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Tymoshenko, Julia

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cambridge anal? manafort dirty tricks

active measures doc jack a

got 7 yrs 200m$ fine, beaten in jail?! campaign w/ guy who got poisoned in a wheelchair?! litvin..., steele?

MOJO

...Pinchuk appears to have long-standing ties to Yanukovych. According to emails released by the State Department, Pinchuk, a major donor to the Clinton Foundation, met in 2011 with an aide to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to convey a message that Yanukovych, whose growing Kremlin ties worried US officials, remained committed to Ukraine’s integration with Europe.

In 2012, Pinchuk allegedly secretly bankrolled a report by Skadden, Arps, a prominent law firm, that defended the legal basis of Yanukoych’s imprisonment of his predecessor, Yulia Tymoshenko. Skadden revealed Pinchuk’s role in January when the firm agreed to pay $4.6 million to settle a Justice Department case that grew out of Mueller’s investigation into Manafort, who helped arrange for the firm’s report. Pinchuk has denied funding the report.

https://medium.com/textifire/a-special-relationship-the-birth-of-cambridge-analytica-97633129cb06

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no obvious prosec names from trump deals/ rudy?

https://yyy.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/23/ukraine-yulia-tymoshenko-travesty-justice-trail

op ed

Yulia Tymoshenko's trial was a travesty of justice

Geoffrey Robertson

Having suffered unfairly under Ukraine's corrupt justice system, the former prime minister must now reform it

Sun 23 Feb 2014 14.30 ESTFirst published on Sun 23 Feb 2014 14.30 EST

Yulia Tymoshenko's miraculous release at the weekend was from a seven-year prison sentence imposed for a non-existent crime. The former Ukrainian prime minister had done nothing wrong: the police, prosecutors and jurists who fabricated her offence were subservient to a state that wanted her eliminated. Whether or not Tymoshenko becomes president of her embattled country, Europe needs to find a way to deal with officials who are complicit in human rights abuses.

Tymoshenko was accused of abuse of office, because she made a deal with Vladimir Putin when he stopped gas supplies to Ukraine in the winter of 2009. This threatened a humanitarian disaster unless Ukraine agreed to pay a higher price for Russian gas. Under pressure from the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the European commission president, José Manuel Barroso, and with her people dying from hypothermia, Tymoshenko gave in to Putin's demands.Some criticised her for not holding out for longer, and she narrowly lost the presidential election a few months later to Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych appointed his crony Viktor Pshonka as prosecutor general, who set his deputy, Renat Kuzmin, to destroy Tymoshenko.This was easy in a former Soviet state that had embraced democracy but had not reformed the justice system, in which all-powerful prosecutors control the judges. Ukraine has "P-plate judges" provisionally appointed for five years with tenure confirmed only if their decisions have not upset the regime. This system has produced a conviction rate in Ukraine courts of 99.8% – an impossible statistic for any democratic country.

To convict at Tymoshenko's trial, the judge brutally refused her bail and did nothing to discourage televised proclamations of her guilt by Yanukovych and his top prosecutors. But even this judge could not invent evidence – because there was none – that she had acted in the gas deal for personal gain, or with any trace of fraud or dishonesty.

Her actions, taken to avoid a humanitarian disaster, cannot rationally be regarded as a crime. But for making what her enemies called a "bad deal", she was jailed.

This travesty of justice was accompanied by similarly rigged prosecutions of her ministers. The Council of Europe turned a blind eye to the outrages. The European court of human rights upheld Tymoshenko's initial complaints, but its slow processes and indulgence of the Ukraine government's delaying tactics prevented it from giving her any meaningful relief.

This failure underlines the need for EU member states to adopt a "Magnitsky Law", which names and shames officials– especially judges, prosecutors and police chiefs – who are complicit in abuses.Sergei Magnitsky blew the whistle on state corruption in Russia and was killed in prison: the US, to Putin's fury, last year adopted a law that denied entry and banking services to 16 of his tormentors, including judges who had denied him bail.

London has become a favourite destination of violent and corrupt officials and oligarchs. But when five former secretaries of state for foreign affairs called last year on the minister for Europe, David Lidington, to support a Magnitsky law, his ignorant response was that it was "unlikely to contribute to achieving justice". Tell that to Tymoshenko.

Her vicious prosecutor, Pshonka, was the first to be indicted by Ukraine's parliament on Sunday,followed by the defence minister accused of ordering the shooting of protesters. There will likely be more charges against Yanukovych and his cronies if the opposition triumphs in the May elections. Can they be fairly tried in Ukraine, before their own judicial tools?

The greatest challenge to any new government will be to establish an independent judiciary. It may be better for it to invite European (including Russian) judges to sit on the trials of Yanukovych's corrupt apparatchiks, and to ask the international criminal court to try those accused of ordering the lethal force used against peaceful protesters – a crime against humanity.

Tymoshenko, whatever her faults in failing to capitalise on the Orange revolution, is a remarkable and courageous figure. After 30 months in prison for a crime that was not a crime, her greatest challenge will be to reform the justice system so this cannot happen again – even to those who put her behind bars.

• Geoffrey Robertson QC advised Yulia Tymoshenko in her European court cases

==

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_cases_against_Yulia_Tymoshenko_since_2010

Since May 2010,[4][5] a series of criminal cases have been opened against Ukrainian politician and former Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko. Tymoshenko is one of Ukraine's most important politicians.[6][7][8][9] After Tymoshenko was released from prison on February 22, 2014, in the concluding days of the Euromaidan revolution, following a revision of the Criminal Code of Ukraine that effectively decriminalized the actions for which she was imprisoned, she was cleared of all charges.[10][11] She was officially rehabilitated on February 28, 2014.[12][13][11][14] Just after Euromaidan revolution, the Ukrainian Supreme Court closed the case and found that "no crime was committed".[15]

By November 2011 Tymoshenko was under criminal investigation for ten criminal acts;[16] Ukrainian prosecutors have claimed she has committed more criminal acts.[17][18] The cases are:

In addition Tymoshenko's lawyer Serhiy Vlasenko stood accused of car theft, robbery and failing to obey a court ruling stemming from his divorce.[26]

On 11 October 2011, a Ukrainian court sentenced Tymoshenko to seven years in prison after she was found guilty of abusing her office when brokering the 2009 gas deal with Russia.[27]

From 5 August 2011 till her release Tymoshenko had been in custody. At first she was held in Kiev, and [28][29] since December 30, 2011[30] Tymoshenko has been imprisoned in Kharkiv. Since May 2012 she was hospitalized and received treatment for a spinal disc herniation[31][32] Tymoshenko was on three hunger strikes during her imprisonment.[33][34][35][36][37][38]

Representatives of several countries and human rights organizations have rated the trials against Tymoshenko as "selective justice" and "political persecution".[27][28][39][40][41][42][43][44] The European Union has shelved the European Union Association Agreement and Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with Ukraine and EU leaders have suggested that these agreements will not be ratified unless Ukraine addresses concerns over a "stark deterioration of democracy and the rule of law", including the imprisonment of Tymoshenko and Yuriy Lutsenko in 2011 and 2012.[38][45][46]

Tymoshenko and her supporters saw the trials (and other similar trials) as political payback by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions.[19][28][47][48] Both have denied this.[49][50][51] According to President Yanukovych the cases were non-partisan measures to combat corruption in Ukraine.[52][53][54] He also hinted late February 2012 he could pardon Tymoshenko if she would apply for it; but this option was brushed aside by Tymoshenko.[55][56]

"Сrackdown of opposition" in Ukraine

...

