukraine,\u201d he added as punctuation.<\/p>\n Several months later, Kilimnik helped make the case more plainly<\/a>in an op-ed in U.S. News & World Report that he helped ghostwrite for his old associate, the Manafort patron Lyovochkin, now serving in Ukraine\u2019s Parliament as a member of the Party of Regions\u2019 successor, Opposition Bloc. Accusing anti-corruption officials of \u201cmanufacturing a case\u201d against Manafort, the op-ed defended those proposing \u201cpainful concessions\u201d in return for peace with Russia.<\/p>\n The counternarrative found a prominent amplifier at the Kremlin, which wasted no time using it to stoke Trump\u2019s ire against its foe. Noting how vital American sponsorship was to Ukraine\u2019s future, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, told reporters in Moscow during the transition,<\/a> \u201cIt appears that keeping this sponsorship is a big challenge for the Kyiv authorities,\u201d who had been \u201cuncivilized and rude towards President-elect Donald Trump\u201d and had planted information about Manafort. Putin joined the chorus in February, asserting that the Ukrainian government had \u201cadopted a unilateral position in favor of one candidate\u201d \u2014 Clinton. \u201cMore than that,\u201d he added, without evidence, \u201ccertain oligarchs, certainly with the approval of the political leadership, funded this candidate, or female candidate, to be more precise.\u201d<\/p>\n Russia\u2019s online assets in Ukraine and America joined in. That July, CyberBerkut<\/a>, a hacker group associated with Russian military intelligence \u2014 and active in Russia\u2019s earlier Ukraine propaganda efforts \u2014 elaborated on Putin\u2019s theory that Ukrainian oligarchs had secretly financed Clinton. The next day, a pro-Trump Twitter account based in St. Petersburg that was later identified as an asset in the 2016 meddling, @USA_Gunslinger, posted, \u201cWhere\u2019s the outrage over Clinton and her campaign team\u2019s collusion with Ukraine to interfere in the US election?\u201d<\/p>\n In the months that followed, Trump\u2019s view of the Ukrainians seemed to grow only darker, as a more outlandish version of the theory flourished in the pro-Trump corners of the internet.<\/a> Its proponents claimed that the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike was owned by a Ukrainian (it wasn\u2019t), and that the physical servers were hidden somewhere in the country (they weren\u2019t). In other words, much like the Russia investigation \u201choax,\u201d it was all a Ukrainian campaign to frame Trump and Russia. Trump nodded at the idea in his news conference with Putin in Helsinki in July 2018, when he said he accepted Putin\u2019s word that Russia had not been involved in the hacking. \u201cWhere are those servers?\u201d he asked. \u201cThey\u2019re missing.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s distrust was threatening to have deadly consequences for the Ukrainians. According to the memoir of his former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, when Russian sailors seized three Ukrainian naval vessels that November in a potentially escalatory move, Trump\u2019s first instinct was to suspect that Ukraine had provoked Russia.<\/p>\n That same month, prosecutors reported to a federal judge that Manafort had breached his plea deal by lying. The judge later sentenced him to a prison term of seven and a half years, to be served at the Federal Correctional Institution Loretto, in Pennsylvania, as Inmate No. 35207-016. What might have been Putin\u2019s best hope for a Trump-approved plan for a weakened and divided Ukraine seemed to have gone away with him. But in ways that played to the Russian leader\u2019s designs, Trump\u2019s festering grievance toward Ukraine would shape the next major scandal of his presidency.<\/p>\n Manafort might have<\/strong> been in prison, but, in search of a pardon, he still had something of value for the transactional president \u2014 his unparalleled knowledge of Ukrainian politics and government. He would effectively pass the baton to Trump\u2019s personal lawyer, the former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who in the fall of 2018 was preparing an offensive to definitively cast the special-counsel investigation as a political hit job after its final report failed to prove \u201ccollusion.\u201d<\/p>\n Central to Giuliani\u2019s mission was an effort to build out the \u201cUkraine did it\u201d counternarrative. Giuliani and Manafort did not speak directly but through Manafort\u2019s lawyers. When I asked Manafort exactly what he had passed along, he was vague, but he noted that Giuliani was \u201ctalking to some of the people in Ukraine who were my friends\u201d and said his lawyers would have briefed Giuliani on the details of what he calls a plot to frame him. Giuliani declined to speak with me about their discussions, but he told The Washington Post in 2019 that his question for Manafort was,<\/a> \u201cWas there really a black book?\u201d and the answer came back, \u201cThere wasn\u2019t a black book.\u201d<\/p>\n What happened from there is already exhaustively litigated Trump history, as Giuliani adventured across Europe spinning that original counternarrative into an ornate conspiracy theory that roped in the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, its ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, and Joe and Hunter Biden. In its simplest version, the impeachment case that followed was about presidential abuse of power \u2014 a scheme to condition essential military aid on a Ukrainian investigation into CrowdStrike, the \u201chidden servers\u201d and the Bidens\u2019 purportedly corrupt dealings with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. What was lost on the American audience, though, was the way Trump\u2019s pressure campaign and Giuliani\u2019s freelance diplomacy were buffeting a country that, whether it knew it or not, was careening toward war. Their machinations were playing directly into a soft-power contest over whether Ukraine would lay the true foundations of an independent Western-style democracy or remain in thrall to Moscow and its proxies.