WASHINGTON — Few political
consultants have had a client fail quite as spectacularly as Paul Manafort’s
did in Ukraine in the winter of 2014.
President Viktor F. Yanukovych, who owed his election to, as
an American diplomat put it, an “extreme makeover” Mr.
Manafort oversaw, bolted the country in the face of violent street protests. He
found sanctuary in Russia and never returned, as his patron, President Vladimir V. Putin, proceeded to dismember
Ukraine, annexing Crimea and fomenting a war in two
other provinces that continues.
Mr. Manafort was undaunted.
Within months of his client’s
political demise, he went to work seeking to bring his disgraced party back to
power, much as he had Mr. Yanukovych himself nearly a decade earlier. Mr.
Manafort has already had some success, with former Yanukovych loyalists — and
some Communists — forming a new bloc opposing Ukraine’s struggling pro-Western
government.
And now Mr. Manafort has taken
on a much larger campaign, seeking to turn Donald J. Trump into a winning
presidential candidate.
With Mr. Putin’s Russia, and
its interference in Ukraine, becoming a focus of the United States presidential
campaign, Mr. Manafort’s work in Ukraine has come under scrutiny — along with
his business dealings with prominent Ukrainian and Russian tycoons.
After disclosures of a breach
of the Democratic National Committee’s emails — which American intelligence
officials have linked to Russian
spies— both men are facing sharp criticism over what is seen as an unusually
sympathetic view of Mr. Putin and his policies toward Ukraine. That view has
upended decades of party orthodoxy toward Russia, a country that the previous
Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, called “our No. 1 geopolitical
foe.”
On Sunday, Mr. Trump even echoed Mr. Putin’s
justification of the annexation of Crimea, saying the majority
of people in the region wanted to be part of Russia, remarks that were
prominently featured on state news channels in Moscow.
It is far from certain that
Mr. Manafort’s views have directly shaped Mr. Trump’s, since Mr. Trump spoke
favorably of Mr. Putin’s leadership before Mr. Manafort joined the campaign.
But it is clear that the two have a shared view of Russia and neighbors like
Ukraine — an affection, even — that, in Mr. Manafort’s case, has been shaped by
years of business dealings as much as by any policy or ideology.
“I wouldn’t put out any moral
arguments about his work,” said Yevgeny E. Kopachko, a pollster with Mr.
Yanukovych’s former party who cooperated with Mr. Manafort for years and called
him a pragmatic and effective strategist. “Nobody
has a monopoly on truth and morals.”
Mr. Manafort did not respond
to requests for an interview. In television interviews on Sunday, though, he
defended Mr. Trump’s views on Russia, saying that as president, Mr. Trump would
be firm with Russia but would deal with it like any other country when doing so
suited American interests.
“He views Russia as a foreign
power that has its own interests at stake,” Mr. Manafort said on CBS’s “Face
the Nation.”
Until he joined Mr. Trump’s
presidential campaign this year, Mr. Manafort’s work in Ukraine had
been his most significant political campaign in recent years. He began his
career in Republican politics in the 1970s and extended it overseas to advising
authoritarian leaders, including Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, Ferdinand Marcos in
the Philippines and Mr. Yanukovych.
Mr. Manafort, 67, is the scion
of an immigrant family that built a construction business in Connecticut. A
lawyer by education, he served briefly in the Reagan administration before
devoting himself to politics and later to business. A review of his work in
Ukraine shows how politics and business converged in a country still struggling
to function as a democracy, a quarter of a century after it had gained
independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In that world in flux, Mr.
Manafort’s political strategy had echoes of Mr. Trump’s populist campaign.
Mr. Manafort’s influence in
the country was significant, and his political expertise deeply valued,
according to Ukrainian politicians and officials who worked with him. He also
had a voice in decisions about major American investments in Ukraine, said a
former spokesman for Ukraine’s foreign ministry, Oleg Voloshyn, who also ran as
a candidate in the new bloc Mr. Manafort helped form.
He persuaded the government to lower grain export
tariffs, a change that benefited agribusiness investors like Cargill, and to open negotiations with Chevron and Exxon for oil and natural gas exploration in the
country.
Mr. Manafort began working in Ukraine after the
popular uprising in the winter of 2004-5 that became known as the Orange
Revolution. Mr. Yanukovych, then prime minister, was declared the winner of a
presidential election in 2004 that was marred by fraud and overturned by the
country’s highest court after weeks of protests in favor of his pro-Western
rival, Viktor A. Yushchenko.
Mr. Yanukovych had relied disastrously on Russian
political advisers who underestimated voter frustration. After his defeat, he
turned to American experts.
Mr. Manafort had begun working for one of Ukraine’s richest
men, Rinat Akhmetov, to improve the image of his companies. Mr. Akhmetov was
also a prominent sponsor of Mr. Yanukovych’s party, the Party of Regions, and
he introduced the two men.
With Mr. Manafort’s advice, Mr. Yanukovych began a
comeback, with the Party of Regions winning the biggest bloc in parliamentary
elections in 2006 and again in 2007, returning him to the post of prime
minister. At the time, Mr. Manafort called Mr. Yanukovych, a former coal
trucking director who was twice convicted of assault as a young man, an
outstanding leader who had been badly misunderstood in the West.