The essence of "the gas case" in the report of PACE

At the June session of PACE (2013) approved a report that focuses on the gas case of Timoshenko:

And later in this report said that Tymoshenko could be considered a political prisoner :

Hearings of witnesses (from 26.07.2011)

Witnesses in the "gas case" were dozens of ex-ministers and known politicians.

As for the 26th of July 2011, it was planned to interrogate 38 witnesses for "the part of prosecution". The judge Kireyev gave admission to witness, for the Tymoshenko part, to just two people (out of 33 claimed) - Alexander Turchinov and Michail Lyvinsky. However even "witnesses for the prosecution part" were testifying, mainly, in favour of Tymoshenko. As a result, Tymoshenko wrote in her Twitter: "Kireyev was banned to call “our” witnesses, he got rebuked even for “theirs” (i.e. witnesses from prosecution)". On July, the 26th, 2011, i.e. just as soon as the process of witnessing started, direct teletransmitting from the trial room stopped.

Witnessing by Oleg Dubina, former head of Naftogas, 29.07.2011

The important moment in witnessing by Oleg Dubina (a former Head of Naftogaz) was his proving that "The Gas Agreement of 19.01.2009 was made on provisions that Ukraine could at any moment terminate it without whatever "penalty sanctions from the part of Russia".

Oleg Dubina confirmed that the agreement with Russia was set the standard formula - the price of gas is calculated according to the price of oil.

...

Foreign reactions

 European Union – In August 2011 European Union (EU) officials called the prosecution of Tymoshenko "selective prosecution of political opponents".[28] After the verdict in the 2009 natural gas deal European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton stated the verdict showed justice in Ukraine was being applied selectively in politically motivated prosecutions and that the Ukrainian Government handling of the case risked deep implications for its hopes of EU integration.[27][188] Other reactions from European Union politicians had a similar tone.[189][190][191][192][193] Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych met with the EU-leadership the week after the verdict was postponed, but Ukraine and the EU assured this would not affect further cooperation.[194][195][196][197] Nevertheless, the EU has shelved the European Union Association Agreement and Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with Ukraine over this issue and the imprisonment of Yuriy Lutsenko.[38][45] At the request of opposition politicians in Ukraine, EU government officials boycotted the UEFA Euro 2012 championship in Ukraine.[198][199][200]

The Council of Europe expressed "serious concern about the trial" on 12 October 2011.[201] On 26 January 2012 the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution in which it called on President Yanukovych "to consider all possible means to release former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and other members of the former government and also to enable them to participate in the upcoming parliamentary elections".[143]

On 29 February 2012 the European People's Party demanded "immediate release of Yulia Tymoshenko, Yuriy Lutsenko and other political prisoners; it also insisted the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the European Union should not be signed and ratified until these demands where met.[41]

 Russia – According to Russia, the 2009 natural gas agreements "were signed on the basis of the necessary instructions from the Russian and Ukrainian Presidents"; it also urged Ukraine to ensure an impartial trial.[202] The Russian Foreign Ministry stated the ruling had an "obvious anti-Russian subtext"[27] and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin commented about the ruling "I can't quite understand why she got those seven years".[203]

 United States – In August 2011 United States officials (also) called the prosecution of Tymoshenko "selective prosecution of political opponents".[28] An 11 October 2011 statement by the White House stated the charges and conduct of the trial has raised serious concerns about Ukraine's commitment to democracy and the rule of law and urged Ukraine to release Tymoshenko, as well as other political leaders and former government officials.[204] On 22 January 2012U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clintonreaffirmed that the United States supported Tymoshenko's immediate release.[205] On 22 September 2012 the U.S. Senate called upon Ukraine to release Tymoshenko and for the U.S. Department of State to institute a visa ban against those responsible for her imprisonment and mistreatment.[206]

 United Nations – On 12 October 2011 United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed concerns over the conviction.[207]

 France – France's Ambassador-at-large for Human Rights, François Zimeray, attempted twice to visit Tymoshenko in jail in January and April 2012.[208]

The co-president of The Greens–European Free Alliance group in the European parliament Rebecca Harms (Germany) announced that she will insist on the order of the European Union on conducting an inspection of documents relating the "gas affair" against Tymoshenko.[209] She believes that the allegations are absurd and baseless.[209] She reported that she recently familiarized herself with the results of investigation of the former Prosecutor General of Denmark, which indicate that Tymoshenko was not supposed to be convicted in this case.[209] In her opinion the Ukrainian authorities and the President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, have realized already that they are going in the wrong direction and that is why other criminal cases were opened against Tymoshenko.[209]

Amnesty International called for Tymoshenko's immediate release (on 12 October 2011).[42]

...

2014 release from prison

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yulia_Tymoshenko_addressing_Euromaidan_with_a_speech._Kyiv,_Ukraine._Events_of_February_22,_2014.-1.jpg)

Tymoshenko addressingEuromaidan with a speech, Kiev, February 22, 2014

Following the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution, on 21 February 2014, Parliament voted for her release in a 310–54 veto-proof vote.[13] To do so, the members of parliament decriminalized the Article on which Tymoshenko was charged and brought it into compliance with Article 19 of the UN Convention against corruption. That could enable immediate release of Tymoshenko through the corresponding court ruling. Viktor Yanukovych didn't sign the law, fled the country after massive violent clashes in Kiev, when the police shot more than 100 demonstrators in the center of Kiev.[11][13][216] On February 22, 2014 the Verkhovna Rada with 322 votes adopted a decree based on the decision of the European Court of Human Rights and corresponding decision of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe.[217]

On the same day Tymoshenko was released from the Kharkiv-based Central Clinical Hospital No. 5, where she had been receiving treatment after being diagnosed with a spinal disc herniation since May 2012 under police surveillance.[218][219][220] Her release was praised by western leaders.[221]

Legal rehabilitation

On February 28, 2014 the parliament rehabilitated Yulia Tymoshenko and restored her rights. That enabled her to run for office, however she has ruled out becoming Prime Minister again.[222]

Kyivsky District Court of Kharkiv closed the criminal case on financial abuse of the United Energy Systems of Ukraine on 28 February 2014.[154] And on April 14 the Supreme Court of Ukraine closed the “gas case” against Tymoshenko for “absence of a criminal act”.[223][224]

