Thread by @karolcummins

The Mariupol plan called for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin control of the country’s industrial heartland.

The trade-off: “peace” for a broken and subservient Ukraine.

📌This was Trump’s initial quid pro quo. nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

Trump could help make the Mariupol plan a reality. First, though, he would have to win, an unlikely proposition at best. Which brought the men to the second prong of their agenda that evening — internal campaign polling data tracing a path through battleground states to victory.

Manafort’s sharing of that information — the “eyes only” code guiding Trump’s strategy — would have been unremarkable if not for one important piece of Kilimnik’s biography: He was not simply a colleague; he was, U.S. officials would later assert, a Russian agent.

But what the plan offered on paper is essentially what Putin is now trying to seize through sham referendums and illegal annexation. And Mariupol is shorthand for the horrors of his war, an occupied city in ruins after months of siege, …countless citizens buried in mass graves.

Putin’s American adventure might be best understood as advance payment for a geopolitical grail closer to home: a vassal Ukrainian state. Thrumming beneath the whole election interference saga was another story — about Ukraine’s efforts to establish a modern democracy.

And, as a result, its position as a hot zone of the new Cold War between Russia and the West, autocracy vs democracy.

📌Even now, some influential right wing officials, are suggesting that Ukraine make concessions of sovereignty similar to those contained in Kilimnik’s plan.

To a remarkable degree, the long struggle for Ukraine was a bass note to the upheavals and scandals of the Trump years, from the earliest days of the 2016 campaign & then the presidential transition, through Trump’s first impeachment and into the final days of the 2020 election.

To view the findings of the Russia investigation through the blood-filtered lens of Putin’s war, now in its ninth month, is to discover a trail of underappreciated signals telegraphing the depth of his Ukrainian obsession & TeamTrump’s willingness to help him achieve that goal.

Yes, many of us were yammering about Ukraine & Team Trump’s Quid pro quo deal with Putin years ago.

Ukraine Peace plan

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1175146899357106176?s=46&t=7ECNomeaHTNuHnC3jxrawg

Putin and TeamTrump knew Biden would fight For Ukraine’s sovereignty and unite our Western Allies in support of Western Liberal Democracy vs Putin’s authoritarian kleptocracy (mafia state). #BidenProDemocracy

Notice how pro democracy advocates are boogeymen of RW media? #Soros

One of the First projects Team Trump worked post inauguration was to draft A PLAN TO LIFT SANCTIONS IMPOSED ON RUSSIA

2/5/17: A Back-Channel Peace Plan for Ukraine and Russia, Courtesy of TeamTrump associates: Flynn, Artemenko, Sater & Cohen.

nytimes.com/2017/02/19/us/…

Was the Mariupol plan a part of a Putin long game or an attempt by his ally, Yanukovych, to claw back power?

Either way, the prosecutors who uncovered the plan would come to view it as potential payoff for the Russian president’s meddling in US elex.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

Putin’s aimed to restore the Russian empire and weaken democracy globally.

📌He pursued that goal via coconspirators of those the countries in his sights, while applying ever-evolving disinfo techniques to play to the fears and hatreds of their people.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

Manafort, a political operative known for treating democracy as a weaponized tool.

He had achieved great riches by putting his political acumen to work for the country’s Kremlin-aligned oligarchs, helping install a gov’t that would prove pliant in the face of Putin’s demands.

📌Then Manafort helped elect an American president (Trump) whose open admiration of the Russian strongman muddied more than a half-century of policy promoting democracy, while alienating our western allies.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

Long before the Trump-era investigations, Manafort had established himself in DC & abroad as a grand master of the political dark arts.
Roger Stone & Manafort helped develop the slashing style of conservative politics, pushing “hot buttons” to rile up base voters & tar opponents.

Manafort, Stone & Black’s firm known as The Torturer’s Lobby specialized in covering up the bloody records of dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines with copious coats of high-gloss spin, presenting them as freedom-loving democrats.

Clients include dictatorial gov’ts in Nigeria, Kenya, Zaire, Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, & Somalia, among others. Manafort’s firm was a primary subject of scorn in a 1992 report issued by the Center for Public Integrity called “The Torturers’ Lobby.”
amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/55…

📌When Putin had an urgent problem in Ukraine, Deripaska, who had various holdings there, stepped in to help: He brought in Manafort’s firm, based on allegations that he had gained his position through ties to organized crime. #MOB #OrganizedCrime

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

Ukrainian Reformists backed Pro-American Viktor Yushchenko who vowed to join NATO & the European Union.