<\/p>\n That contest was hard to see through the fog of Ukrainian politics. Everyone I spoke with who had any experience in Kyiv \u2014 no matter their political persuasion \u2014 warned against seeing anything in black and white, good guys and bad. There was no telling how many seemingly contradictory agendas a major player in Ukraine might be juggling \u2014 the only reliable through-lines being the pursuit of money and power. It is in that spirit that the oligarchs most often characterized in the Western press as being \u201cpro-Russian\u201d reject the label. \u201cI was never pro-Russian,\u201d the billionaire energy broker Dmitry Firtash told NBC News<\/a> this year, \u201cbut you have to understand that I\u2019m a businessman.\u201d In prewar Kyiv, pursuing money and power and serving Putin\u2019s interests could often mean the same thing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cAmericans were playing a basic game \u2014 \u2018Trump wants dirt on Biden,\u2019\u201d says Suriya Jayanti, chief of energy policy at the American Embassy in Kyiv at the time. \u201cWhat was actually going on in Ukraine was this crazy web of shifting alliances and oligarch pockets and horse trading and back-stabbing, and in our American myopia we had limited understanding that if a tree falls in the forest and America is not there to hear it, it still falls.\u201d<\/p>\n If any place provided a relatively clear view of this seething panorama, it was the embassy, through the events that led to the firing of the ambassador, Yovanovitch. Something of a supporting character in Trump\u2019s first impeachment, Yovanovitch was central to the geopolitical competition playing out in Kyiv. In bottom-line terms, she represented American diplomatic resistance to everything Putin and his Ukrainian proxies wanted from Trump.<\/p>\n A strait-laced and driven career diplomat dispatched to Kyiv by Obama just months before Election Day, Yovanovitch was the daughter of \u00e9migr\u00e9s whose families had fled the Soviets and the Nazis. She arrived in Ukraine at a precarious time. In the wake of the 2014 Maidan uprising, the popular will for democracy was proving irrepressible yet again. Billions of dollars flooded in from the West. But the efforts to nurture Ukraine\u2019s democracy were foundering as the new administration, like the post-Orange Revolution government, was failing to keep its promises of reform. The new president, Petro O. Poroshenko, left little doubt about the seriousness of his anti-Russian rhetoric as he pressed the Obama administration, unsuccessfully, for defensive weapons.<\/a> But as an oligarch politician in the classic Ukrainian mold \u2014 he had made his fortune in the chocolate trade \u2014 he was also part of the system he was being asked to blow up.<\/p>\n Yovanovitch immediately set out to shore up the two pillars of the American democracy agenda: freeing Ukraine\u2019s economy from the grip of the oligarchs and its justice system from the corrupting imperatives of politics. That inexorably brought her into conflict with two powerful men.<\/p>\n One was the energy broker Firtash, the embodiment of the oligarchic system that had proved so beneficial to Putin.<\/a> He had built extraordinary wealth through a partnership with Gazprom, Russia\u2019s leading energy concern: Gazprom sold deeply discounted gas to a middleman company that it owned with Firtash, which then resold it, at a considerable profit, to Ukraine and throughout Europe. Firtash, in turn, used some of those profits to support Russia-aligned politicians. He had been a major sponsor of the Party of Regions and, prosecutors believed, an important paymaster for Manafort. The men were also would-be business partners; a decade earlier, they discussed a deal to buy a hotel in Manhattan. (Firtash did not respond to questions sent to a representative.)<\/p>\n By the time Trump took office, Ukraine had cut Firtash\u2019s middleman out of the gas deal. Firtash himself was in Austria, fighting extradition to the United States on unrelated bribery charges<\/a> that he denies. But he maintained lucrative ties to Ukraine\u2019s energy industry through ownership of regional distribution companies associated with the national gas concern, Naftogaz. Now, despite what she suspected was pressure from Firtash, Yovanovitch persuaded Poroshenko to hold to his vow to enact new rules that would disrupt \u201cthe Firtash business model,\u201d as the ambassador put it in her memoir<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yovanovitch at first had hopes for Ukraine\u2019s chief law-enforcement official, the prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko. But she almost immediately got crosswise with him as well. Lutsenko had been appointed in the spring of 2016, after Western allies pressed for the ouster of his predecessor, Viktor Shokin, for failing to prosecute corruption cases. One of the more egregious examples, cited frequently by the Americans, involved the energy company Burisma. It had escaped prosecution despite allegations, which it denied, that it embezzled public funds. As State Department officials called for an investigation into the handling of the case by the prosecutor general\u2019s office, Joe Biden, as vice president, delivered a forceful ultimatum: $1 billion in loan guarantees would be contingent on the prosecutor general\u2019s firing. Biden was an imperfect messenger. The year before, Burisma had given a lucrative board seat to his son Hunter<\/a>, who had a famous last name but no energy-industry experience. Even State Department officials worried,<\/a> presciently, that his board position would pose the appearance of a conflict.