On 25 April 2014 the General Prosecutor of Ukraine launched a pre-trial investigation against a number of officials from its own office and the Pechersky district court and Kiev's court of appeals (the judges who had sentenced Tymoshenko) because of "deliberate, systematic and flagrant violation of accused Yulia Tymoshenko’s rights to defense, which are granted by Ukraine’s current laws".[223]

On 24 June 2014 the Supreme Court of Ukraine rehabilitated Tymoshenko.[225]

Aftermath

Rodion Kireyev, the judge who had sentenced Tymoshenko to seven years in jail (on 11 October 2011) was charged for "giving a deliberately unlawful verdict" on 20 June 2014.[226] Kireyev disappeared from Kiev on 2 July 2014 and was placed on the wanted list on 7 July 2014.[226] He was dismissed from his office by President Petro Poroshenko on 18 January 2016.[227]

Falsification proofs. Manafort case

According to the Guardian's investigation,[228] Tymoshenko's case was fully fabricated by Viktor Yanukovych who hired Paul Manafort to do that. In 2011 Manafort approved a strategy to discredit Tymoshenko abroad. Alan Friedman, a former Wall Street Journal and Financial Times reporter, based in Italy, masterminded this project. Also involved were Rick Gates, Manafort's then deputy, and Konstantin Kilimnik, another senior Manafort associate who the FBI believes has links to Russian military intelligence.

In 2012, the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom was hired to produce a report for the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice defending the prosecution of Tymoshenko as part of Manafort's efforts to improve Ukraine's international image.[229] The report was worked on by Alex van der Zwaan[230] and Gregory Craig.[229] van der Zwaan, a Dutch attorney at Skadden's London office and son-in-law of Russian oligarch German Khan, pleaded guilty in February 2018 to lying to the FBIabout the nature of his work on the report and his contacts with Kilimnik, and to destroying evidence sought by the Mueller investigation.[230] He was sentenced to 30 days in federal prison and ordered to pay a $20,000 fine.[231] In January 2019, Skadden agreed to forfeit to the U.S. government the $4.6 million it had received from the Ministry and to retroactively register as a foreign agent.[232] Craig, a partner at Skadden and former White House Counsel in the Obama administration, was indicted in April 2019 for his role in lying to the U.S. government about the extent of the firm's work for the Ministry and altering documents as part of the attempted coverup.[229]

==

manafort ukraine hit on Julia PM

https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/05/ex-trump-aide-paul-manafort-approved-black-ops-to-help-ukraine-president

no lnx docs

The Guardian -

Former Trump aide approved 'black ops' to help Ukraine president

Exclusive: Paul Manafort authorised secret media operation that sought to discredit key opponent of then Ukrainian president

by Luke Harding

Thu 5 Apr 2018 11.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 5 Apr 2018 20.00 EDT

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort authorised a secret media operation on behalf of Ukraine’s former president featuring “black ops”, “placed” articles in the Wall Street Journal and US websites and anonymous briefings against Hillary Clinton.

The project was designed to boost the reputation of Ukraine’s then leader, Viktor Yanukovych. It was part of a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort carried out by Manafort on behalf of Yanukovych’s embattled government, emails and documents reveal.

The strategies included:

• Proposing torewrite Wikipediaentries to smear a key opponent of the then Ukrainian president.

• Setting up a fake thinktank in Vienna to disseminate viewpoints supporting Yanukovych.

• A social media blitz “aimed at targeted audiences in Europe and the US”.

• Briefing journalists from the rightwing website Breitbart to attack Clinton when she was US secretary of state.

Manafort’s Ukraine strategy anticipated later efforts by the Kremlin and its troll factory to use Twitter and Facebook to discredit Clinton and to help Trump win the 2016 US election. The material seen by the Guardian dates from 2011 to 2013.

Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, has indicted Manafort on multiple counts. Manafort is accused of “laundering profits” from his lobbying work in Ukraine, carried out over a period of a decade for Yanukovych and his political party.

Mueller also accuses Manafort of hiring retired European politicians to lobby on behalf of Yanukovych, and paying them more than €2m (£1.74m, $2.45m) via offshore accounts.

The documents reveal another surreptitious operation to influence international opinion. In 2010 Yanukovych defeated his rival Yulia Tymoshenko in presidential elections. The following summer Ukrainian prosecutors arrested Tymoshenko and put her on trial. This provoked severe criticism from the Obama administration and the EU, which accused Yanukovych of locking up Tymoshenko for political reasons.

In 2011 Manafort approved a clandestine strategy to discredit Tymoshenko abroad. Alan Friedman, a former Wall Street Journal and Financial Times reporter, based in Italy, masterminded this project. Friedman has previously been accused of concealing his work as a paid lobbyist.

Also involved were Rick Gates, Manafort’s then deputy, and Konstantin Kilimnik, another senior Manafort associate who the FBI believes has links to Russian military intelligence.

In July 2011 Friedman sent Manafort a confidential six-page document titled Ukraine - A Digital Roadmap. It laid out a plan to “deconstruct” Tymoshenko via videos, articles and social media. Yanukovych deferred to Manafort, who gave the project the go-ahead, sources in Ukraine’s former government say.

Friedman’s proposed operation was ambitious. It included producinganonymous videos attacking Tymoshenkoand comparing the opposition leader to a drunk Boris Yeltsin. “The social media space offers great opportunities for guilt by association,” Friedman wrote in the document.

He continued: “We know that video exists of Tymoshenko uttering some of her outrageous claims in court … The video can be floated into the social space to reinforce the impression that she is at best reckless and unstatesmanlike and at worst malicious, defamatory and antisemitic.”

[An anonymous video attacking Yulia Tymoshenko.

Twitters users, including “those ‘known’ to us”, could retweet hostile content. The “roadmap” included a website, blogposts and “blast emails”, sent out to a “targeted audience in Europe and the US”. One section was called “Black Ops”. It said: “This could include Wikipedia page modification to highlight [Tymoshenko] corruption and trial and modify the tone of the language being used.”

Friedman worked with Eckart Sager, a one-time CNN producer. Emails show they liaised closely with “Paul”, who in turn briefed Yanukovych’s chief of staff, Serhiy Lyovochkin. Lyovochkin declined to comment. He appears in correspondence as “SL”.

“He was under the radar,” one source said of Friedman. “Alan kept a low profile. Without Paul’s authorisation Alan would never have got a contract with the [Yanukovych] government.”

Friedman’s company FBC Media was retained on a “rolling contract”. It was paid around €150,000 every three months, sources in Kiev suggest. The money was deposited in an offshore account in Seychelles, they allege. Often the payments were late, prompting Friedman to complain, they add.

Quick guide

Paul Manafort Ukraine connections: who's who?

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Contacted by the Guardian, Friedman said these earnings were “declared”. He confirmed his company worked for Ukraine from late summer 2011 on what he called “a public relations and country profiling project”. He said: “It was not a secret or covert plan. We had PR people proposing interviews and features to newspapers very openly.”

He said its goal was to promote the Ukraine government’s then policy of moving closer to a partnership agreement with the EU.“Our aim was to keep a steady communication going in favour of dialogue between Brussels and Kiev. That was our message.