To the Kremlin a Yushchenko victory would represent “a catastrophic loss of Russian influence, leading ultimately to Russia’s geopolitical isolation.”

Enter Manafort.

My, my, so many parallel dirty trick political tactics used by Russian and Right Wing operatives here in the US today, funny that.

“The Yanokovych team resorted to declaring an election heist worthy of Trump’s 2020 election fraud fantasia.”

Deripaska asked Manafort if he could restore Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, to power.

Manafort put the plan into action. He brought in int’l elections consultants & US strategists & he brought in Kilimnik.

The Manafort strategy was a smashing success.

nytimes.com/2017/02/19/us/…

Manafort become a shadow foreign-policy adviser & emissary to Yanukovych.

He was later charged as working as an unregistered foreign agent, running secret lobbying campaigns in Washington and Brussels to stave off sanctions over the Tymoshenko jailing.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

In 2015 Manafort assisted Akhmetov’s chosen mayoral candidate, a former executive w/ his steel company, Vadym Boychenko.

Manafort’s hand in the campaign, revealed in an email unearthed by Senate Intel Inv’n, was largely hidden.
Akmetov involved w/ 2017 UKR peace plan w/ Sater

The day after the Trump campaign announced his appointment as chief convention strategist, Manafort worked with Gates & Kilimnik to send copies of the announcement to his main patrons in UKR, along with personal letters promising to keep them in the loop throughout the campaign.

The recipients included Deripaska, Akhmetov & a former Yanukovych chief of staff named Sergiy Lyovochkin.

A conduit for oligarchs’ money to Manafort during the Party of Regions years, Lyovochkin also had a close working relationship with Kilimnik.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

As Manafort rose to become Trump’s campaign chairman — and as Russian operatives were hacking Democratic Party servers — the candidate took stances on the region that were advantageous to Putin’s ambitions for Ukraine.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

Ahead of the RNC in Cleveland in 7/16, Trump shocked the American foreign-policy establishment by voicing only tepid support for NATO.

📌Trump also told aides that he didn’t believe it was worth risking “World War III”to defend Ukraine against Russia.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

Two other very invested players were on hand at the convention — the Ukrainian and Russian ambassadors (Kislyak) to the US; the Russian spoke with operative J.D. Gordon days after the Republican plank re UKR was weakened.

beaconjournal.com/story/news/pol…

cleveland.com/open/2019/04/c…

On July 27, Trump said he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory, effectively ending Obama-adm sanctions & normalizing relations that had been strained since the illegal annexation.

He also, famously, invited Russia to hack HRC’s emails.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

The following day, Kilimnik flew to Moscow. In his email to Manafort & met with “the guy who gave you your biggest black caviar jar several years ago” — Yanukovych, who once gave Manafort $30k worth of fine caviar.

Kilimnik needed to meet in person.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

At the Grand Havana Room, Kilimnik delivered Yanukovych’s urgent message: A “peace” plan for Ukraine was coming together that he hoped Manafort would help effect.

The plan was based on Putin’s interpretation of accords, signed in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, in late 2014/2015.

For the US, any plan that gave the east outsize autonomy and influence ran counter to longstanding support for “an independent, sovereign Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.”

Trump’s rhetoric on Russia was suggesting a break from that policy.

The meeting at the Grand Havana Room incl the discussion of polling data that traced how Trump might win. Manafort & Gates had been passing that data to Kilimnik since the spring; produced by Manafort’s pollster, Fabrizio, it was among the campaign’s more closely held secrets.

As Manafort told Kilimnik at the club, the polling was picking up something that Clinton pollsters & mainstream prognosticators were not — a path to the White House through traditionally blue states like WI, MN & PA & would require a relentless assault on Clinton’s public image.

The UKR/Mariupol Peace plan, was the “quo” Putin wanted for the “quid” of helping Trump’s campaign.

“On August 2, if not earlier,”“Russia had clearly revealed what it wanted out of a President Trump: ‘a wink,’ a nod of approval from a as it took over Ukraine’s richest region.”

