Ukraine’s Tragic 20th Century, its Post-Independence Seizure by Organized Crime, and the Road to the Orange Revolution
This article covers the struggle for Ukrainian national identity during the 20th Century, how post-Soviet Ukraine was overtaken by Russian state-backed organized crime, and finally the events that led to the Orange Revolution. I wrote it as a contextual prelude to a larger series explaining the significance of Paul Manafort’s later activities and relationships in Kyiv, but it stands on its own. While reading the earlier entries to this series is not necessary, it is recommended.
Part 1 covers Paul Manafort’s early career.
Part 2 provides a background to Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch who introduced Manafort to Ukraine.
This article is partially excerpted from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
UKRAINE’S CATASTROPHIC 20TH CENTURY AND THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE
On December 1st, 1991, millions of Ukrainians gathered at polling sites to cast votes in a referendum that would not only determine their future as a people, but would change the course of world history. The question at stake was deceptively simple: independence or union. Within it lay a thousand years of history and conflicting cultural identities.
The Soviet Union was the last of the great European empires, forged by Bolshevik revolutionaries seventy-four years earlier from the bones of the northern imperium conquered by a succession of Tsars dating back to Ivan the Terrible. It’s survival hung in the balance.
The story of the Ukrainian people in the 20th Century is a story of immense human suffering and the will to survive.
These struggles commenced with the revolution of 1905, which began on January 22nd when Tsarist authorities fired upon workers peacefully demonstrating in St. Petersburg. Unrest soon spread to the Western, Ukrainian language speaking areas of the empire, in cities such as Kyiv, Yuzivka (later named Donetsk), Odessa, Mariupol, Mykolaiv, Oleksandrivske and others.
Ukrainian nationalists initially made inroads, with Tsar Nicholas II issuing an October manifesto that allowed for the establishment of a limited parliament, or State Duma, in which Ukrainians could participate, and some basic civil liberties that allowed for the flourishing of a Ukrainian language free press. However, by 1907, Imperial Russian authorities intentionally fostered radical Russian nationalism and virulent anti-semitism that ended in violence, pogroms and the reestablishment of Russian hegemony.
By 1914, the Great Powers of Europe tumbled into the First World War, a conflict that would drive a stake through the heart of three historic empires. Ukraine, which at that time existed as a geographic, rather than a national, concept, was caught between two of the empires that would not survive the conflagration.
While the majority of what today comprises the Ukrainian nation was ruled by the Russian Empire, it’s Southwestern region was administered by the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire. The division, which dates back to the 1815 Congress of Vienna following the defeat of Napoleon, would have cultural implications that reverberate to this day.
Whereas authorities in Moscow and St. Petersburg viewed Ukrainians as “Little Russians;” officials in Vienna sought to promote Ukrainian nationalism.
The First World War saw Ukrainians pitted against other Ukrainians, with 3.5 million fighting in the Russian Imperial Army and 250,000 fighting under the Austro-Hungarian banner. By the Armistice in November 1918, 450,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 140,000 civilians had perished. However, while the First World War may have ended for for some of the combatants, civil strife and violence was just getting started in Ukraine. In 1917, the Russian Revolution sent shockwaves around the world and eventually transformed the Russian Empire into the communist Soviet Union.
Not everyone in Russia, and certainly not everyone in Ukrainian lands, was happy to go along with Vladimir Lenin’s dream of a workers paradise. Immediately following the Bolshevik seizure of power in October, 1917, Russia was plunged into a civil war that would eventually claim the lives of 8 million people.
Between 1917 and 1921, during the closing days of WWI, the upheaval of the Russian Revolution, Civil War and a Ukrainian war for independence, a Republic based in Kyiv briefly arose.
Ukrainians were once again divided, split between nationalists, anarchists and Bolsheviks. Foreign powers, hellbent on smothering Soviet Communism in its cradle, supported White Russian forces as they battled, ultimately unsuccessfully, against the newly formed Red Army. By 1922, the Soviets emerged victorious and the majority of what today consists of modern Ukraine was absorbed into the USSR, the rest of it partitioned between Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.