“We never supported a pro-Moscow stance and had already ended our relationship when the Ukrainian president abandoned closer ties with Europe.”

Asked whether he had registered with the US Department of Justice, Friedman said he had never worked as a lobbyist for Ukraine. He added: “I never registered as a foreign agent because I never was one.

“I was a communications guy, doing PR media strategy work in Europe for a client, like dozens of London PR companies that work for a variety of governments.”

The documents show Friedman reported directly to Kiev. In spring 2012 he told the foreign minister, Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, he had “generated dozens of positive op-eds/interviews/articles for print and TV” and “disseminated positive news stories” to nearly 2,000 publications.

Key to this strategy was a fake thinktank, the Center for the Study of Former Soviet Socialist Republics (CXSSR), set up with Manafort’s backing. Friedman used it to publish dozens of positive stories about Yanukovych, many of them authored by a “Matthew Lina”.

Lina’s comment pieces criticising Tymoshenko and Obama’s state department ran on the conservative US website RedState.Friedman told Manafort his editorial team ghostwrote an article by Yanukovych published by the Wall Street Journal.

He claimed credit for a Tymoshenko profile written by the Journal’s Matthew Kaminski. Kaminski said Friedman was never a source, “or even someone that as far as I can remember I had any contact whatsoever with”.

In April 2012 Friedman sent another “highly confidential” two-page document to Manafort. It set out plans to launch a “special website” entitled The Tymoshenko Files. The site would purport to belong to Inna Bohoslovska, a Ukrainian deputy and Tymoshenko critic.

In fact, Friedman would “discreetly prepare, implement and maintain” the site, the document said. It would include “ghost-penned” blogs and “a quasi-novella serialisation”. Asked about the website, Friedman said he had never written “any content”.

Emails seen by the Guardian show a regular pattern of interaction between Manafort, Friedman, Gates, Kilimnik and Ukrainian officials. Gates, who went on to work with Manafort on the 2016 Trump campaign, wrote several messages. In February Gates , and agreed to cooperate with Mueller.

At the time Kilimnik was the Russian manager of Manafort’s Kiev office. Kilminik is understood to be “Person A” in Mueller’s latest indictment, filed last week. It says theFBI believes Kilimnik has ties to Moscow’s GRU spy agency, and adds that Gates was aware of this. Kilimnik denies a connection. Friedman confirmed he had met Manafort and Gates but said he had done so “because the client asked me to”.

Manafort’s media operation included attacks on Clinton. In October 2012 Gates emailed Manafort and Friedman, flagging a piece written by the journalist Ben Shapiro. TheBreitbart article criticised Clinton for her public support of Tymoshenko, who had recently made an electoral pact with the far-right Svoboda party.

The article cited a Jewish “leader” who accused Clinton anonymously of creating a“neo-Nazi Frankenstein”. Gates wrote: “Gentlemen – Here is the first part of a series of articles that will be coming as we continue to build this effort. Alan, you get full credit for the Frankenstein comment.”

The alleged use of offshore accounts is likely to interest the FBI. Manafort is accused of concealing more than $75m earned from his work in Ukraine.

Yanukovych’s attempts to woo western leaders ended in October 2013 when he accepted a bailout from Moscow. He fled to Russia after anti-government protests. In 2015 Friedman wrote an authorised biography of Silvio Berlusconi. Manafort continued to work for Yanukovych’s party up until he joined Trump’s campaign. Manafort denies wrongdoing and has said he will fight Mueller’s charges.

==

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ben-shapiro-trump-used-irregular-channels-because-he-was-rightfully-paranoid/

ben Shapiro, a right-wing political commentator and the editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, attempted to defend President Donald Trump in light of testimony from Bill Taylor, the United States’ top diplomat in Ukraine. Taylor testified that the Trump administration had circumvented normal diplomatic channels and that Trump ordered that foreign aid to the country be dependent on Ukraine’s president launching an investigation into one of Trump’s political enemies.

:{During }Wednesday’s episode:{ of his podcast, Shapiro defended Trump’s behavior surrounding Ukraine. }::{In part of that defense, Shapiro argued that government is a “self-fulfilling prophecy” in which leaders rule according to their perception of what the government is like. Because Trump had good reason to believe the government was corrupt since he was being targeted by Democrats, Shapiro argued, he chose to use “improper channels” to do his political bidding.}:

“He also feels as if he has been targeted, and correctly so. He feels that he is being targeted by people inside his own administration, to the cheers of the media. And that’s true, he is being targeted by people in his own administration to the cheers of the media,” Shapiro said.

To back up his claims that Trump was right to feel targeted, Shapiro cited recent news reports that the author of an anonymous New York Times op-ed last year, identified only as a senior official in the Trump administration, will be publishing a book called “A Warning.” He argued that the book was the type of thing that would rightly motivate Trump to set up improper communications channels.

“That’s not good for the presidency. It’s not good for the country. And of course, it’s going to underscore how suspicious Trump is of people inside his administration, and it’s going to encourage Trump to set up exactly the sort of irregular channels that Bill Taylor was talking about,” Shapiro said. “Why would you set up an irregular channel? The only reason to set up an irregular channel is because you don’t trust the regular channel. One of the reasons you might not trust the regular channel is it feels like the regular channel is being used as a method of hurting you.”

Shapiro added, “It’s hard to argue with Trump about why Trump should feel differently.”

The anonymously authored book set to come out later this year is, according to Shapiro, “underscoring the president’s distrust in government, which leads him to set up irregular channels, which leads them to make mistakes, which leads him into traps, which leads the Democrats to seem to believe that they have material to impeach.”

Later in the same episode of his podcast, Shapiro argued that Trump’s comparison of the impeachment process to “lynching” was not actually problematic.

==

war is boring 2017

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/trump-aides-and-russian-mobsters-pulled-strings-in-putins-massive-ukraine-gas-scheme-2ec3e6cef803

Trump Aides and Russian Mobsters Pulled Strings in Putin’s Massive Ukraine Gas Scheme

Follow the money

by BRIAN E. FRYDENBORG

Before Donald Trump was president or a candidate, and when he was hurting for investors as Wall Street had all but shut down loaning operations to him, his businesses established extensive ties to Russian oligarchs, including some allegedly affiliated with organized crime.

At the same time, associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Russian government and future associates of Trump — most notably Paul Manafort, his future campaign chairman — were allegedly involved in a massive Eurasian natural gas and money laundering scheme worth billions of dollars, and part of Putin’s grand plan to control Ukraine.

At best, Trump may have had no knowledge of this scheme and these ties, but even this scenario highlights serious deficiencies in Trump’s judgment in terms of who he did business and politics with — and it is of urgent interest to the American people as Trump manages the nation as president.

While there is no direct proof of Trump’s knowing involvement or collusion in any single aspect of these dealings, the sheer number of them over a period of years and his close association with a number of key players, combined with his public statements as a presidential candidate, create a picture that stinks to high heaven and makes it more likely — not less — that something nefarious is going on between Team Trump and Team Putin.

