https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-18-2024
"Paul Manafort walking onto the floor of the Republican National Convention
yesterday illustrated that the Republican Party under Trump has become
thoroughly corrupted into an authoritarian party aligned with foreign
dictators.
Manafort first advised and then managed Trump’s 2016 campaign. A long-time
Republican political operative, he came to the job after the Ukrainian people
threw his client Viktor Yanukovych out of Ukraine’s presidency in 2014.
Yanukovych was backed by Russian president Vladimir Putin, who was determined
to prevent Ukraine from turning toward Europe and to install a puppet
government that would extend his power over the neighboring country. Beginning
in 2004, Manafort had worked to install and then keep Yanukovych and his party
in power. His efforts won him a fortune thanks to his new friends, especially
Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. Then in 2014, after months of popular
protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the
Revolution of Dignity.
Yanukovych fled to Russia, and Putin invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it,
prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions
on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs,
prohibiting them from doing business in United States territories. These
sanctions crippled Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.
Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to
Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was
advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort stepped in to
remake it. He did not take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of
his Ukrainian business partners, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik,
immediately after landing the job, asking Kilimnik how “we” could use the
appointment “to get whole,” and he made sure that the Russian oligarch to whom
he owed the most money knew about his close connection with the Trump campaign.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the
2016 presidential election explained at least one answer: Manafort and
Kilimnick “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in
Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern
region of Donbas, and having Yanukovych…elected to head that republic.” The
report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a
‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.”
This policy was the exact opposite of official U.S. policy for a free and
united Ukraine. Russia worked to help Trump win the White House, and
immediately after his election, according to the Republican-dominated Senate
Intelligence Committee, Kilimnick wrote that “[a]ll that is required to start
the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump]
saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision
to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.” The email went on to
say that once then–Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko understood this
“message” from the United States, the process “will go very fast and DT could
have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.”
The investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia slowed the
consummation of this plan, and strong bipartisan support for Ukraine threw a
monkey wrench into the works, prompting Trump’s cronies to try to smear Ukraine
as the country that interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, a story that began to
come out during Trump’s first impeachment hearing. Biden’s election meant an
abrupt end to Russia’s quiet absorption of Ukraine’s eastern region, and in
February 2022, Putin simply invaded the country and then claimed that the
people there had voted to join Russia."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