The interwar years played out in dramatically different fashion for these different regions. In the area of modern day Ukraine under Polish rule, there existed a political system that embraced elements of electoral democracy and allowed for the formation of independent Ukrainian political parties as well as cultural and religious organizations. In the area ruled by the Soviet Union, conditions were markedly different.
The ascension of Joseph Stalin to power in the Soviet Union would have a profound and catastrophic impact on the people of Ukraine.
Between 1928 and 1933, Soviet authorities implemented the forced collectivization of the USSR’s agricultural sector. Fed by a network of rivers, Ukraine is a land noted for its rich, fertile black soil and has often been referred to as the breadbasket of Europe. As 86% of Ukrainians at this time lived a rural, farming lifestyle, Stalin’s collectivization program tore at the very fabric of Ukrainian society.
Across the Soviet Union, prosperous peasant farmers known as kulaks were branded as ideological enemies to the Communist system and on December 27th, 1929 Stalin announced a plan for the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class.”
Estimates for the death toll across the Soviet Union of the dekulakization program range from 530,000–600,000 to even higher, with Oxford historian Robert Conquest suggesting that the number could reach as high as five million.
Collectivization in Ukraine ultimately led to a devastating man-made famine known as the Holodomor. Between 1932 and 1933, one in eight Ukrainians starved to death, nearly 4 million men, women and children.
The social impact of famine and mass starvation cannot be overestimated, nor can its impact on individuals and families that survived. In 2006, the Ukrainian parliament, or Rada, passed a bill defining the Holodomor, which was ignored and denied by Soviet authorities, as an act of genocide against the the Ukrainian people.
A mere three years after the Holodomor, Stalin’s Great Terror, also known as the Great Purge, descended across the Soviet Union. Across the USSR, a brutal campaign of mass political repression against government and military officials, as well as the continued persecution of the kulaks, lead to the deaths of between 680,000–1,200,000 people.
In Ukraine alone, 270,000 people were arrested between 1937 and 1938, with nearly half of those executed. Many of the Soviet officials who had implemented the policies that had led to the famine would be caught up in the vortex of the Stalinist terror and executed in turn.
With the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Third Reich in August of 1939, the Ukrainian parts of Poland were shortly thereafter reintegrated into the Soviet sphere following the partition of that country between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Soviet forces committed war crimes in occupied Poland, killing upwards of 15,000 Polish military officers in the spring of 1940 in a mass execution committed in Katyn Forest near Smolensk.
The peace between Europe’s two most vicious and ideologically opposed totalitarian dictators could never last. Given the brutality of Stalin’s rule over Ukraine, it isn’t surprising that many Ukrainians initially treated the advancing Wehrmacht as potential liberators.
They would soon be disabused of the notion.
The Nazi war against the Soviet Union was a racist war of annihilation. Central to Hitler’s plans for a thousand year Reich was the extermination and enslavement of the peoples of Eastern Europe all the way to the Volga and the resettlement of ethnic Germans. The fertile lands of Ukraine and the oil rich regions of the Caucuses were to feed and fuel the German master race.
When on June 30th, 1941 German forces entered the city of Lviv, the largest city in Western Ukraine, members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) entered into an agreement with Abwehr, Nazi intelligence, and agreed to form two battalions in support of the German advance. They celebrated by proclaiming the establishment of an independent Ukrainian state, something Hitler had no sympathy for whatsoever.
Within days the nationalist leadership was arrested and interned in concentration camps.
In the fall of 1941 the Nazi’s set about implementing their racial policies, culminating in the Holocaust which led to the near extermination of Ukrainian Jewry and the deaths of the 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews.
Unlike many later Jews who would die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other death camps, the majority of Ukrainian Jews were shot by SS military death squads known as Einsatzgruppen. Aided by locally police formed by the German occupation administration, most Jews were executed outside of populated cities and towns in broad daylight.