We may never know exactly what happened or exactly who is responsible or exactlywhat Trump was and wasn’t aware of, but, despite ludicrous claims to the contrary, this has nothing to do with the media or with irresponsible speculation.

With so many questionable people, actions and circumstances, the only sane and responsible course forward is to continue to vigorously demand more answers to the questions Trump and his associates have raised because of their actions, especially since their accounts of these events and people keep shifting as more and more evidence comes to light.

After all, contrary to American civil criminal law, in the court of public opinion, the burden on a sitting president with so many questionable connections is for him to shed light on his dealings and to clear any hint of suspicion if he wants to earn the benefit of the doubt.

Time to go over what we do know, and what that information — when put together and given proper context — makes clear and what it suggests.

To begin to understand the big picture, let’s go back to 2004.

In 2004, Carter Page — later a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser — moved to Moscow to set up a branch for the New York investment firm Merrill Lynch. His bio on the website ofGlobal Energy Capital LLC, which Page founded and where he is currently a managing partner, states that “[h]e spent 3 years in Moscow where he was responsible for the opening of the Merrill office and was an advisor on key transactions for Gazprom, RAO UES and others.”

As Page was setting up shop in Moscow, future Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort began running Victor Yanukovych’s political life.

Yanukovych is a notorious, scandal-ridden Ukrainian politician who first attracted global attention during the 2004 Ukrainian elections.Leonid Kuchma, the outgoing president during these elections, had appointed Yanukovych as his prime minister in 2002 and had backed him as a pro-Russian — and pro-Putin — candidate to succeed him in 2004.

Kuchna’s support extended to trying to rig the election for Yanukovych, which sparked the Orange Revolution that, in turn, led to victory for the more pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, who had almost been killed by a mysterious poisoning incident.

Yanukovych had already developed a reputation for extreme corruptionby this time, but that did not stop Manafort from running Yanukovych’s 2004 campaign. Despite the loss, Manafort stuck around and was hired to take charge of both rehabilitating the disgraced Yanukovych and strategizing for his political party, the Party of Regions.

This type of work was hardly out of the ordinary for Manafort, and his client list over the years has included dictators such as Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Somalia’s Siad Barre, Sani Abacha of Nigeria and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi. Other clients included Jonas Savimbi of the Angolan guerrilla group UNITA, and the Kashmiri American Council, a front group for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence.

Interestingly enough, the Associated Press recently published a bombshell of a story in which it was revealed that Manafort proposed in 2005 — through a formal memo, no less — a massive lobbying effort designed to discreetly promote Putin, the Russian government and their agenda while undermining their critics, with efforts concentrated in the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics.

Manafort sent the proposal to Oleg Deripaska, a fabulously wealthy Russian oligarch with ties to Russian organized crime who has a very close, generally good —if not always great — relationship with Putin and who was then working with Manafort to promote Russian interests in Montenegro.

Under the terms Manafort proposed, a contract was agreed upon in 2006 and lasted until at least 2009, one in which Manafort was paid $10 million a year and used a Delaware shell company — LOAV Ltd.— to conduct official business and transactions. AP obtained numerous documents, memos, and wire transfer records to corroborate its story.

In 2014, Deripaska and Manafort had a dramatic falling out, resulting in a $19 million Cayman Islands court battle related to theiralleged efforts to launder money for Yanukovych and his allies, but not before the aforementioned working relationship was well established.

The AP story broke just hours before CNN would report that FBI officials have information describing how “associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”

The AP soon after reported that U.S. Treasury officials are investigating Manafort’s offshore financial dealings. If these interactions seem dramatic, Manafort’s machinations involving Ukraine are even more so

...

 no lnx

Dirty gas money

Court documents allege that Manafort first became acquainted with Yanukovych in 2003, a time when he also began cozying up to Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs allied with Yanukovych and Putin.

Throughout the rest of the decade, Manafort entered into a variety of shady business deals with some of these oligarchs and others, deals that generally seemed to have some ulterior motive in advancing Putin’s agenda in the background.

In particular, around the same time he began interacting with Yanukovych, Manafort befriended Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch, natural gas businessman and Putin ally, according to court documents.

Firtash, featured in the Panama Papers revelations, had been themain middleman bringing in both Russian and Central Asian natural gas to Ukraine since 2002 and was linked to Semion Mogilevich, the essential head, or “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia. Mogilevich is also a friend of Putin’s and was one of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted fugitives from 2009–2015.

In mid-2004, Putin and outgoing Ukrainian president Kuchma created a Swiss-registered company called RosUkrEnergo [RUE] to replace the company represented by Firtash that handled Ukraine’s Russian-related natural gas imports.

The imports ostensibly came from Turkmenistan, but also involved shady deals that seemed mostly orchestrated and subsidized by Gazprom dominated by Putin allies. Additionally, the gas traveled through pipes wholly owned by Gazprom that went mostly through Russian territory.

But not much changed with RUE in that Firtash ended up owning 45 percent of the new company, a stake that is partially a front for Mogilevich to control the company. Gazprom owned 50 percent of RUE, making clear the incestuous nature of the entire arrangement.

But there was a bigger picture, a greater purpose, to all these machinations than just Gazprom dominance of the region’s gas industry, and the specifics of the deal make the following scheme quite easy to understand.

Gazprom would basically sell billions of dollars of gas to Firtash through RUE at a steal of a price. Next, Firtash would sell billions of dollars of gas at hiked-up prices to Ukraine, with the profits directed to funding pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. Finally, Putin’s allies in the financial industry would open up lines of credit for Firtash in the billions of dollars so he could buy key Ukrainian assets and multiply his influence further.

It’s no coincidence that this scam came into being not long after Yanukovych’s defeat at the hands of a more pro-Western candidate. Unsurprisingly, some of the disputes betweenUkraine and Russia involved fighting over gas deals. This all culminated in January 2006 when Russia shut its gas flow into Ukraine and therefore into much of Europe as well, which received the vast majority of its gas from pipes passing through Ukrainian territory.

After the shutoff, Firtash and his allies rearranged their business.

First, RUE became the exclusive and direct supplier of all natural gas coming from Central Asia and Russia, and, along with Gazprom and Gazexport?—?a subsidiary?—?it would sell to Ukrainian industrial customers via a joint venture with Naftogaz Ukrainy, Ukraine’s state-owned energy company.

The new joint venture was called UkrGazEnergo, and would sell gas to Naftogaz to distribute among Ukrainian households and municipalities.

But there was another key factor in the deal: RAO UES?—?Russia’s state-owned power company?—?would buy and import Ukrainian-generated electricity into European Russia, with the Ukrainian government providing that energy from the gas that RUE was being paid by Ukraine to import from Turkmenistan. And again, RUE would act as the intermediary.

One of the reasons for this confusing complexity is that at each stage along the way there was the possibility of marking up or down the pricewhen it suited the purposes of those who set up the system in the first place.