In mid-August (2016), The New York Times had reported that a new Ukrainian anti-corruption agency had obtained a Party of Regions “black ledger,” listing earmarked, off-the-books payments to Ukrainian officials — and to Manafort. #BlackLedger

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

“The more exposure there is of Trump and Trump’s circle, the more difficult it will be for Trump to conclude a separate deal with Putin, thereby selling out both Ukraine and the whole of Europe,”
opined Leshchenko.

tabletmag.com/sections/news/…

📌From the start Trump appeared to give Russia every indication that its political bet had paid off.

He nominated as NatSec adviser Flynn, who had accepted $33,750 to speak at a 2015 Moscow celebration of Russia’s state-financed propaganda outlet, RT.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

📌Even before taking office, Flynn was speaking with Putin’s ambassador (Kislyak) in DC, a violation of federal law, about lifting sanctions over election meddling. (Flynn twice pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about those discussions but was pardoned by Trump.)

The new secretary of state would be Rex W. Tillerson, who as Exxon Mobil’s chief executive had criticized the Obama administration’s decision to sanction Russia over Crimea and the shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines flight.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

Manafort met with Kilimnik and Lyovochkin at a VA hotel. (The two men obtained inauguration tickets through a Manafort associate who would later plead guilty to failing to register as a foreign agent and illegally buying the tickets.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

Manafort acknowledged to prosecutors the Ukraine “peace” plan.

In 2016, with no official position, Manafort continued to advise the Trump camp.

At the same time, Kilimnik was shuttling between Moscow and Kyiv, working out the “peace” plan’s details.
nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

Kilimnik told Manafort that he & Yanukovych — code named BG for Big Guy — had met in Russia and discussed the plan.

“Russians at the very top level are in principle not against this plan,” Kilimnik wrote, “& will work with the BG to start the process.”

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

📌A public endorsement by Trump, Kilimnik added, would overcome resistance in Kyiv. “All that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from DT saying, ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

📌Trump’s representative would apparently be Manafort, who, Yanukovych could guarantee, would have entree at “the very top level” in the Kremlin, with regard to the Ukraine Peace Plan.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

The early months of the Trump administration brought a head-spinning procession of disclosures.

Flynn, the national security adviser, was fired over his back-channel conversations with the Russian ambassador (Kislyak)

nytimes.com/2020/05/29/us/…

There was the revelation that a foreign-policy adviser to the campaign named George Papadopoulos, at a bar in London, had told an Australian diplomat that Russia had dirt on Clinton, weeks before Russia’s hacking of Clinton’s emails was publicly known.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

📌There was the news that DonJr, Kushner & Manafort met at Trump Tower in June 2016 with a well-connected Russian lawyer (Veselnitskaya) who, wanted to pass along incriminating info about Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Trump.”

bbc.com/news/world-us-…

📌And the Mueller team disclosed in 2017 that Kilimnik was “assessed to have ties to a Russian intelligence service.”

📌Even after Manafort’s indictment in late 2017, prosecutors reported, he & Kilimnik continued to seek the Trump adm’s “wink” for the Ukraine “peace” plan.

To that end, as late as March 2018, Manafort & Kilimnik were working on a survey of Ukrainians.

A draft of the poll asked whether Donbas should stay under the governance of Kyiv in one of two alternative arrangements; break off as an autonomous region; or join Russia outright.

The poll, devised with input from Trump’s pollster Fabrizio, it also asked if Yanukovych could be accepted as a leader in the east.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

Viktor Yanukovych calls for negotiations with Russia to end war

republicworld.com/amp/world-news…

📌Weissmann scuttled the cooperation deal when he learned Manafort, consistently lied “about one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik, the Russian intel officer.”

📌Among those interactions: the maneuverings for the Mariupol plan.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

After the disclosure of Manafort’s name in the black ledger, Kilimnik mounted a reputational defense of his boss by surfacing a new iteration of the counternarrative — that Clinton’s Ukrainian allies had fabricated the ledger to tar Manafort & undermine Trump.

📌Manafort effectively passed the baton to Rudolph W. Giuliani, who in the fall of 2018 was preparing an offensive to definitively cast the special-counsel inv’n as a political hit job after its final report reportedly failed to prove “collusion.”

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

📌Central to Giuliani’s mission was an effort to build out the “Ukraine did it” counternarrative.

Giuliani and Manafort did not speak directly, but through Manafort’s lawyers.

