There’s something obvious about the Ukraine scandal threatening to bring down Donald Trump.
The people around him — his top lieutenants, former campaign manager Paul Manafort and attorney Rudy Giuliani — have been deeply involved with questionable political and business leaders in Ukraine for years. I would know, as I’ve been following economic affairs in the country for decades.
Manafort became top political adviser to Ukraine’s then President Viktor Yanukovych in the summer of 2005. He was tremendously skillful as a political operative — intelligent, courteous, unassuming. He focused on winning elections for his client and making as much money as possible. Without Manafort, it’s fair to say Yanukovych would have lost the tight 2010 presidential race to pro-Western Yulia Tymoshenko.
When Trump appointed Manafort as his campaign manager in 2016, he was not the least concerned about his decades spent lobbying for disreputable politicians. Much like Yanukovych, Trump owes his narrow presidential victory to Manafort. As such, his decision to sack Manafort when it became public he had received $12.7 million from a “black ledger” kept by Yanukovych came as a surprise. (He retained Manafort’s long-time deputy Rick Gates as deputy campaign manager.)
As Manafort left the stage, Trump reactivated his engagement in Ukraine via two Ukrainian emigrés in the U.S. — who created backchannels to top officials in Kiev and pushed for the removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine — and Giuliani, his attorney.
Ukraine doesn’t have a track record of appointing honest prosecutors general.
Giuliani, like Manafort, is well entrenched in Ukraine and has earned big money there. He started traveling to the country in the mid-2000s, when he gave a well-paid speech to an event organized and paid for by Vadim Rabinovich, an old commodity trader with a controversial reputation.
In 2017, Giuliani concluded a well-paid “cyber security contract” with Ukraine through then President Petro Poroshenko, and signed a “security contract” with Kharkiv’s Mayor Gennady Kernes, who was almost killed in a gang dispute in 2014. He also had a contract with the Russian-Ukrainian real estate developer Pavel Fuks, who was involved in a failed real estate deal with Trump in Moscow in 2006.
Last May, Giuliani waded into Ukraine’s political affairs, attacking anti-corruption activists and claiming that Serhiy Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist and then a member of parliament, had falsified the so-called black ledger. The accusations against Manafort were false, he insisted.
That track record should discredit his latest claim: that former vice president, now Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden forced the sacking of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in March 2016 in order to stop an investigation into the owner of a gas company, Burisma, that has had Biden’s son Hunter on its board since May 2014 for an allegedly high fee.
Rudy Giuliani, is well entrenched in Ukraine | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Ukraine doesn’t have a track record of appointing honest prosecutors general. Shokin, who was close to former President Poroshenko, refused to prosecute a single member of the Yanukovych regime and faced widespread accusations of corruption himself. He was ousted in 2016 thanks to a united front of Ukrainian anti-corruption activists and Western pressure led by Biden.
Unfortunately, Poroshenko appointed Yuriy Lutsenko as prosecutor general, and he acted just like Shokin, and no senior member of the Yanukovych or Poroshenko governments has been prosecuted.
But in a sign change may be underway, the new Ukrainian parliament — where the party of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has a majority — sacked Lutsenko on its first day in session in August. Whether the new prosecutor general, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, will break from the example set by his predecessors is an open question.
The now infamous phone call between Trump and Zelenskiy — which is at the center of a whistleblower complaint from a U.S. intelligence official — took place on July 25, just a month earlier. The U.S. president reportedly wanted to congratulate his fellow TV star-turned-president on his election victory. But, as I learned in a private briefing several days later, Trump told Zelenskiy he would not meet with him or provide the $250 million in military aid granted to Ukraine by Congress unless he offered up dirt on Biden and his son. Zelenskiy, flabbergasted, reportedly responded that no such evidence existed.
Trump, meanwhile, stood firm. His behavior may be shocking — and has rightly prompted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to throw her support behind impeachment proceedings against him. But we shouldn’t be surprised it’s come to this. Trump surrounded himself with people used to doing dirty business in Ukraine. It was, perhaps, inevitable he would sooner or later get caught in that same quagmire.
Anders Åslund is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of the new book “Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy.”