Naturally, this overall deal was so unpopular with Ukrainians?—?who felt cheated at getting sold gas at hiked-up prices by entities with little supervision and with opportunities for massive corruption?—?that Ukraine’s parliament voted against the deal,albeit it ended up being a nonbinding vote and the agreement went ahead anyway.

This arrangement would last from 2006 through early 2009, when another dispute derailed it.

Carter Page in February 2017. PBS NewsHour screen capture

Page-Manafort connection

Which brings us back to Carter Page. It is important here to note that Page’s tenure at Merrill Lynch was from 2004–2007, and the only two companies his aforementioned current bio mentions in relation to this tenure are Gazprom and RAO EUS, claiming that he was an adviser on “key transactions” of theirs.

It is hard to imagine transactions more “key” than those involving natural gas being transported from Central Asia and Russia to Ukraine and Europe, the creation of RUE, and RAO’s subsequent deal with Ukraine.

If Page is telling the truth about his role, then it is virtually inconceivable?—?considering that he advised both Gazprom and RAO and the way they would be tied together starting in 2006?—?that he would not be aware of what was going on.

And after all, as someone with a Ph.D. and an MBA and a graduate the U.S. Naval Academy, Page would certainly have been aware of the geopolitics of these deals, and that they went against American interests at a time when Ukraine was trying to escape the stranglehold of the Kremlin.

However, Julia Ioffe’s profile of Page raises important questions about whether Page is exaggerating his role, and her story is filled with anecdotes from people knowledgeable about these types of deals who had never heard of Page?—?and people who did know of him suggested he was a nobody.

Read ‘Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism’]

Maybe Page deliberately kept a low profile. Without a more formal investigation, it is impossible to know what the full picture is. Even if Page exaggerated his role, if he was still talking to people at both Gazprom and RAO at this time?—?even if his discussions interactions may have been more informal than formal?—?it is certainly a realistic possibility that he still knew a lot and performed an advisory role, one that was perhaps unknown by his colleagues at Merrill.

Finally, if he knew what was going on and was involved, there is certainly a possibility of interest being piqued if he came to know that Manafort?—?another American?—?was involved on the other side of these deals, with the same being the case with Manafort. Interest on either side could have led to either one making contact with the other, which may have led to some sort of coordination.

This is admittedly speculative, but a real possibility nonetheless, and is certainly not one bit less speculative than an enormous portion of the mainstream media discussion and reporting on both the e-mail/server situation with Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

The question of a possible Manafort and Page link, and the fact that they were involved on one level or another in the massive Eurasian gas scheme, deserve more official scrutiny and need to be answered through a formal investigation, because it is clear that those in question have no intention of sharing the truth.

Yulia Tymoshenko in June 2008. European People’s Party photo]

Manafort and Putin’s allies prep Yanukovych’s comeback

As for the dispute that derailed the 2006 gas deal, the foundations were laid with the unpopular deal itself.

In 2007, Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister and gas tycoon in her own right and a co-leader of the Orange Revolution, rose to become prime minister again. It was clear that she was on a mission to drive out Russian domination of the whole gas system and push against Russian influence in Ukraine overall.

This meant taking on Firtash, Mogilevich and the Russian mafia, and RUE.

Tymoshenko’s first step was to get rid of UkrGazEnergo, run by RUE and Naftogaz, but then Tymoshenko set her sights on taking RUE and Firtash?—?and thus Mogilevich and the Russian mobsters?—?out of the loop, which lead to a series of hostile exchanges between Russia and Ukraine.

In October 2008, Tymoshenko finally worked out a deal with Putin to remove RUE from Ukrainian gas deals, but they were subsequently unable to agree on pricing, leading to Russia to again shut off gas going into Ukraine, and by extension, most of Europe, for almost three weeks in January.

But on Jan. 19, 2009, a long-term, 10-year agreement was reached, and only a few days later normal flows were restored, much to the relief of not only Ukraine, but also Europe, as it was the middle of winter. Additionally, the parties agreed to take future disputes to arbitration in an international commercial dispute court in Stockholm, Sweden.

If it seemed the players of Team Putin gave up too easily on having RUE taken out of the game, they had other plans in motion to counter Tymoshenko’s effort to limit Russian influence in Ukrainian politics.

Manafort linked to possible money laundering during crackdown

Even before Putin agreed to let Tymoshenko shut down RUE, his agents?—?including Firtash, Mogilevich and Yanukovych (the latter with Manafort acting as his right-hand man)?—?were already putting in place plans to go around and escape her efforts.

Some of these involved setting up a U.S. investment fund initially capitalized with $100 million. Firtash paid Manafort and Rick Gates?—?who had joined Manafort’s efforts as part of his consulting firm in 2006?—?$1.5 million to handle the money. The main purpose of the fund was to allegedly act as a conduit to launder money from the Firtash gas dealings that were being scrutinized by the Tymoshenko government.

Among the various deals Firtash and Manafort went into was one in 2008 for $895 million for the site of the famous Drake Hotel on Park Avenue in New York, with Firtash wiring $25 million toward the project to make it look legitimate, and a further $25 million was later launderedthrough the project, according to a U.S. court indictment.

But rather than move forward and apply the money to the project, the Drake property was never actually purchased.

The deal, like their other deals, never closed and eventually fell through after many third parties had spent a lot of time and money trying to close it out and after many employees were not paid, but not before Manafort, Firtash, Mogilevich, Yanukovych and their allies were able to keep substantial funds away from the prying eyes of Tymoshenko and Ukrainian authorities during crucial periods of her time as prime minister.

Unfortunately for Firtash, Mogilevich and their backers,natural gas is not something that can be laundered. In early 2009, Tymoshenko orchestrated a seizure by Ukraine’s own state-run Naftogaz —allowed under the agreement she made with Putin?—?of 11 billion cubic meters of gas from RUE’s gas stockpiles, a quantity worth billions of dollars at the time.

Tymoshenko had effectively cut out the middlemen who had been hiking up prices and using those profits to poison and pollute Ukrainian politics.

Playing a longer-term game, Firtash initiated a lengthy arbitration process through Stockholm.

Other planted crops were already bearing fruit. Unfortunately for Tymoshenko, though she had risen to be prime minister late in 2007, in that election and even in the prior 2006 parliamentary elections,Manafort had built Yanukovych’s Party of Regions into a political forcethat campaigned with modern, highly effective techniques and tactics.

In both elections, the Party of Regions ended up having the most seats in parliament of any single party by significant margins, but ended up being in the opposition because of alliances made between Tymoshenko’s bloc and other parties.

Of course, Manafort and the Party of Regions were operating with a gigantic advantage?—?the enormous amount of money flowing from the massive Eurasian gas scam.

All this meant that Yanukovych’s opposition was certainly within striking distance of taking over the government, and that even by 2006 Manafort and the gas scheme had already achieved great success in rehabilitating Yanukovych and his party.

The distance would close in 2010.

