The Untold Story of ‘Russiagate’ and the Road to War in Ukraine

It did not take long for Yanukovych to begin backsliding on his democracy pledges. He jailed his opponent, the former Orange leader Yulia Tymoshenko; ratcheted back press freedoms by criminalizing defamation and bringing trumped-up investigations of opposition media outlets; presided over the plundering of public funds; rigged the 2012 parliamentary elections; and reversed a plan to end Russia’s lease on the Crimean port of Sevastopol, where its naval fleet was viewed as a stalking horse for a Putin takeover.

Soon several of Manafort’s democracy consultants dropped out in disappointment. For his part, Manafort expanded his role with Yanukovych, becoming something of a shadow foreign-policy adviser and emissary to the West. He was also, prosecutors later charged, working as an unregistered foreign agent, running secret lobbying campaigns in Washington and Brussels to stave off sanctions over the Tymoshenko jailing while insisting that Yanukovych was still pursuing his economic deal with Europe.

But that tenuous bridge to the West could not hold. Under pressure from Putin, Yanukovych abruptly reversed course in late 2013, breaking off talks with Europe and deepening his economic commitment to Russia. By the tens of thousands, protesters again streamed into Maidan square. Weeks of standoff, punctuated by violence, came to a deadly denouement over three days in February 2014, when a government crackdown left dozens dead, mere yards from Manafort’s office.

In the backlash, with his political coalition in pieces, Yanukovych fled to Russia. Within weeks, claiming Yanukovych had been ousted not in a homegrown swell of democracy but in a Western-backed coup, Putin moved on Crimea and the east. To this day, Manafort, too, maintains that Maidan was essentially a coup against a duly elected president. It was also a personal financial disaster — he had lost his cash cow. Still, he managed to find work, helping former Party of Regions members start a new party called Opposition Bloc and consulting on mayoral races.

The last one came in late 2015, in Mariupol. The port city, in Ukraine’s southeast, was part of a potential land bridge for arms between occupied Crimea and the war-torn Donbas and would be a commercial hub for a Potemkin republic beholden to Moscow. It was also a fief of Ukraine’s richest citizen, the metals and mining magnate Rinat Akhmetov, for whom both Russia and Europe were important markets. An early political godfather to Yanukovych, Akhmetov was also an original financier of Manafort’s work for the Party of Regions.

With a concentration of industrial holdings in the Donbas, Akhmetov kept a tight hold over the region’s politics, governance and media. Even as Putin’s proxies advanced on Mariupol and held a sham independence referendum in 2014, Akhmetov struck a neutral-seeming posture that gave the “separatists” an opening to claim they had his support. “Rinat,” read graffiti in Kyiv’s Independence Square, “are you with Ukraine or the Kremlin?” Akhmetov ultimately came out harshly against the “separatist” violence, dispatching workers to patrol the streets and help repel Russia’s proxies. But even then, his mixed messages continued to feed suspicion that he was hedging his bets. After “separatists” shelled a civilian area in early 2015, killing 30 people — the attack, it later became clear, was directed by Russian military officials — his largest news outlet, Segodnya, stood out for articles that avoided ascribing blame. “The impression was, ‘It’s not man-made shelling but some kind of earthquake; it just happened,’” Eugenia Kuznetsova, a Ukrainian media analyst who studied the coverage of the attack, told me.

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