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Is Donald Trump’s Campaign Manager Still on the Payroll of a Ukrainian Political Leader?

by MargieLadner7 Posted on August 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Is Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, still on the payroll of a Ukrainian politician or party?

According to the New York Times, which on Monday published an investigation into Manafort’s decadelong involvement in Ukrainian politics, the answer is unclear. As the Times detailed, Manafort—who has a lengthy history of helping dictators and strongmen rehab their reputations—once represented Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian politician with ties to Vladimir Putin who fled Ukraine in 2014 as demonstrations and uprisings raged in the country. But Manafort’s work in Ukraine didn’t end with Yanukovych’s ouster. He subsequently went to work for Serhiy Lyovochkin, Yanukovych’s former chief of staff, to revitalize Yanukovych’s beleaguered political party. The Times reported this intriguing detail near the end of its article:

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.

Hope Hicks, Trump’s spokeswoman, did not respond immediately to questions about whether Manafort is currently involved in any work related to Ukrainian politics. If Manafort does have active ties to Lyovochkin or other Ukrainian politicians, this would raise conflict-of-interest questions and fuel the controversy surrounding Trump’s foreign policy stance on Russia and his relationship with Putin.

The Trump campaign has raised the eyebrows of the press and many foreign policy experts by repeatedly advocating a softer stance toward Russia. Over the weekend, for instance, Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he would look into recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea and that the people of Crimea would rather be part of Russia (which also happens to be the official line of the Kremlin).

Another example of the Trump campaign’s pro-Russia maneuvering came last month while the Republican Party was drafting its platform in Cleveland. According to the Washington Post, Trump aides removed a provision from the platform that called for the United States to provide “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine’s military to defend itself against Russia and dissidents. Instead, the campaign worked behind the scenes to replace the pledge to provide weapons with a call for “appropriate assistance.”

When Stephanopoulos asked Trump about this change in the platform, Trump said he had not been involved. But he added, “It’s, well, you know, I have my own ideas.”

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Is Donald Trump’s Campaign Manager Still on the Payroll of a Ukrainian Political Leader?

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Donald Trump Has Nice Things to Say About Megalomaniac Autocrats

by John Parks Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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When Donald Trump recently praised former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein at a rally in North Carolina, it was not his first time expressing admiration for dictators and despots. In the past, he has complimented North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin. His top political operative, Paul Manafort, a veteran Republican lobbyist and consultant, has made millions of dollars working the system on behalf of corporations seeking government favors as well as Third World strongmen and kleptocrats.

In fact, the two men have been involved with an unusual number of the world’s autocrats and despots. Here are a few whom Trump has praised or for whom Manafort has worked, and some of their most notable abuses of power.

Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein: During Saddam’s reign in Iraq from 1979 to 2003, human rights groups documented numerous instances in which the regime engaged in brutal torture, systematic rape, arbitrary executions that included beheadings, and other abuses. After Saddam was captured in 2003 by US forces, the New York Times estimated that his regime had contributed to approximately 1 million deaths in Iraq’s prisons and in the war he had launched against Iran.

Trump connection: At a rally in North Carolina in July, Trump said of Saddam: “He was a bad guy—really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. It was over. Today, Iraq is Harvard for terrorism.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin: Since returning to power in 2012, Putin has passed laws and instituted policies that crack down on freedom of expression and assembly. A 2012 law targeted groups that accept foreign funding—often NGOs with social justice causes. Authorities have arrested hundreds of activists at opposition rallies across the country. Under Putin, the Russian parliament also unanimously passed several pieces of anti-gay legislation, including the “gay propaganda” bill, passed in the run-up to the 2014 Sochi Olympics, that emboldened vigilante gangs to torment gay people. Some Russia researchers and Putin opponents suggest a link between Putin, one of his allies, and the 2015 killing of Boris Nemtsov, a prominent opposition activist, as well as the deaths of other opposition figures.