1 out of 6 Jews who died in the Holocaust were Ukrainian.
While some 250,000 Ukrainians fought alongside German forces, these numbers were dwarfed by the estimated 4.5 million who fought on behalf of the Soviet Union. Of the 8 million Soviet soldiers who died during WWII, an estimated 1.4 million were ethnic Ukrainians.
Many Ukrainians were seized by Nazi forces and brought to work as slave labor in German factories to help maintain the Nazi war machine. As these factories bore the brunt of the massive Allied bombing campaigns against the German mainland, many innocent Ukrainian workers lost their lives.
The Second World War also saw the mass removals of peoples from their ethnic lands by Soviet authorities who were worried that they might collaborate with the Nazi’s, an example being the Tartars of Crimea, who were removed to Siberia from their ethnic homeland of centuries.
“The reality of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine had crushed the Ukrainian intelligentia’s dream of joining Europe,” writes Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy. “The Europe that the German’s brought to Ukraine came in the form of a colonial empire, its agents driven by notions of race, exploitation, and the extermination of “subhumans” (Untermenschen). The Soviets took advantage of this recent disappointment with the West to fuel the propaganda of the Cold War era. For years they would link Ukrainian nationalism with German fascism by constantly referring to the Ukrainian insurgents as ‘German-Ukrainian nationalists.’”
Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, post-War Ukraine was in a state of ruin and desolation.
One of the key Soviet officials in Ukraine during the war was Nikita Khrushchev, who succeeded Stalin upon his death in 1953. Khrushchev, who was born just a few miles from the Ukrainian border in Kalinovka, was just one of several future Soviet leaders with close links to Ukraine. Under Khrushchev, the bloody excesses of Stalinism were curtailed, though the Soviet Union remained firmly in the totalitarian camp.
In 1954, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union transferred the Crimean Oblast (province) from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic. The transfer was seen as a “symbolic gift,” recognizing 300 hundred years since Ukraine had become a part of the Tsardom of Russia.
Postwar Ukraine was consumed with task of reconstructing the country. One of the party bosses who participated in this process was Leonid Brezhnev, who would go on to succeed Khrushchev and rule the Soviet Union as the General Secretary of the Communist Party for 18-years, from 1964 to 1982. Brezhnev’s ethnicity was labeled as Ukrainian on some documents, and Russian on others, exemplifying the complex, fluid and often interchangeable nature of the two identities.
Khrushchev and Brezhnev were not the only individuals with ties to Ukraine at the highest levels of the Soviet power structure. Mikhail Gorbachev, the initiator of perestroika and glasnost and the final leader of the Soviet Union, was born in the village of Privolnoye, which was divided roughly evenly between ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. Gorbachev’s maternal ancestry was Ukrainian.
It seems reasonable to surmise that his ancestral connections to both Ukraine and Russia informed his belief that, while by the 1980s the Communist system had obviously failed and the political structures of the Soviet Union were in desperate need of reform, the union between Russia and Ukraine should persist. However, while Gorbachev’s reform efforts were in earnest, he was unable to save the terminally-ill Soviet Union.
Ukraine played a decisive role in the dissolution of the USSR. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster dealt a serious blow to the credibility of Soviet authorities. In the chaotic last days of the Soviet empire, resurgent nationalism became a driving force not only in Ukraine and the outer Republics, but within Russia itself under Yeltsin.
Gorbachev, representing the central Soviet power structure, was overwhelmed by events. On July 16th, 1991, the recently elected parliament of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic passed the Declaration of State Sovereignty by a vote of 355 to 4. The Declaration decreed that Ukrainian law took precedence over Soviet law. Russia had passed a similar law a month earlier.
US President George H.W. Bush arrived in Kyiv on August 1st, 1991, and delivered what New York Times columnist William Safire derisively labelled his “Chicken Kyiv Speech.”
The collapse of the Soviet Union is an event largely misunderstood in the West, particularly in the United States, where for domestic political reasons a triumphalist narrative placing the U.S. at the center events emerged almost immediately after the USSR ceased to exist.
