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In 2005, the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Ahmetov summoned Manafort to Kiev. Ahmetov hailed from Donetsk, the Russian-oriented heavy-industry east of the country. Ahmetov had cause for panic. The best political hope for his region, and, more to the point, his own business interests, was a gruff politician called Victor Yanukovych. As a teen, Yanukovych spent three years in prison for robbery and assault. After his release, he was again arrested for assault. None of this past history—these “youthful mistakes,” which he once instructed the KGB to expunge from his record—slowed his rise through the political ranks. In 2002, he served a brief stint as prime minister in a sclerotic pro-Russian government, mired in corruption scandals.
When Ahmetov summoned Manafort, in 2005, his candidate had suffered a crushing defeat. Yanukovych had just run for president of Ukraine, a campaign that involved rampant fraud and the possible poisoning of his opponent with dioxin. His bid ended in massive protests against him and his crude attempts to overturn the will of the people. The protests, the Orange Revolution, were a burst of optimism that Ukraine might transcend its past and take its seat as a European-style democracy. They should have destroyed Yanukovych’s career.
Yanukovych seemed a hopeless case. “A kleptocratic goon, a pig who wouldn’t take lipstick” is how one American consultant who worked in Ukraine described him. Yet Manafort saw hope, as well as a handsome paycheck. Despite Yanukovych’s Soviet style, Manafort considered him political clay that could be molded. “He saw raw talent where others didn’t and he shaped it brilliantly,” one former State Department official told me. Manafort set about giving Yanukovych a new look: well-tailored suits, shirts and ties that matched, a haircut that tamed his raging bouffant. Manafort taught the pol a few simple lessons that helped sand down his edges. He showed him how to wave to a crowd, rather than keep his arms locked to his sides. He instructed him to refrain from speaking off the cuff. He taught him how to display a modicum of empathy when listening to the stories of voters. “I feel your pain,” Yanukovych would now exclaim at his rallies. One Ukrainian columnist cheekily asked his readers to identify the 10 elements of Yanukovych rallies that Manafort had imported from the Republican conventions he’d run.
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At the same time, Manafort understood how to accentuate divisions in the Ukrainian electorate. He had overseen Reagan’s Southern strategy; he understood the power of cultural polarization. His polling showed that Yanukovych could consolidate his base by stoking submerged grievances. Even though there was little evidence of the mistreatment of Russian language speakers by the Ukrainian state, he encouraged his candidate to make an issue of imagined abuses to rally their base. To the same end, he instructed Yanukovych to rage against NATO, which he did by condemning joint operations the alliance was conducting in Crimea.
When American Ambassador William Taylor arrived in Kiev in 2006, he summoned Manafort to a meeting in his office. Manafort would become a fixture in the offices of American ambassadors to Ukraine, the U.S. government’s primary conduit to Yanukovych and the pro-Russian camp. As Taylor told a group of American democracy activists just after the meeting, he had asked Manafort to tamp down Yanukovych’s criticisms of the joint operations NATO was conducting with the Ukrainians. The implications of his ask were clear: The interests of American security were hurt by such rhetoric. “American to American, I’m asking you to talk to him.” Manafort scoffed at the notion. He bluntly announced that he wouldn’t ask Yanukovych to dial back the rhetoric. It polled too well.
To be fair, Manafort was hardly the only American in Yanukovych’s orbit. Bernie Sanders’ consultant Tad Devine went to work for him in 2009. Ukrainians spent heavily in Washington, hiring a small army of top-drawer Republican lobbyists, including former congressmen Vin Weber and Billy Tauzin, to bolster Yanukovych’s image in Washington and ultimately stave off American support for Ukrainian democracy.
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In 2005, John McCain received a call from a staffer on the National Security Council. There was a problem, the staffer told the senator. The man orchestrating McCain’s presidential campaign was Paul Manafort’s partner, a lobbyist named Rick Davis. The administration wanted the senator’s help dialing back the duo’s work in Ukraine, two top McCain aides told me. By promoting enemies of the Orange Revolution, they were undermining American policy.