📌Rudy Giuliani’s Year of Living Dangerously

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1178393938647863296?s=21

Firtash III - #UkraineGate

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1218605908999061504?s=21

Giuliani adventured across Europe spinning that original counternarrative into an ornate conspiracy theory that roped in the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, its ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, and Joe and Hunter Biden.
#Ukrainegate

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1198977547033178112?s=21

📌Marie Yovanovitch was central to the geopolitical competition playing out in Kyiv.

📌In bottom-line terms, she represented American diplomatic resistance to everything Putin and his Ukrainian proxies wanted from Trump.
nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

Yovanovitch set out to shore up the American democracy agenda: freeing Ukraine’s economy from the grip of the oligarchs and its justice system from the corrupting imperatives of politics.

That brought her into conflict with Firtash & Lutsenko.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

#Firtash had built extraordinary wealth through a partnership with Gazprom, Russia’s leading energy concern: Gazprom sold deeply discounted gas to a middleman company that it owned with Firtash, which then resold it, at a considerable profit, to Ukraine and throughout Europe.

Firtash used some of those profits to support Russia-aligned politicians. He had been a major sponsor of the Party of Regions and, prosecutors believed, an important paymaster for Manafort.

By the time Trump took office, Ukraine had cut Firtash’s middleman out of the gas deal.

📌Why Firtash hates Biden & why he worked with Giuliani to smear him

📌Reminder: Gas industry experts say the gas-market reforms pushed by Biden & others in 2014 & 2015 hit Firtash in the wallet, and badly—to the time of hundreds of millions of dollars. 

thedailybeast.com/ukrainian-olig…

Firtash maintained lucrative ties to Ukraine’s energy industry through ownership of regional distribution companies assoc’d with the national gas concern, Naftogaz.

Giuliani pals (Parnas & Fruman) leveraged GOP access to seek Ukraine’s Naftogaz gas deal

apnews.com/article/russia…

As part of this scheme, Parnas & Fruman seem to have launched a campaign to remove the leadership of the Ukrainian national company, Naftogaz, and to install managers more favorably inclined to their bid (and to Firtash).

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1218618430363815936?s=46&t=4C0sUPFZjT4y4mMI-Rtsgg

The Firtash story - Hail Mary Pass to fight extradition.

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1180870472403050496?s=21

Team Trump attempts to control Naftogaz via seating US boardmembers willing to turn a blind eye to Fritash “business model”

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1180670096638758912?s=46&t=wCDcJR1uJ_40zRGG7LcBSg

Yet for all that intrigue, the sincerity of Ukrainian protesters’ calls for democracy, independent and uncorrupted. And on April 21, Poroshenko was voted out of office in favor of Zelensky who fashioned himself in the reformist mold of the character he had played on television.

The scheme to dig up dirt on the Biden’s was at a dead end.

As Trump and Giuliani worked to get it back on track under the new adm in Kyiv, Trump finally forced out Yovanovitch, casting her as a central actor in the fantasy plot to defeat him in 2016.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

Now Trump & Giuliani were trying to force a result that Yovanovich sought to vanquish in Ukraine: the rank politicization of the justice system, openly articulated in Trump’s “perfect phone call” asking Zelensky to trade a sham inv’n for arms, which led to the 3rd impeachment.

In March 2021, US intel services declassified a report detailing that Kilimnik and others associated with Russian intel had used various Americans — among them, Giuliani — to promote the false narrative of the Bidens’ alleged corruption in Ukraine to influence the 2020 campaign.

The US intel report assessed that Russian leaders viewed Biden’s potential election as “disadvantageous to Russian interests” — especially as it pertained to Ukraine.

dni.gov/files/ODNI/doc…

washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…

Trump pardoned Manafort before leaving the White House.

Had he remained in office, the former president said in a statement earlier this year, “the Ukraine desecration would not be happening.”

📌No doubt, Trump would have handed Ukraine & Europe to Putin.

With Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, Putin faced a new American president who promised a tough line against his imperial designs on Ukraine — and with no obvious back channels through which to manipulate him or his policy.

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

📌Thirteen months later, Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian frontier….

nytimes.com/2022/11/02/mag…

Trump and Putin allies are still frantically trying to overturn the 2020 election to re install Trump as president, this while hyping Russian favorable narratives & disinformation.