In truth, officials in the U.S. foreign policy establishment in mid-to-late 1991 did not want the USSR to collapse. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unilateral pull out of Soviet forces across Eastern Europe in 1989, the Cold War was effectively over.
Bush, in his meeting with Gorbachev in the Soviet leader’s dacha outside Moscow on July 30th, explicitly told the Soviet leader that it would not be in America’s interest for the Soviet Union to implode and that he would counsel Ukraine against independence.
The American President was not alone among leaders in the West in his opposition to total independence for Ukraine, a year earlier British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had compared the idea of opening an embassy in Kyiv to opening an embassy in San Francisco.
Bush, concerned with global stability and nuclear disarmament, saw in Gorbachev a leader he could work with and the overriding fear was that a chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union would lead to a “Yugoslavia with nukes” scenario.
Gorbachev’s opposition to the notion of an independent Ukraine was a view widely held by the Russian political establishment. Yeltsin, fearing that a USSR without Ukraine would be dominated by non-Slavic peoples, warned Bush in their meeting at the Kremlin that, “Ukraine must not leave the Soviet Union.”
Bush’s speech, written by Condoleeza Rice and delivered in the Verkhavna Rada, supported the idea of a further decentralized Soviet Union. Bush used the occasion to praise Gorbachev for his “astonishing” achievements regarding perestroika and glasnost.
Bush offered a frank warning to Ukrainian nationalists over the idea of independence, “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”
The speech received mixed-to-negative reviews at home and was particularly criticized by Ukrainian Americans, an important Republican voting constituency that Bush needed to court as he faced an impending election. Furthermore, as it was official American policy to support independence for the Baltic States, which had been conquered by Stalin during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the early days of WWII, it was difficult to maintain the appearance of a cohesive policy. However, events that few predicted soon took a course of their own.
Between August 19th and 22nd, an attempted coup d’état led by the KGB briefly detained Gorbachev at his dacha in Crimea before ultimately failing when ordinary Russians took to the streets of Moscow and rallied around President Yeltsin outside the Kremlin.
Two days after the failure of the coup, crowds of Ukrainians gathered outside of the parliament in Kyiv to protest the complicity of the Ukrainian Communist Party and demand for complete independence.
Sensing the dramatic changes wrought by the failed coup attempt, Leonid Kravchuk, a Communist Party member since 1958 and perhaps the most powerful Ukrainian politician at the time, announced that he was leaving the party. Kravchuk pushed a slew of initiatives that solidified Ukraine’s sovereignty and announced that a referendum for full independence would be held before the end of the year.
The referendum for Ukrainian independence took place on December 1st, 1991, and passed in overwhelming and unanimous fashion.
While the failed KGB-coup attempt had all but assured its passage, the strength and breadth of its support across Ukraine took both Ukrainian, Russian and Soviet authorities by surprise. In Galicia, a western region of Ukraine and bastion of nationalism, support for the measure reached nearly 99%. In the South and East of the country, which contained more Russian speakers and closer links to Russia, support for independence was still strong. In the Odessa Oblast, 85% supported independence.
Ukraine’s Easternmost and perhaps most Russophile Donbas region, consisting of Luhansk and Donetsk, voted in favor of independence by 83% and 77% respectively. Even in Crimea, 54% voted in favor of independence. In Sevastopol, the largest city on the Crimean peninsula where the Soviet Black Sea Fleet was anchored, 57% voted in favor of independence.
Without Ukraine, there could be no Soviet Empire.
Kravchuck, who had been instrumental in coaxing his former Communist Party deputies into supporting the independence referendum, tried to suggest to a shell-shocked and disconsolate Gorbachev a smaller union consisting of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, but the exhausted and defeated Soviet leader wouldn’t even consider it.
“And what would be my place in it?” Gorbachev asked. “If that’s the deal, then I’m leaving. I’m not going to bobble like a piece of shit in an ice hole.”