The call came after Manafort and Davis had already drawn McCain into their eastern escapades. It wasn’t just Ukraine. That year, the pair had consulted on behalf of pro-independence forces in the tiny principality of Montenegro, which wanted to exit Serbia and become its own sovereign republic. On the surface, this sounded noble enough, so noble that McCain called Montenegro’s independence the “greatest European democracy project since the end of the Cold War.”
A report in the Nation, however, showed that the Montenegrin campaign wasn’t remotely what McCain described. The independence initiative was championed by a fantastically wealthy Russian mogul called Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska had parochial reasons for promoting independence. He had just purchased Montenegro’s aluminum industry and intended to buy broader swaths of its economy. But he was also doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin, on whose good graces the fate of all Russian business ultimately hangs. The Nation quoted Deripaska boasting that “the Kremlin wanted an area of influence in the Mediterranean.”
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Not everyone within the McCain camp felt comfortable with this relationship. One group of aides pushed hard for McCain to fire Rick Davis for sullying the senator with the firm’s muck. McCain intended to do just that. The senator had backed the cause of Ukrainian democracy and he couldn’t stomach his top aide’s firm working to undermine it. What’s more, aides had come to McCain with the rumor that Deripaska had purchased an apartment in Trump Tower for Davis and Manafort. But in the moment, McCain lost his nerve, as his aides have recounted the episode. Davis supplied a tear-filled soliloquy that saved his job. “Rick’s plea somehow worked—and that was the root of the divisions that tore apart the campaign,” one of McCain’s top advisers told me.
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Deripaska wasn’t the only dubious oligarch to invest with Manafort. He orchestrated a major deal with a Ukrainian called Dmitry Firtash. A fireman and soldier, Firtash found ways to flourish in the post-Soviet economy as a middleman, selling natural gas—by his own admission, he did so thanks to his connections with Seymon Mogilevich, the Russian Mafia’s “boss of bosses.”
But his crucial connection was to Vladimir Putin. Firtash’s grand scheme was detailed in a thorough investigation published by Reuters. Gazprom, the Russian state-owned natural gas conglomerate, would sell to Firtash at a deep discount. Firtash, in turn, resold the gas to the Ukrainian government, investing the profit in funding for pro-Putin politicians, including Victor Yanukovych.
Reuters was blunt in describing the pernicious effect of Firtash’s dealings:
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It demonstrates how Putin uses Russian state assets to create streams of cash for political allies, and how he exported this model to Ukraine in an attempt to dominate his neighbour, which he sees as vital to Russia’s strategic interests. With the help of Firtash, Yanukovich won power and went on to rule Ukraine for four years. The relationship had great geopolitical value for Putin: Yanukovich ended up steering the nation of more than 44 million away from the West’s orbit and towards Moscow’s until he was overthrown in February.
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It was a good moment for Firtash to park his cash in Manhattan. His arch-enemy Yulia Tymoshenko, an old natural gas broker herself, had come to power a year earlier. She moved aggressively against Firtash, whose company she described as “a wart on the body.” She cut her own deal with Putin for the supply of energy, eliminating Firtash from the business. And she seized his massive stockpile of gas, effectively nationalizing the source of his fortune.
Defeating Tymoshenko thus became Firtash’s primary goal in life. He spent heavily on Yanukovych’s campaign against her in 2010. Fortunately for Firtash, Manafort was on the job. When the consultant first arrived in Kiev, Yanukovych was the subject of near universal derision. But his years of grooming Yanukovych, and perfecting his political machinery, carried him to victory—a narrow win rooted in the missteps of his opponents, but one that would have never happened without skilled reinvention. Marveling at this accomplishment, the Ukranian journalist Mustafa Nayeem wrote that Manafort was “the only person who really adapted to Ukrainian political reality.”
As soon as Yanukovych came to power, he restored Firtash’s business. Most important, the new government settled a lawsuit that Firtash had filed objecting to Tymoshenko’s seizure of his gas. As part of the settlement, the government handed $3 billion worth of natural gas to Firtash: his old stash plus an extra billion cubic meters of gas thrown into the deal as compensation for his troubles. Der Spiegel, which reviewed the text of the settlement, concluded, “Viktor Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine, served the commercial interests of an oligarch with whom he has close ties—at the expense of his own country. And, in doing so, he also did Moscow a favor.”
