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For years, Ukraine has occupied a sizeable role in the US political discourse. In 2016, Paul Manafort was named the chairman of the Trump campaign and Chief strategist. He was one of many members of a rotating cast of grifters and yes-men who surrounded the then candidate Trump.
Manafort was a veteran political operative, who got a start in 1970s working with self-proclaimed dirty trickster, Roger Stone. Manafort’s career took a bit of a turn as he started making a lucrative living by advising and lobbying on behalf of dictators and “strong-men”. In the early 2000s, he started working for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s puppet candidate to lead Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych. Yanukovych had tried to steal the presidential election in Ukraine in October 2004. There was stuffed ballot boxes an voter intimidation, and his opponent, the pro Ukraine candidate, Viktor Yuschenko was poisoned apparently by Russian agents as his faced got disfigured. This led to the orange revolution and it brought Yanukovych down and handed the election to the legitimate winner. It was around this time Yanukovych hired Manafort. Manfort was assisted by a political operative named Konstantin Kilimnick, who the US intelligence says is a Russian Intelligence official and was integral to Manafort’s dealings in Ukraine and Russia.
Manafort then gave the Ukrainian-Putin candidate a complete political makeover, dressing him like a more traditional politician. He thought him how to empathise when speaking to voters. The work paid off. The Putin candidate won the presidency in 2010. Things were going fine for this new Putin-approved president for a few years, until 2013 when he refused to sign the trade agreement with the European Union, as he opted to align Ukraine closer with Russia. This decision sparked massive protests in the country spanning multiple months. Yanukovych was eventually forced out of office, fleeing in the middle of the night to Russia in 2014. Putin was not happy. He had lost his puppet president and there was huge pro-democracy protest next door. This was a seismic moment for Putin and you can see in 3 brain geo-political moves he made afterwards.
The first thing he did was to seize Crimea Fromm Ukraine. Almost immediately after the pro-democracy protests in Ukraine, Putin sent soldiers with no flags on their uniforms to Crimea. They occupied government buildings and Russian forces quickly took control. It was, up until that point, the largest European land grab since WWII. Putin basically got away with it.
The second thing he did was to deploy official Russian troops outside the former Soviet republic for the first time since the end of the Cold War. He sent troops to intervene in Syria, and they are still there today to keep Bashar al-Assad in power. That intervention was incredibly expensive and brutal but essentially decisive. Putin managed to secure the victory he wanted, and Assad has stayed in power. That same year in 2015, Trump announced he’s running for president, and right before the Republican National Committee, where he would accept the party nomination, Trump hires Paul Manafort to come run his campaign for free. Manafort, the guy who got Putin’s puppet in Ukraine elected is now in charge of the Trump campaign. During Manafort’s short tenure, the campaign altered the Republican platform to tone down it’s support for military assistance to Ukraine, which in no uncertain terms was a direct gift to Russia, and Trump’s own ties to Russian money started coming under scrutiny. As campaign manager, Manafort also stayed in constant contact with Konstantin Kilimnick, who many suspected was the direct link between the campaign and Russian Intelligence. The two men will later go on to cook up the bizarre plot where the eastern Ukrainian territory of Donbas – now the target of Putin’s invasion – break up into it’s own pro-Russia country under the rule of disgrace Putin-backed former president Yanukovych.
Manafort was ultimately ousted from the Trump campaign after his corruption and obvious ties to Russia were too much even for them. This brings us back to Putin and his third brazen act – interfering in the 2016 election. It is impossible to measure the impact of Russia’s hack and leak disinformation campaign, but regardless, Putin again got his desired outcome. Trump became president.
Seizes Crimea. Boosts Assad. Helps Trump get elected. All in the span of 3 years.
Now he has an ally in Trump as he become Putin’s soft power. We see this play it in different ways for example, repeating the weird Russian line that Montenegro will start WW3 by joining NATO. He infamously said- “Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people….by the way, they are very strong people, they are very aggressive people. They may get aggressive, and congratulations, you are in World War 3.” Trump also delegitimise NATO as a deadbeat alliance taking advantage of The US. Putin’s influence can also be seen in the centrality of Ukraine in Trump’s attacks on Hunter Biden, which of course undermines the country’s legitimacy, highlighted its very real and rampant political corruption, culminating of course in Trump’s first impeachment for threatening to withhold military aid from Ukraine’s president, Zelensky, unless he helped dig up dirt on the Bidens.
In simpler terms, Trump helped legitimise Putin, elevated his status on the world stage, and undermined NATO. So when Republicans say that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine under Trump, they are probably right but for the wrong reasons. Putin would not have likely invaded because he didn’t need to. Trump was his ultimate gift doing everything Putin himself wanted to do – elevating Russia, denigrating NATO, delegitimising Ukraine. Trump was Putin’s useful idiot. Without him in the White House, Putin took matters into his own hands. Invading Ukraine, putting the country once again at the center of US politics.
When Zelensky called Trump in 2019, there was an opportunity for the American president to stand behind Ukraine, the opportunity to do better. Trump didn’t take it. Trump refused to invite Zelensky to the White House for a show of solidarity that Zelensky so desperately needed. Trump and his allies instead pushed that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 US elections. Rudy Giuliani led an effort to manufacture dirt in Ukraine on Trump’s political opponent. When the American ambassador too Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch was perceived a s roadblock to that project precisely because she was such a staunch opponent of the corrupt figures in Ukraine, who were helping Giuliani spin up this dirt, they trashed her reputation. Trump ultimately removed her.
Russia recently sanctioned some Americans including Joe Biden. Trump, being a useful idiot, mocked Biden for being sanctioned. Trump lies to himself that no one was harder on Russia than himself. Guess who didn’t get sanctioned by Russia? The useful idiot.
Trump you were not hard on Putin. You had a hard-on for Putin.
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