<\/p>\n On paper, Lutsenko seemed<\/a> the man to professionalize the justice system. Though he had no formal legal training, he had been a leader of the Orange Revolution, was then imprisoned by Yanukovych and emerged to join the 2014 Maidan protests. The black ledger would be one test of whether he would succeed where Shokin had failed, and he promised to support the investigations into its contents, which extended beyond Manafort to apparent bribes to judges and elections officials. Within months, though, reformers were complaining that Lutsenko\u2019s office appeared to be slow-walking the ledger-related investigations. One lead lawyer in the office publicly complained that the prosecutor general was prohibiting him from interviewing witnesses<\/a> or issuing subpoenas in four cases relating to Manafort\u2019s work.<\/p>\n At the embassy, Yovanovitch was clashing with Lutsenko over his apparent lack of zeal for a range of corruption cases. She was furious, too, that he was working to undercut, if not disempower, a corps of independent anti-corruption prosecutors and investigators that the West had pushed Ukraine to create. As she lectured him about the need for a depoliticized justice system, they soon ceased regular communication. \u201cWe thought he would be different,\u201d she told me. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n When Trump won the presidency in 2016, the Ukrainians and the Russians believed that the American-led push for change in Kyiv would subside. But Trump, convinced that Ukraine was behind the Russia \u201choax,\u201d showed little interest in the country, leaving Yovanovitch free to stay the course.<\/p>\n That changed drastically as Giuliani entered the picture in late 2018. Firtash would provide a vital building block of Giuliani\u2019s case against the Bidens \u2014 a sworn affidavit from Shokin in September 2019 asserting that Biden had forced his firing as part of a corrupt scheme to protect Burisma, with his son on the board, from scrutiny. Despite ample evidence that the case against Burisma lay dormant under his watch, Shokin maintained that he had, in fact, been pursuing a \u201cwide-ranging\u201d inquiry. Firtash had secured the affidavit as part of his own legal fight \u2014 in it, Shokin suggested that Firtash\u2019s bribery case was politically motivated \u2014 and it apparently found its way to Giuliani through mutual associates. Firtash has said he never met Giuliani<\/a> and did not authorize the affidavit\u2019s use<\/a> in his operation.<\/p>\n But that operation would not have been possible without Lutsenko, who carried it forward with an added twist implicating Yovanovitch in the supposed plot to help Clinton and hurt Trump.<\/p>\n Though Lutsenko had his own political ambitions, he owed his current position to Poroshenko, who wanted one thing above all else from Trump: more antitank missiles. People inside and outside Kyiv already suspected that was at play as the ledger investigations remained stalled and the United States delivered a first batch of missiles. As one Ukrainian official told The Times in 2018, the Poroshenko government had put the ledger inquiries<\/a> in a \u201clong-term box,\u201d because \u201cwe shouldn\u2019t spoil relations with the administration.\u201d And in March 2019, after meeting with Giuliani at his Park Avenue office, Lutsenko appeared to give Trump at least some of what he wanted. He told the political publication The Hill that he was opening a new ledger investigation<\/a> \u2014 into the allegations that anti-corruption activists and investigators had released it to help Clinton. He would then indicate that he had evidence of possible wrongdoing by the Bidens.<\/p>\n Yet for all that intrigue, there was one force that even the most cynical Kyiv hands never doubt \u2014 the sincerity of Ukrainian protesters\u2019 calls for democracy, independent and uncorrupted. And on April 21, Poroshenko was voted out of office in favor of Zelensky, a political neophyte who fashioned himself in the reformist mold of the character he had played on television.<\/p>\n Suddenly Lutsenko was reversing course, announcing that he saw no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens.<\/a> (He did not respond to attempts to reach him for comment.) The scheme was at a dead end. As Trump and Giuliani worked to get it back on track under the new administration in Kyiv, Trump finally forced out Yovanovitch, casting her as a central actor in the fantasy plot to defeat him in 2016. Now the president and his lawyer were trying to force a result that embodied everything the fallen ambassador had sought to vanquish in Ukraine: the rank politicization of the justice system, openly articulated in Trump\u2019s \u201cperfect phone call\u201d asking Zelensky to trade a sham investigation for arms, which led to impeachment, only the third in American history.<\/p>\n In March 2021,<\/strong> U.S. intelligence services declassified a report detailing their consensus view that Kilimnik and others associated with Russian intelligence had used various Americans<\/a> \u2014 among them, it strongly suggested, Giuliani \u2014 to promote the idea of the Bidens\u2019 corruption in Ukraine to influence the 2020 campaign. The report assessed that Russian leaders viewed Biden\u2019s potential election<\/a> as \u201cdisadvantageous to Russian interests\u201d \u2014 especially as it pertained to Ukraine.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2022\/11\/06\/magazine\/06mag-Manafort-3\/06mag-Manafort-3-mobileMasterAt3x.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=600\")
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