Lobbying for Viktor Yanukovych and involvements in Ukraine
[Paul] Manafort worked as an adviser on the Ukrainian presidential campaign of [Putin stooge] Viktor Yanukovych (and his Party of Regions during the same time span) from December 2004 until the February 2010 Ukrainian presidential election[47][48][49] even as the U.S. government ... opposed Yanukovych because of his ties to Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin.[21]
Manafort was hired to advise Yanukovych months after massive street demonstrations known as the Orange Revolution overturned Yanukovych’s victory in the 2004 presidential race.[50]
Borys Kolesnikov, Yanukovich’s campaign manager, said the party hired Manafort after identifying organizational and other problems in the 2004 elections, in which it was advised by Russian strategists.[48]
Manafort rebuffed U.S. Ambassador William Taylor when the latter complained he was undermining U.S. interests in Ukraine.[34]
According to a 2008 U.S. Justice Department annual report, Manafort’s company received $63,750 from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions over a six-month period ending on March 31, 2008, for consulting services.[51]
In 2010, under Manafort’s tutelage, the opposition leader put the Orange Revolution on trial, campaigning against its leaders’ management of a weak economy. Returns from the presidential election gave Yanukovych a narrow win over Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a leader of the 2004 demonstrations.
Yanukovych owed his comeback in Ukraine’s presidential election to a drastic makeover of his political persona and, people in his party say, that makeover was engineered in part by his American consultant, Manafort.[48]
In 2007 and 2008 Manafort was involved in investment projects with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska (the acquisition of a Ukrainian telecoms company) and Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash (redevelopment of the site of the former Drake Hotel in New York City).[52]
The Associated Press has reported that Manafort negotiated a $10 million annual contract with Deripaska to promote Russian interests in politics, business, and media coverage in Europe and the United States, starting in 2005.[53]
In 2013 Yanukovych became the main target of the Euromaidan protests.[54]
After the February 2014 Ukrainian revolution (the conclusion of Euromaidan) Yanukovych fled to Russia.[54] On March 17, 2014, the day after the Crimean status referendum, Yanukovych became one of the first eleven persons who were placed under executive sanctions on the Specially Designated Nationals List (SDN) by President Obama, freezing his assets in the US and banning him from entering the United States.[55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][a]
Manafort then returned to Ukraine in September 2014 to become an advisor to Yanukovych’s former head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine Serhiy Lyovochkin.[49]
In this role he was asked to assist in rebranding Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.[49] Instead, he argued to help stabilize Ukraine, Manafort was instrumental in creating a new political party called Opposition Bloc.[49] According to Ukrainian political analyst Mikhail Pogrebinsky, “He thought to gather the largest number of people opposed to the current government, you needed to avoid anything concrete, and just become a symbol of being opposed”.[49]
According to Manafort, he has not worked in Ukraine since the October 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election.[66][67]
However, according to Ukrainian border control entry data, Manafort traveled to Ukraine several times after that election, all the way through late 2015.[67]
According to The New York Times, his local office in Ukraine closed in May 2016.[28]
According to Politico, by then Opposition Bloc had already stopped payments for Manafort and this local office.[67]
In an April 2016 interview with ABC News Manafort stated that the aim of his activities in Ukraine had been to lead the country “closer to Europe”.[68]
Ukrainian government National Anti-Corruption Bureau studying secret documents claimed in August 2016 to have found handwritten records that show $12.7 million in cash payments designated for Manafort, although they had yet to determine if he had received the money.[28]
These undisclosed payments were from the pro-Russian political party Party of Regions, of the former president of Ukraine.[28] This payment record spans from 2007 to 2012.[28] Manafort’s lawyer, Richard A. Hibey, said Manafort didn’t receive “any such cash payments” as described by the anti-corruption officials.[28]
The Associated Press reported on August 17, 2016 that Manafort secretly routed at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012 on Party of Regions’ behalf, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party’s efforts to influence U.S. policy.[11]
Associated Press noted that under federal law, U.S. lobbyists must declare publicly if they represent foreign leaders or their political parties and provide detailed reports about their actions to the Justice Department, which Manafort reportedly did not do.[11] The lobbying firms unsuccessfully lobbied U.S. Congress to reject a resolution condemning the jailing of Yanukovych’s main political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko.[69]
Financial records certified in December 2015 and filed by Manafort in Cyprus showed him to be approximately $17 million in debt to interests connected to interests favorable to Putin and Yanukovych in the months before joining the Trump presidential campaign in March.[70]
These included a $7.8 million debt to Oguster Management Limited, a company connected to Russian oligarch and close Putin associate Oleg Deripaska.[70] This accords with a 2015 court complaint filed by Deripaska claiming that Manafort and his partners owed him $19 million in relation to a failed Ukrainian cable television business.[70]
An additional $9.9 million debt was owed to a Cyprus company that tied through shell companies to Ivan Fursin, a Ukrainian Member of Parliament of the Party of Regions.[70] Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni maintained in response that “Manafort is not indebted to Mr. Deripaska or the Party of Regions, nor was he at the time he began working for the Trump campaign.”[70]
During the 2016 Presidential campaign, Manafort, via Kiev-based operative Konstantin Kilimnik, offered to provide briefings on political developments to Deripaska, though there is no evidence that the briefings took place.[71][72]
According to alleged leaked text messages between his daughters Manafort was also one of the proponents of violent removal of the Euromaidan protesters which resulted in police shooting dozens of people during 2014 Hrushevskoho Street riots.
In one of the messages his daughter writes that his “strategy that was to cause that, to send those people out and get them slaughtered”.[73]
Manafort has rejected questions about whether Russian-Ukrainian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, with whom he consulted regularly, might be in league with Russian intelligence.[74]
New Manafort travel docs reveal closer ties to Russia: report
Fox News, Nov 23, 2017
Paul Manafort had taken 18 trips to Moscow and was in contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s allies for more than a decade before running President Trump’s 2016 election campaign, a new report said Thursday.
Manafort, who was indicted by a federal grand jury last month on 12 counts including conspiracy against the United States, had also taken at least 19 trips to Kiev to work with a pro-Kremlin political faction before joining Trump’s team, McClatchy reported.
The news outlet cited flight records they obtained from Ukrainian authorities as well as intelligence gathered from current and foreign government officials. The new evidence suggests Manafort’s ties to the Kremlin go much deeper than previously thought.
Even after the February 2014 fall of Ukraine’s pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych, Manafort continued to go to Kiev another 19 times in fewer than two years while working for the smaller, pro-Russian Opposition Block party, McClatchy reported.
Some have suggested Manafort had been turned into an asset acting on Moscow’s behalf.
“You can make a case that all along he ...was either working principally for Moscow, or he was trying to play both sides against each other just to maximize his profits,” Daniel Fried, a former assistant secretary of state who communicated with Manafort during Yanukovych’s reign in President George W. Bush’s second term, told McClatchy.
“He’s at best got a conflict of interest and at worst is really doing Putin’s bidding,” Fried, now a fellow with the Atlantic Council, said.
Sounds like a fountain of information on folks close to the Kremlin.