Trump connection: “I think Putin’s been a very strong leader for Russia,” Trump said during a GOP debate in March. “He’s been a lot stronger than our leader, that I can tell you.” A few months prior, Trump said in an interview with ABC, “In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that. I don’t know that he has.”

Former Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi: Gaddafi’s 42-year reign in Libya was marked by the arrest, imprisonment, disappearance, or torture of thousands of government critics, protesters, and civilians perceived to be in cahoots with the political opposition. The regime also sanctioned televised public hangings and mutilation of political opponents. In 1996, security forces fatally shot more than 1,000 inmates at a Libyan prison.

Trump connection: In a February GOP debate, Trump said, “We would be so much better off if Gaddafi were in charge right now.”

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un: Last week, the US government issued sanctions against the North Korean leader as well as 10 other North Korean officials for their complicity in human rights abuses. “Under Kim Jong Un, North Korea continues to inflict intolerable cruelty and hardship on millions of its own people, including extrajudicial killings, forced labor, and torture,” said Adam J. Szubin, acting undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, in a press release. The Treasury Department singled out Kim Jong Un’s Ministry of State Security, which maintains a network of prison camps that hold 80,000 to 120,000 people. Egregious abuses in these state-run camps are common, according to the Treasury Department, and include “torture and inhumane treatment of detainees during interrogation and in detention centers. This inhumane treatment includes beatings, forced starvation, sexual assault, forced abortions, and infanticide.”

Trump connection: At a January rally in Iowa, just days after North Korea said it had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb, Trump said, “If you look at North Korea, this guy, he’s like a maniac, okay? And you got to give him credit. How many young guys—he was like 26 or 25 when his father died—take over these tough generals and all of a sudden, you know, it’s pretty amazing when you think of it. How does he do that? Even though it is a culture, and it’s a culture thing, he goes in, he takes over, he’s the boss. It’s incredible.”

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad: According to a 2016 Human Rights Watch summary on Syria, Assad’s government has been carrying out “deliberate and indiscriminate” attacks on civilians while doing little to end the ongoing civil war. “Incommunicado detention and torture remain rampant,” Human Rights Watch noted. A UN Human Rights Council report found that many detainees in Syrian prisons had been beaten to death or died as a result of injuries sustained during torture or due to inhumane living conditions. “The Government has committed the crimes against humanity of extermination, murder, rape or other forms of sexual violence, torture, imprisonment, enforced disappearance and other inhuman acts,” the UN concluded.

Trump connection: On a June 2015 episode of The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News, Trump discussed his Middle East policy shortly after announcing his run for president. “So we’re helping the head of Syria, who is not supposed to be our friend,” Trump said, “although he looks a lot better than some of our so-called friends.”

Ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych: Yanukovych served as Ukraine’s president from 2010 to 2014 before being ousted in February 2014, following mass protests against his regime in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. His rule was marked by a slide from democracy to a more authoritarian style of government. Yanukovych’s regime jailed officials of the previous administration, including the former prime minister. Following Yanukovych’s ouster, a warrant was issued for his arrest due to involvement in the “mass killing of civilians,” related to the deaths of at least 82 people, primarily protesters, in Kiev earlier that winter.

Trump connection: Manafort was first hired to work for Yanukovych on his 2004 presidential campaign. Yanukovych was momentarily victorious but lost power after allegations of massive electoral fraud led to the Orange Revolution and a revote in which Yanukovych lost. He was appointed prime minister in 2006 and soon hired Manafort again to help his party win that year’s parliamentary elections. Manafort then stayed on as a general consultant. He worked on Yanukovych’s messaging and brand, trying to help the strongman and his party improve their image in the eyes of the Ukrainian people. After the 2010 presidential election, which Yanukovych won, Manafort continued working for him as an adviser. A former associate familiar with Manafort’s earnings told Politico that his total pay from work with Yanukovych ran into the seven figures.

