by Luke Harding
By 2011 Tymoshenko was in jail. The West called repeatedly for her release. Yanukovych shrugged this off. On the foreign policy front, Yanukovych renewed the lease for Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet, stationed in Crimea. In return, Putin gave him a discount on Ukraine’s gas bill. Negotiations continued over an association agreement with the European Union.
Then in November 2013, Yanukovych announced he was dropping the EU plan and accepting a $15 billion loan from Moscow. The decision meant that Ukraine had given up on closer integration with the West. Instead, it would remain part of Russian political and economic space—with key decisions over the country’s future and foreign policy taken, in effect, by the Kremlin. Yanukovych would be Putin’s provincial viceroy. The loan was a bribe.
For some Ukrainians this vision of the future was unappealing. It came on top of four years of misrule during which the president had robbed the state. In particular Yanukovych had enriched his family members and cronies. His son Oleksandr, a dentist, accumulated a fortune estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars.
Nayyem, the reporter, never actually met Manafort, though he told me he did once glimpse him in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel. That November Nayyem posted a question on Facebook. It asked: was anyone planning to go to the Maidan? Within an hour his post had more than a thousand “likes.” “That night four hundred people showed up. They stayed until 6:00 a.m. Most of them were my friends from Facebook. It was the so-called creative class,” he told me.
Nayyem’s Maidan protest went through several iterations. For weeks it was peaceful. Then the government used brutal force. This was counterproductive: the demonstrations grew. Ukraine’s official opposition leaders—Vitali Klitschko, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Oleh Tyahnybok—came along but were habitually booed and referred to by protesters as “those three clowns.” By February 2014 the mood in Kiev was febrile. Prominent anti-government activists were disappearing; some turned up dead, others alive but showing signs of torture. Paid pro-Yanukovych thugs—titushki—roamed the streets, beating and killing. Crowds of protesters built barricades. The riot police fired tear gas.
The revolution had many aspects. It was not unlike the post-crash Occupy movements that had filled the streets of New York, London, and Madrid. It was also strikingly retro—with protesters donning homemade shields and helmets, and using medieval-style catapults to chuck stones at the cops. Additionally, it was the anti-Soviet revolution that failed to happen when Ukraine exited the USSR in 1991. A lot of Lenin statues were toppled.
In the final hours of the regime, government snipers killed dozens. Video footage shows them firing on unarmed protesters trying to advance across open ground. Twenty police also died.
Yanukovych was at his palace on the outskirts of Kiev. He was in no physical danger, but he chose to flee the country. He took $32 billion with him (having stolen an estimated $100 billion in four years), leaving by helicopter and escaping to Russia. Other members of his government ran away, too, stuffing money and jewels in their luggage like comedy gangsters.
Putin’s response was to seize Crimea and declare that the uprising in Ukraine was a “fascist coup.” He pledged to defend the ethnic Russians whom Manafort had previously targeted as election fodder. Soon after Putin started a war in eastern Ukraine—albeit a covert one, done with undercover troops and clandestine agents. The conflict that gripped Ukraine in 2014 wasn’t, as Moscow claimed, a civil war. In reality it was a Frankenstein-like conflict, artificially created by the Russian government and given life by the external brute shock of military force and invasion. The GRU—the outfit that would go on to hack the DNC—played a key role.
The real coup took place in Crimea, where, a week after Yanukovych’s flight, masked gunmen—actually Russian special forces troops—seized the parliament building in Simferopol, Crimea’s regional capital. Meanwhile, in the eastern cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, pro-Russian groups began storming government buildings.
The Kremlin rapidly escalated this dispute in the east by providing hardware to anti-Kiev rebels. It included tanks, artillery pieces, and antiaircraft systems. That spring, summer, and fall Russian soldiers—sometimes repackaged as “volunteers”—did much of the fighting. When it appeared that the rebels were on the brink of defeat, Moscow used its regular units to smash Ukrainian forces.