According to State Department cables at the time and
later released by WikiLeaks, Mr. Manafort and his colleagues Phil Griffin and
Catherine Barnes frequently pressed American diplomats in Ukraine to treat Mr.
Yanukovych and his supporters equally so as not to risk being seen as favoring
his opponents in the new elections. With Mr. Manafort’s help, the party was
“working to change its image from that of a haven for mobsters into that of a
legitimate political party,” the American ambassador at the time, John E.
Herbst, wrote.
During this time, lucrative side deals opened for Mr.
Manafort.
In 2008, he and the developer Arthur G. Cohen negotiated a deal
to buy the site of the Drake Hotel on Park Avenue in Manhattan. One partner was
Dmytro Firtash, an oligarch who made billions as a middleman for Gazprom, the Russian natural gas giant, and who was known for
funneling the money into the campaigns of pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine,
including Mr. Yanukovych. The three men intended to reopen the site as a mall
and spa called Bulgari Tower, according to a lawsuit filed in Manhattan by
Yulia V. Tymoshenko, a former prime minister of Ukraine. In the end, though,
the project unraveled.
A separate deal also funneled
Russian-linked oligarchic money into Ukraine. In 2007, Mr. Manafort and two
partners, Rick Gates and Rick Davis, set up a private equity company in the
Cayman Islands to buy assets in Ukraine, and invited the Russian oligarch Oleg
Deripaska to invest, according to a court filing. Mr. Deripaska agreed to pay a
2 percent annual management fee to Mr. Manafort and his partners, and put $100
million into the fund, which bought a cable television station in the Black Sea
port of Odessa, Ukraine, before the agreement unraveled in disagreements over
auditing and Mr. Deripaska sued Mr. Manafort. The case is still pending.
By 2010, Mr. Yanukovych’s
revival was complete. He had won a presidential campaign against Ms.
Tymoshenko, who was convicted of abuse of office and sent to prison.
Mr. Kopachko, the pollster,
said Mr. Manafort envisioned an approach that exploited regional and ethnic
peculiarities in voting, tapping the disenfranchisement of those who felt
abandoned by the Orange Revolution in eastern Ukraine, which has more ethnic
Russians and Russian speakers.
Konstantin Grishchenko, a
former foreign minister and a deputy prime minister under Mr. Yanukovych, said
in a telephone interview that Mr. Manafort had ultimately grown disillusioned
with his client.
Mr. Manafort pressed Mr.
Yanukovych to sign an agreement with the European Union that would link the
country closer to the West — and lobbied for the Americans to support Ukraine’s
membership, as well, despite deep reservations because of the prosecution of
Ms. Tymoshenko.
Mr. Manafort helped draft a
report defending the prosecution that Mr. Yanukovych’s government commissioned
from the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in 2012.
Mr. Manafort’s role was
disclosed after a document was discovered in a box in a sauna belonging to a
former senior Ukrainian official. Other documents in that cache are now
evidence in a criminal case against a former justice official, and could shed
more light on Mr. Manafort’s role.
Ultimately Mr. Yanukovych
disregarded Mr. Manafort’s advice and refused to sign the trade agreement,
which Mr. Putin vehemently opposed. Mr. Yanukovych’s decision led to the
protests that culminated in two nights of violence in February 2014 and Mr.
Yanukovych’s flight.
Mr. Manafort has said little
about Mr. Yanukovych’s fall. “I don’t think he’s very happy with the outcome,”
Mr. Grishchenko said.
Mr. Manafort’s chance for a
comeback, however, came sooner than anyone had expected.
When the government of President
Petro O. Poroshenko called snap parliamentary elections for October 2014, just
eight months later, Mr. Manafort rallied the dispirited remnants of Mr.
Yanukovych’s party.
He was now on the payroll of
Mr. Yanukovych’s former chief of staff, Serhiy Lyovochkin. Mr. Manafort flew to
Ukraine in September 2014 and set to work rebranding a party deeply fractured
by the violence and by Russia’s intervention.
Rather than try to resurrect
the disgraced party, he supported pitching a bigger political tent to help his
clients and, he argued, to help stabilize Ukraine. The new bloc would woo
everyone in the country angry at the new Western-backed government.
It was Mr. Manafort who had
argued for a new name for the movement — the Opposition Bloc, or Oppo Bloc, as it
was called. “He thought to gather the largest number of people opposed to the
current government, you needed to avoid anything concrete, and just become a
symbol of being opposed,” recalled Mikhail B. Pogrebinsky, a political analyst
in Kiev.
The strategy worked. Under the
new name, the Party of Regions kept a foothold in Parliament. Its new bloc now
has 43 members in the 450-seat chamber.
It is not clear that Mr.
Manafort’s work in Ukraine ended with his work with Mr. Trump’s campaign. A
communications aide for Mr. Lyovochkin, who financed Mr. Manafort’s work,
declined to say whether he was still on retainer or how much he had been paid.
Mr. Manafort has not
registered as a lobbyist representing Ukraine, which would require disclosing
his earnings, though at least one company he subcontracted, the public
relations firm Edelman, did in 2008. It received a
retainer of $35,000 a month to promote Mr. Yanukovych’s efforts as prime
minister “toward making Ukraine a more democratic country.”
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