Jonas Savimbi, former Angolan guerilla army leader: Savimbi and his guerilla army, UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), tried for decades to overthrow the Angolan government. In the process, they maimed or killed tens of thousands of civilians with land mines, and a Human Rights Watch report described men being forcibly recruited to fight, girls held in sexual slavery, and random killings or beatings of suspected government sympathizers.

Trump connection: With Angola in the middle of a civil war in 1985, Savimbi paid Manafort’s DC lobbying firm $600,000 to help him get funds and other support from the US government for UNITA’s work to overthrow the government. The lobbying effort led Sen. Bob Dole to encourage the United States to send additional arms to UNITA and the Reagan administration to funnel $42 million to UNITA from 1986 to 1987. Several sources, including Sen. Bill Bradley, have credited Savimbi’s continued willingness to pay large sums to Manafort’s firm, and the continued US funds that Manafort’s firm lobbied for, with delaying a cease-fire and protracting the violence in Angola.

Mobutu Sese Seko, former ruler of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo): Mobutu seized power of the Democratic Republic of Congo in a 1965 coup. He renamed the country the Republic of Zaire in 1971 and would remain its president until 1997. Mobutu established a political structure that kept most power in his hands, and he used his power to steal a fortune from the state for himself, while the rest of the country floundered economically. His regime was also marked by brutal treatment of its citizens: widespread torture of political opposition, illegal searches, military looting, beating, rapes, and arbitrary arrest and detention, often without a fair trial.

Trump connection: In 1989, Mobutu hired Manafort’s firm to orchestrate a PR campaign to clean up his image. Mobutu paid the firm $1 million a year for this service.

Sani Abacha, former president of Nigeria: Abacha became the head of Nigeria in 1993, when he overthrew a transitional government. The following year, he formally assigned absolute power to his regime, issuing a decree that placed his jurisdiction above that of the courts. His rule ended in 1998 with his death, but in the intervening years Abacha’s regime engaged in brutal treatment of Nigerian citizens: He arrested or executed his opponents, shut down democratic institutions, and reportedly stole nearly $500 million from the government for his own personal coffers.

Trump connection: Abacha hired a firm run by Manafort in 1998 to help him orchestrate a PR campaign that would convince Americans that he was the leader of “a progressive emerging democracy,” wrote the New York Times in 2000. The Times reported that the Abacha account was handled primarily by Manafort himself.

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Donald Trump Has Nice Things to Say About Megalomaniac Autocrats

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Russia Is Crushing Ukraine’s Hopes for Energy Independence

by OmarPtrppfziz Posted on April 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in The Atlantic and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk initiative.

Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine has never looked more likely.

In events that eerily resemble the prelude to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, pro-Russian demonstrators have overtaken government buildings in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv, Luhansk, and Donetsk, proclaiming a “people’s republic” in Donetsk and snagging weapons and possibly hostages in Luhansk (Ukrainian police have regained control in Kharkiv). Oleksandr Turchynov, Ukraine’s acting president, has blamed Moscow-organized instigators for the unrest, as fears mount in the West that Russia, whose troops are massed along Ukraine’s eastern border, could seize Ukraine’s industrial heartland next.

If that happens, Russian President Vladimir Putin would acquire various forms of leverage over the young, weak, and pro-Western Ukrainian government—including an often-overlooked one: Ukraine would have little hope of achieving energy independence from Russia.

Energy politics and Ukrainian politics are often the same thing. Around 40 percent of the energy Ukraine consumes comes from natural gas, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Three-fifths of the 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas Ukraine uses each year is imported from Russia, with the rest domestically produced. This gives Russia a significant bargaining chip in its relations with Kiev—one that Moscow isn’t afraid to use. Gazprom, a Russian energy conglomerate with close ties to the Kremlin, raised gas prices for Ukraine by 81 percent earlier this month, prompting Ukraine’s interim prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, to accuse Russia of “economic aggression.”