Without Russia there wouldn’t have been a war in 2014. There would undoubtedly have been tension between the central government in Kiev and its predominantly Russian eastern regions—a political dispute about autonomy, devolved power, the multiple failures of the Ukrainian state, and the status of the Russian language. But Ukraine wouldn’t have fallen apart. Fewer people would have died.
Boiled down, Yanukovych had sold himself out to a foreign power. He had committed treason. He had also stolen very large sums of money.
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How much of this was down to Manafort? Might he be blamed for the Ukraine disaster? And to what extent was Yanukovych’s kleptocratic family presidency a model for Donald Trump?
For sure, the fault lines in Ukraine—between Catholic west and Orthodox east, between those looking to Europe and those nostalgic for the lost Soviet universe—existed before Manafort arrived on the scene. The charge against Manafort is that he cynically exploited these divisions for short-term electoral gain, without much caring about the consequences. These were, in the end, catastrophic.
Before signing on with Trump in spring 2016, Manafort spent over a decade working in Ukraine. Yanukovych hired him to run four election campaigns: the presidential one and three parliamentary polls. After Yanukovych left, Manafort continued to work for the defeated Party of Regions. He helped reshape it. This was at the behest of Lyovochkin, Yanukovych’s former chief of staff. Manafort renamed it the Opposition Bloc. He visited Kiev up until late 2015.
According to Nayyem, among Trump’s entourage it is Manafort who has the closest ties with Russia. Nayyem acknowledged Manafort’s gifts as a political technician and said: “Manafort tried to civilize Yanukovych. He told him: ‘You are so ugly. I will present you to the West.’”
Nayyem described the American as “deeply cynical.” “He didn’t think about the history or about the people of Ukraine. He treated Ukraine as if he was playing a computer game, dividing the country into three parts, making these clashes.”
Other critics noted that Manafort specialized in “bastards.” His previous client roster included Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Angola’s Jonas Savimbi, and Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko. “He’s an evil genius,” Alex Kovzhun—former image-maker to Tymoshenko—said of Manafort. “He doesn’t work statesmen. He works dictators and all-around bad guys.”
Manafort sold the unsellable product, Kovzhun told me, adding: “If you have a dead horse and you need to sell it, you call him.”
Manafort’s specialty, according to Kovzhun, is running expensive campaigns and targeting the “big unwashed.” “It’s the same element who voted for Putin, supported Brexit, back Erdogan, and who like Trump. Manafort works the lowest common denominator. I find him repulsive and his message ugly. He leaves destruction in his wake.”
There were parallels between Manafort’s campaign for Yanukovych and his work for Trump in 2016, Kovzhun said, adding that he recognized the same “moves”: “He gets his clients to do corny stuff with bland political slogans and uncreative Soviet-style imagery. With Yanukovych it was: ‘I’ll Hear Everyone!’ With Trump it’s ‘Make America Great Again!’ ”
Some of those who worked closely with Manafort in Kiev make a countercase. They say that Yanukovych “listened to what Paul said” between 2007 and 2010 but then failed to heed his advice. This wasn’t Paul’s fault, they say. Oleg Voloshin—a former aide to Foreign Minister Kostyantyn Gryshchenko—described Manafort as extremely intelligent, with an impressive knowledge of law, history, and public affairs.
In strategy meetings Manafort would typically sit and listen, Voloshin said: “He didn’t speak Russian. He had an interprete
r with him. At the end he would speak for fifteen minutes.” The American’s advice was always nonideological. Manafort would calmly explain that “these people won’t vote for you, don’t bother with them” and then suggest “promote this message, promote that message.”
According to Voloshin, Manafort was an advocate for U.S. interests. So much so that the joke inside the Party of Regions was that he actually worked for the CIA. He promoted American oil companies like Exxon and Chevron. He supported Ukraine’s association with NATO and with the EU. He warned Yanukovych not to lock up Tymoshenko.
“If it weren’t for Paul, Ukraine would have gone under Russia much earlier,” Voloshin told me. “He was the one dragging Yanukovych to the West. In the end the Russians had to make threats against Yanukovych about his personal safety. Yanukovych is very stubborn. But when he breaks, he breaks totally.”