Russia’s then-president Dmitry Medvedev, left, and Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2011. Kremlin photo]

The downfall of Tymoshenko

Early in 2010, Yanukovych won the presidential race, defeating Tymoshenko in a runoff election, the culmination of over five years of work with Manafort and the whole gas scheme crew. Not long after, Tymoshenko lost her position as prime minister in a vote of no-confidence.

Meanwhile, in the wake of his victory, Yanukovych worked to undo many of the Orange Revolution reforms, curbing democratic freedoms in areas ranging from the courts to the press. Most notably, in December 2010, Tymoshenko was retroactively charged with abusing her power during her stint as prime minister, and, after a widely condemned politically-motivated show trial, was sentenced to prison in October 2011.

Paul Manafort and Rick Gates actually lobbied American lawmakers on behalf of Yanukovych’s government from 2012–2014,defending the imprisonment of Tymoshenko and trying to discredit her, as well as trying to improve the image of their client and his government.They did this without disclosing their lobbying activities as required by U.S. law.

Incidentally, these efforts were paid in part by Rinat Akhmetov,Ukraine’s wealthiest man for the last eight years, a client of Manafort’s since his earliest days in Ukraine, and for whom Manafort helped arrange a meeting with U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

Manafort and Akhmetov utilized the services of two Washington, D.C. lobbying firms, including Podesta Group Inc., run by the brother of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman and later victim of Russian-government hacking and WikiLeaks disclosures.

The day after this information was made public in mid-August 2016, Manafort resigned from his role as the chairman of the Trump campaign. As for Gates, it was unclear at the time if he had stayed on board or left and the Trump campaign refused to clarify the matter.

Lobbying efforts throughout the Yanukovych period were also hardly limited to Manafort and Gates, with those efforts having for years been tied to prominent Republicans in the United States.

Perhaps most prominent among the lobbyists, former Kansas senator and 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole?—?for whom Manafort had been a strategist?—?was paid more than half a million to lobby for Deripaska, who was then, and is still, denied a U.S. visa for his links to the Russian mafia.

Yuri Bokyo, a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician and a close Yanukovych ally, and a former minister of several energy-related sections of Ukraine’s government?—?and was heavily involved in setting up the Eurasian gas scheme?—?paid nearly $100,000 to a Washington lobbyist to meet with top Republicans.

Barbour Griffith & Rogers,co-founded by the former Republican governor of Mississippi and influential GOP insider Haley Barbour, was alsopaid more than $800,000 for lobbying efforts by a lawyer who “structured” the legal aspects of the Eurasian gas deal.

Though Mogilevich had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, he strangely enough has been able to retain the lawyerly services of William Sessions, a Republican who was the FBI director from 1987–1993, to lobby on Mogilevich’s behalf for deals with the U.S. government to clear his charges.

Those talks, which failed, were arranged by Neil Livingston, a prominent consultant whose firm, GlobalOptions, serviced many Russian and former-Soviet-republic-businessmen. GlobalOptions was introduced by Barbour Griffith & Rogers to a shell company calledHighrock Holdings used by none other than Firtash as a prominent vehicle for money laundering in the Eurasian gas scheme.

Highrock paid GlobalOptions for at least two projects, one a mysterious “special operation” as named in a subsequent lawsuit for an unnamed member of the Ukrainian government. And just to give one example ofFirtash’s European outreach, his relationship with several Conservative MPs in the United Kingdom may prompt an official investigation.

For his part in engineering Yanukovych’s comeback and Tymoshenko’s downfall,Firtash also got some $3 billion in gas assets returned to him that had been seized by Tymoshenko’s governmentas a result of proceedings at the arbitration court in Sweden.

Which was a logical move. Once Yanukovych was in power, Ukraine and Firtash essentially became the same party in the case, with Ukraine’s lawyers dropping opposition to Firtash’s attempts to recover the seized gas?—?andnow quite happy to see $3 billion in gas go from the ownership of the Ukrainian people back to Firtash.

It was clear that Yanukovych’s government was willing to fight for the interests of Putin and Firtash, but not its own people. Without Ukraine’s representatives making any case whatsoever, the court simply sided with Firtash in June 2010.

Firtash also got his aforementioned credit lines from Putin’s bankers not long after Yanukovych’s victory, specifically some $11 billion in credit from a consortium of banks arranged byGazprombank, the flagship banking arm of Gazprom.

Gazprombank would not disclose which other banks were part of this arrangement, but by itself it lent him $2.2 billion, the largest possible amount under Russian law and almost one-quarter of the bank’s total capital, making him Gazprombank’s single largest individual borrower.

Firtash used this cash to expand his holdings?—?especially in the chemical and fertilizer industries?—?and power in Ukraine, all while staying close to Yanukovych. These moves actually made him the fifth-biggest fertilizer maker in Europe and helped him establish relationships with politicians throughout the continent.

When reporters asked him where all the money came from to enable him to do all this, he coyly replied: “It’s a secret.”

From January 2011 on, Firtash was again buying Gazprom gas at a discount through shady international front companies, then selling that gas back at a far higher price to his new assets, to the tune of billions in questionable profits to his shell companies, in something of a return to the old system before Tymoshenko had rocked the boat.

But the spirited Tymoshenko was not content to only be on defense during this period. During her trial and from prison, she filed a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in Manhattan in April 2011. In it she named Firtash, Manafort, Mogilevich, Yanukovych and their front companies as defendants, including initially RUE?—?although RUE was switched out to name the front companies that controlled it for Firtash and Mogilevich in later amended complaints.

The suit accused them of setting up a series of racketeering, fraud and money laundering enterprises in the United States designed to keep dirty gas money away from Ukrainian authorities when she was prime minister, and that such activities resulted in material harm for her since they contributed to the downfall of her government and her unjust trial and imprisonment.

After being rejected several times, a fourth and final version of the suit was rejected in September 2015. While not ruling out criminal wrongdoing on the part of the defendants, the judge ruled that the higher-than-average standards for convictions under the RICO statute were not met.

Still, in the longer ruling rejecting the third complaint, it was noted that “the Court accepts as true the allegation that some of the money that passed through the U.S. Enterprise was ‘funneled back to Ukraine’?—?albeit by unidentified actors?—?and somehow used as ‘financing’ for Tymoshenko’s ‘persecution.’”

Berkut riot police in Kiev during Euromaidan. Ivan Bandura photo via Flickr]

Putin allies expelled from Ukraine

Yes, after the 2010 election, everything was going perfectly in regards to Ukraine for Putin, Yanukovych, Manafort, Gates, Firtash, Mogilevich and their teams. But, as in 2004, there was one thing that they did not plan well for, and it was the same thing that confounded Soviet leaders for decades and led to the downfall of the USSR.

The people had other ideas.

Many Ukrainians?—?especially younger ones?—?realized what was happening to their country, and were hopeful of better opportunities and a better future by having Ukraine orient itself more to the West, toward Europe and the United States. Yanukovych sought to placate these desires by courting a major trade deal with the European Union.

But in November 2013, protests erupted over Yanukovych’s about-face backing out of this long-desired E.U. trade deal in the face of a Russian counteroffer.

