Thread by @anders_aslund

In two recent articles in @nytimes @kenvogel has accomplished such distortions that would put him in the category of Walter Duranty, the Times denier of Stalin's famine in Ukraine.
nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/… nytimes.com/2019/05/09/us/…

@kenvogel discusses two Giuliani issues:
1. Manafort
2. Hunter Biden's involvement in a Ukrainian gas company.

How can anybody seriously dispute Manafort's criminality? He got $75 million from Yanukovych's crowd and $60 million from Russian oligarch Deripaska to work for GRU. Mueller could have put it more clearly, but Manafort is a world-class criminal. Why doesn't Vogel state this fact?

Nowhere does Vogel state the universally known fact that the Prosecutor General's Office is pervasively corrupt, probably the most corrupt institution in a very corrupt country. Yanukovych refused to approve a law on prosecution, an EU demand that blocked EU agreement.

Poroshenko did adopt a law on prosecution, but he appointed a series of three prosecutor generals that were all considered equally pervasively corrupt, Vitaly Yarema June '14-Feb '15, Viktor shokin Feb '15-Mar '16 & Yuriy Lutsenko May '16 & unfortunately still in office.

After Poroshenko had appointed three frightfully corrupt prosecutor generals nobody could harbor an doubt any longer: They were all corrupt & that was the preference of the president.

Both Vogel & his only real source, Giuliani, however ignore this elementary insight, treating the Ukrainian prosecutor generals as serious officials, and not as predatory criminals.

What Ukrainian prosecutors do is they investigate real crimes. After they have found sufficient evidence, however, they go to the culprit & say: I have found something very interesting about you. How much are you willing to pay?! This is extortion under state protection.

Giuliani who has met Lutsenko repeatedly & has dealt with the Mafia in New York must understand what they & he is doing. Vogel seems to understand nothing of this, or just ignore it.

Vogel quotes Giuliani (5/9): "And this isn't foreign policy--I am asking them to do an investigation that they're doing already and that other people are telling them to stop." None of these statements is true, but Vogel only cite Giuliani & his acolytes.

The more serious journalists with some knowledge of Ukraine, Bloomberg's Stephanie Baker and Daryna Krasnolutska, have debunked all the Giuliani/Vogel disinformation. There arguments speak for themselves.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

The only question remaining is whether @nytimes is sufficiently serious to issue a full-fledged denial of the Giuliani/Vogel article or not.