Ultimately, Voloshin claimed, Manafort’s engagement with Ukraine was about the challenge rather than about the money. I wasn’t persuaded by this: Manafort would later admit to earning over $17 million from the Party of Regions in just two years, between 2012 and 2014. The tougher the client the greater the success, Voloshin said. Manafort was a person capable of working miracles:
“In 2004 Yanukovych was dead. He was seen as a Russian puppet. It was Paul who resurrected him.”
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Manafort’s relationship with Trump went back a long way. In 1980 Manafort founded a lobbying company. One of his partners was Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political mentor and campaign adviser.
As The Washington Post reported, Stone played a small but notable role in the original Watergate scandal and would go on to feature prominently in the Trump-Russia story. In 1972 he donated money to Nixon’s Republican rival in the primary race, Pete McCloskey—not in his own name but as the Young Socialist Alliance. Stone then tipped off the press that McCloskey was taking money from alleged communists.
In 1980 Stone met Trump while looking for contributions to Reagan’s election campaign. Trump then became an early client of Manafort’s company, Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly. Trump sought advice from Stone. He hired Manafort, an attorney, to look after gambling and real estate issues. In the intervening years, Manafort did much of his work outside D.C.—in central and east Africa, the Philippines, Russia, and Ukraine. It was this outsider backstory that endeared Manafort to Trump when the lobbyist came looking for a job.
According to the Times, Manafort contacted Trump in late February 2016. At this point Trump was the front-runner in the Republican race, having won New Hampshire and South Carolina. However, he also faced strong resistance from the Republican establishment ahead of a possibly contested convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Victory was by no means guaranteed.
Manafort’s pitch—delivered via a mutual friend, Thomas Barrack, Jr.—was a master class in self-promotion. He pointed to the fact that he had managed presidential campaigns around the world, while stressing that since 2005 he’d kept away from Washington. “I will not bring Washington baggage,” he said. Barrack recommended Manafort to Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, describing him as a “killer” and “the most experienced and lethal of managers.”
Trump was favorably impressed. This feeling grew when the two men met. The New York Times reported that Manafort began by saying that he lived on an upper floor of Trump Tower. (Soon after he started working for Deripaska, in 2006, he bought an apartment there for $3.6 million.) Manafort cited his successful track record with oligarchs and other international figures. Trump told aides that he liked Manafort’s manner and tanned appearance—noting that for a man in his midsixties the lobbyist had a rich head of chestnut hair. There was a final clinching factor: Manafort said he would work for nothing.
A month later, on March 29, Trump unveiled his new convention manager, stating that Manafort was “volunteering” his insight and expertise. The candidate called Manafort a “great asset” and said that he would ensure it was Republican voters and not the “Washington political establishment” who got to pick the nominee. Manafort said he was “honored” to serve “Mr. Trump’s campaign.” He added: “I am confident that he [Trump] will be the next president of the United States.”
Manafort quickly settled into his new post. His colleague, Rick Gates—whom I met in Kiev in 2007—became his deputy. As with Manafort’s remarks to me about Yanukovych, the strategy was to try to persuade skeptics that Trump wasn’t the man he seemed. Unlike the brash reality TV showman who trash-talked his rivals, the real Trump was measured, rational, and statesmanlike.
“The part he’s been playing is now evolving into the part you’ve been expecting,” Manafort told The Washington Post in April.
The problem was that Trump seemed unaware of his impending metamorphosis. Instead, Trump got into an argument during a TV debate over the size of his penis, telling Marco Rubio—his Republican rival—that there wasn’t “a problem.”
By May Manafort had become Trump’s campaign manager and strategist-in-chief—Corey Lewandowski retained the role officially but was effectively sidelined. This harmonious state of affairs lasted until July, when WikiLeaks released the first tranche of Kremlin-hacked DNC emails. With Russian meddling becoming the top story, it was inevitable that Manafort’s Moscow-Kiev links would come under scrutiny. Investigative journalists began sniffing around.