Protests erupted in a main square in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, which became known as the Euromaidan protests. After months of a tense situation, security forces shot and killed dozens of protesters on Feb. 20, 2014. In response to state violence, the protests swelled exponentially, fueled by mass public outrage at the bloodshed. By Feb. 22, the Ukrainian parliament had voted Yanukovych out of office.

Tymoshenko was freed from prison?—?in a wheelchair, recovering from what she said was physical abuse and ill-treatment at the hands of her guards and authorities?—?and Yanukovych fled the city. Soon, he would flee the country to Russia with the help of none other than Putin.Today, he is still wanted by Ukrainian authorities for the deaths of the protesters, but he hopes to one day return to Ukraine again as president, which he still contends he is legally.

Putin had overplayed his hand. His royal straight flush of an ace of natural gas, a king in Yanukovych, a queen in Firtash, a jack in Mogilevich, and a 10 in Manafort did not anticipate a wild-card joker in the form of Yanukovych’s allies fleeing him.

But Putin had invested a lot into Ukraine over many years?—?and into controlling its politics and energy sector through gas. Faced with his whole house of cards collapsing in on itself in the face of popular resistance, and with a government hostile to him, Putin went to Plan B?—?the dismemberment of Ukraine and war.

Firtash has fled Ukraine as well, and is also wanted by U.S. authorities for a separate racketeering and bribery scheme. He was living in a sort of exile in Austria, but just late last month, a U.S. extradition request based on bribery and corruption charges in a Chicago-based case was approved in Austrian court, though in a bizarre twist he was arrested mere minutes after the ruling by Austrian authorities on a Spanish warrant related to charges of money laundering and organized crime.

In light of ties to Manafort and the related implications for Trump’s presidency, the scandals and ensuing war in Ukraine, the connections to the Russian organized crime, and importance to Putin, this could be one of the most sensational and important internationally focused trials in many years.

And, not to be macabre, but it is highly doubtful that either Putin or the Russian mobsters will give Firtash the chance to prove his loyalty or show his disloyalty, as powerful men willing to orchestrate murder for far less have little reason to allow him to be tried and risk so much.

Meanwhile, Manafort and Gates made millions.

BLACK LEDGER]

Hand-written records from the office of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions show the party had set aside payments totaling $12.7 million specifically for Manafort from 2007–2012 alone. Gates was also involved with Manafort in the $19 million Cayman Islands fiasco with Deripaska, who accused both of the other two of illegally bailing out on him.

The fate of that $19 million is still unknown. All of this is totally apart from the newly-revealed annual $10 million Manafort got from his Deripaska-brokered deal....

salon manafort timeline:

...

2008: Rick Davis arranged for Deripaskato meet then–presidential candidate John McCain at an international economic conference in Switzerland. At the time, Davis was McCain’s campaign manager, having taken a leave from his company with Manafort.

June 2008:CMZ Ventures, described as “one of the more bizarre development teams ever assembled in the city,” forms and attempts to buy the Drake Hotel in Manhattan for $850 million. CMZ was made up of Manafort, Arthur G. Cohen, a former top developer in the city, andBrad Zackson, who had served as a right-hand man to Fred Trump Sr.Zackson had been “the exclusive broker and manager for Fred Trump of the original Trump Organization.”

Zackson gained “access to society’s inner circle through the Trumps.” According to the Commercial Observer, Zackson had wanted to buy a property in the Bahamas, but needed help navigating the bureaucracy there, so he teamed up with Cohen and Manafort.

The Real Deal reported:

Manafort and Zackson were neighbors in the Hamptons, and soon became friends and business associates. Zackson says he invested in Manafort’s film production business, Manhattan Pictures, best known for the 2005 film The Dying Gaul.

Manafort had “an uncanny ability to conjure investors, such as Ukrainian billionaire gas king Dmitry Firtash, for projects,” the Commercial Observerreported in 2011.

Mr. Manafort then met withUkranian billionaire Mr. Firtash,a part owner of Eural Transgas, in Kiev, and secured the promise of an initial $112 million for the project, but that fell apart when Mr. Firtash became distracted by an investment in troubled Bank Nadra back home. Grasping, Mr. Zackson wrote in an email in March 2009: “I have an idea to bring [Donald] Trump in on the Drake. I think it solves a lot of issues right away.”

Court documents show Deripaska was also “set to make a $56 million investment in the Drake,” through the Pericles fund.

But the company, designed to be a billion-dollar fund to buy distressed luxury real estate, never made a single purchase.

Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko allegedin a lawsuit that “Firtash used CMZ as a front in order to hide income illegally skimmed from his natural gas company RosUkrEnergo,” but a judge ultimately dismissed the suit.

2010: Manafort helps elect Yanukovych as president of Ukraine.

2014:Yanukovych is forced to flee Ukraine for Russia in the face of widespread public protests.

2014:Deripaska dissolves the private equity fund being managed by Manafort. He accuses Manafort in a Cayman Islands court of taking nearly $19 million.

Feb. 29, 2016: Manafort reportedly reaches out to Trump via their mutual friend Tom Barrack with two memos, which laid out the case for why he’d be a good fit for the campaign. These memos were reported on by the New York Times in April 2017. In one of them, Manafort “refers vaguely to work he performed, years ago, to clear noisy airspace over Mr. Trump’s Florida resort.” He stresses that he’ll work for free.

The*Washington Post*: “ ‘I really need to get to’ Trump, Manafort said, according to Barrack. He told Barrack he wanted to work as Trump’s convention manager, helping him navigate what they expected would be a contentious affair.”

March 2016: Manafort meets Barrackat the Montage hotel in Beverly Hills to talk about joining the Trump campaign.

March 28, 2016: Trump campaign hires Manafort to work unpaid.

May 2016: Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Manafort in his Kiev political consulting operation since 2005, and Manafort meet.

May 19, 2016: Manafort is named chairman of the Trump campaign.

July 2016:Manafort reportedly offers private briefings on the campaign to Deripaska over email.

Aug. 2, 2016: Manafort and Kilimnik meetat the Grand Havana Club, an upscale cigar bar in Manhattan, to talk “caviar,” which is believed to be a reference to earlier payments made to Manafort by Deripaska.

August 2016: A phone belonging to one of Manafort’s daughters is hacked and hundreds of her text messages are eventually posted on a darknet website. The texts reveal Manafort’s daughters were worried about the work he did in Ukraine and that someone had tried to blackmail him, suggesting they could reveal a secret meeting Manafort had supposedly arranged for Trump in 2012 with a Yanukovych ally.

Aug. 19, 2016:Manafort submits his resignation from the Trump campaign.

...

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In a far-reaching and extensive report on Firtash’s fate and possible links to Trump and Putin, Bloomberg last week detailed Manafort’s ties to Firtash. Former Ukraine Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko alleged in a lawsuit filed in a U.S. court in 2011 that the hotel and shopping mall Manafort and Firtash had planned to build in midtown Manhattan was nothing more than a means tolaunder money.

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