Even ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s pre-revolution government sought greater energy independence from Russia after bitter price disputes with Moscow and two gas-supply shutdowns in 2006 and 2009. A 2011 OECD analysis identified three major objectives for Ukraine’s energy strategy: doubling electricity production between 2005 and 2030, shifting thermal power plants from gas-fired units to ones fueled by domestically produced coal, and increasing nuclear-power generation. Last August, Kiev approved a new energy strategy through 2030 to reduce its dependence on foreign-energy sources through investment in renewable-energy sources and greater utilization of domestic energy reserves.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, the Crimean peninsula was crucial to the country’s energy-diversification plans. Yanukovych had opened negotiations with Azerbaijan, Russia’s last remaining ex-Soviet energy rival, as part of his effort to build a liquid-natural-gas pipeline terminal on Crimea’s Black Sea coast. The peninsula also sits atop vast underwater gas basins in the Black Sea, estimated to contain between 4 and 13 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. As Ukraine’s southernmost territory, the peninsula has the highest solar-energy potential in the country and already featured one of Europe’s largest photovoltaic parks. Its mountainous coastline holds strong wind-energy potential, with seven wind plants already built there and more planned before the crisis. But all of that infrastructure and investment now rests in Russian hands.

The main gas pipeline in the village of Boyarka, near the capital Kiev. AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov

The loss of Crimea only further weakened Ukraine’s already-tenuous energy security. Almost all of the fuel for Ukraine’s 15 state-owned nuclear reactors, which accounts for almost half of the electricity the country generates, comes from Russia. Ukraine’s domestic reserves of uranium are paltry, and it lacks the enrichment capacity to turn what it does have into usable fuel. Russia, by comparison, is a net uranium exporter to Europe and owns nearly half of the world’s enrichment capacity.

Ukraine still has some domestic-energy alternatives in the long term, but these require significant investment. The country possesses the third-largest shale gas reserves in Europe, estimated to hold nearly 1.2 trillion cubic meters, but commercial extraction isn’t slated to begin until 2020 at the earliest. That timeline might have been overly optimistic even before the revolution, considering the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and the public resistance that comes with it. Another complicating factor is location: one of the two large fields, the Yuzivska field, falls almost entirely within the Donetsk and Kharkiv oblasts, two of the eastern regions in which Ukraine has accused Russia of fomenting revolts.

Coal, the remaining option, is more readily accessible. It makes up almost 95 percent of Ukraine’s current domestic-energy resources and roughly 30 percent of Ukraine’s energy consumption. Viktor Turmanov, a Ukrainian lawmaker and head of the national coal industry’s trade union, boasted in 2012 that the country’s coal reserves would last for 400 years. Emphasizing Ukrainian coal over Russian natural gas became a priority even under Yanukovych. Now, it’s become a necessity. Ukraine’s Minister of Energy and Coal Industry Yuriy Prodan told a cabinet meeting last week that Ukraine is “now reviewing our electricity and fuel balance for 2014 with a view of using as much domestic coal as possible at the expense of natural gas.”

That won’t be easy, thanks to Ukraine’s haphazard coal-mining industry. Donetsk’s regional economy, which is driven mostly by heavy industry and the coal industry that fuels it, is responsible for between 10 and 15 percent of Ukraine’s GDP. But the region’s heavily subsidized mining companies suffer from limited modernization and chronic inefficiency. An abundance of illegal surface mines called kopanki also drive down prices, as the criminal syndicates that run them don’t bother paying taxes or spending money on employee health insurance and safety equipment, allowing them to sell their coal at one-fifth of the price offered by licensed mines. If coal is to become the future of Ukrainian energy, the government will need to make major investments and broad reforms in the sector.

But none of that will matter if Russia moves west. Losing the Donets Basin would sever Ukraine from nine-tenths of its coal reserves, the sixth-largest national reserves in the world overall, and losing the Yuzivska gas field would rob it of a large portion of its remaining shale-gas reserves. Without those, and with Crimea already lost for the foreseeable future, Ukraine’s hopes for energy independence would be lost.

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Russia Is Crushing Ukraine’s Hopes for Energy Independence

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