It was Manafort, according to the Post, who persuaded Trump to pick the Indiana governor, Mike Pence, as his running mate. Trump’s inclination had been to go for an outsider, a troublemaker like himself—a Flynn, or Chris Christie, or Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House. Pence, by contrast, was an insider who might attract the support of mainstream Republicans who were uneasy with Trump. Ivanka and Jared reportedly supported Manafort’s choice.
Manafort’s six months as Trump’s campaign lieutenant ended abruptly in mid-August, days after The Times published a front-page story. It read: “Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief.” The ledger had been found in a third-floor room inside the Party of Regions HQ in Kiev. In February 2014 anti-government protesters had ransacked the building.
One of those who examined the ledger was Leshchenko, the journalist, who was now a newly elected member of Ukraine’s post-Yanukovych parliament. It included several hundred pages of entries. There were names and dates, written by hand in blue ink. One of the names was Manafort’s. It appeared twenty-two times. Between 2007 and 2012 Manafort had allegedly received $12.7 million in cash. Apparently these were secret payments from a political slush fund.
It was unclear from whence this shadow money had come. Party of Regions officials told the Times that the room had once contained two safes, stuffed with $100 bills. Seemingly, some had gone on legitimate election business like exit polls. Other tranches of cash—$2.2 million, in one case—were funneled to U.S. lobbyists via a Yanukovych-linked nonprofit organization.
Manafort denied any connection to this cash. The black ledger was a fake, he said. To claim otherwise was unfounded, silly, and nonsensical. Trump repudiated the story, too. He dismissed the Times as a “garbage paper.”
In a statement Manafort said: “I have never received a single ‘off-the-books cash payment’ as falsely ‘reported’ by The New York Times, nor have I ever done work for the governments of Ukraine and Russia. Further, all the political payments directed to me were for my entire political team: campaign staff (local and international), polling and research, election integrity and television advertising.”
“Ukrainians are concerned about the theft of public money. We want the chain of corruption to end. That’s why many are troubled that Manafort’s name has emerged in this investigation,” Leshchenko wrote that August.
Soon after the Times story broke, Manafort quit. His departure came amid rumors that Trump had cooled on him. The Ukraine story had become a “distraction,” the candidate’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., said to Fox News. Manafort’s replacement was Stephen Bannon, chair
man of Breitbart.
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This was the official story of Manafort and Trump. But the Steele dossier suggests that Manafort’s role went well beyond shaping the candidate’s campaign message. According to one of Steele’s early memos, Manafort was at the center of the alleged “extensive conspiracy” between Trump’s campaign team and Moscow.
In late July Steele’s Source E reported that this “conspiracy of cooperation” was “well-developed.” On one side was the Russian leadership. On the other, Trump and his top aides.
Of the conspiracy Steele wrote:
This was managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy advisor Carter PAGE and others as intermediaries. The two sides had a mutual interest in defeating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, whom President PUTIN apparently both hated and feared.
Source E admitted that the “Russian regime” was behind the release of DNC emails published by WikiLeaks. Crucially, he alleged that the operation “had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of TRUMP and senior members of the campaign team.”
In other words, Steele claims that Manafort knew. Manafort has repeatedly denied that he has done anything wrong.
It’s unclear to what extent, if any, Manafort was involved in supplying intelligence to Russia, another of the dossier’s allegations. This was the back channel in which information was fed to the Kremlin on the activities of business oligarchs and their families inside the United States. That Manafort was willing to accept compromising information supplied by Moscow would later become clear. Certainly, Manafort was well placed; he had extensive contacts in this world.
The dossier further claimed that the candidate’s team was “relatively relaxed” about adverse publicity concerning Russian interference:
[This] deflected media and the Democrats’ attention away from TRUMP’s business dealings in China and other emerging markets. Unlike in Russia, these were substantial and involved the payment of large bribes and kickbacks which, were they to become public, would be potentially very damaging to their campaign.