A week later, newly elected as the President of an independent Ukraine, Kravchuk traveled to a hunting lodge within Belavezha forest in neighboring Belarus where he met with Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Chairman of the Belarussian Supreme Soviet Stanislav Shushkevich.
Surrounded by dense woods in one of the last remaining tracts of an ancient primeval forest that once stretched across European plain, the three Slavic leaders engaged in a spirited and alcohol soaked discussion that culminated in the signing of the Belavezha Accords.
With the stroke of the pen, the final European empire was consigned to the history books. Ukrainians, after a century of unimaginable suffering and hardship, had not only won their independence, but had changed the world forever. Their challenge was just beginning.
UKRAINE UNDER KUCHMA: OLIGARCHS, ORGANIZED CRIME, AND THE ORANGE REVOLUTION
While Leonid Kravchuck would serve as the President of Ukraine during the first four years of its independence, the fundamental political and economic fault-lines of pre-Orange Revolution Ukraine developed during the tenure of his successor, Leonid Kuchma.
It is important to note that Ukraine, like most of the newly independent countries of the former Soviet Union, experienced a catastrophic economic decline in the first years of independence. Between 1991 and 1997, Ukraine’s GDP lost 60% of its value, dwarfing the American experience in the Great Depression and the contemporaneous economic troubles in Russia, and industrial production dropped by 48%. The nadir of the economic crisis took place in 1994, when Ukraine’s GDP dropped 23% from the previous year. In June of that year, Kuchma was elected President.
During Kuchma’s ten year reign, the Ukrainian oligarchic system developed into its fundamental form. The business interests owned by these oligarchs took control over whole sections of the Ukrainian economy, seized primary control over the mass media and exerted a controlling interest over Ukrainian political parties.
“The big businessmen sponsor various political parties,” writes Anders Åslund, who worked as an economic advisor to Kuchma, “including even the Communists and Socialists, but have no ideology and seek only narrow self interest. Sometimes these business figures compete against one another and sometimes they collude; they are, above all, astute dealmakers.”
The oligarchic power structure was divided up by regional “clans,” representing the moneyed interests of Ukraine’s most highly industrialized regions.
In Donbas, the easternmost region of Ukraine, the concentration of large heavy industry plants led to the emergence of the Donetsk Clan, Donetsk referring to the region’s largest city. The other part of Ukraine which contained the largest concentration of heavy industry was Dnipropetrovsk, and thus there emerged a rival Dnipropetrovsk Clan. Together, the often competing Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk Clans represented the most powerful structures in post-Soviet Ukrainian politics.
Perhaps the defining feature of post-Soviet Ukraine was corruption in the lucrative natural-gas trade, where nearly all of the wealthiest and most powerful Ukrainian oligarchs made the lion-share of their fortunes. This economic power translated into political influence.
The system is relatively simple, Russian natural gas was purchased at an artificially low, state-regulated price and then sold at higher prices shielded by state imposed monopolies. Gazprom was the sole provider of natural gas to Naftogaz, Ukraine’s state natural gas monopoly.
The vast Soviet system of pipelines was designed and constructed by Communist bureaucrats operating in a geographically enormous but politically unified entity. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, suddenly these pipelines found themselves traversing multiple different countries with competing and often conflicting interests.
Russia, by far the largest of the Soviet Republics, contains the world’s largest supply of natural gas. Ukraine is strategically located between Russia and the energy hungry economies of the Eurozone. As of 2010, 80% of Russia’s natural gas exports to Western Europe flowed through pipelines that cross Ukrainian territory, representing 56% of Gazprom’s total profits. Subsequent Russian pipeline construction will have diminished these figures, but they remain significant.
As far back as 1992–1993, Russia has attempted to sell Ukraine discounted natural gas in exchange for control of strategic national assets and political influence within Ukraine.
In the winter of 1993–1994, an energy war with Russia led to the brief cut-off of natural gas supplies to Ukraine. Natural gas is used for home heating, and for Ukrainians in wintertime that can mean more than simply comfort but in some cases an issue of life and death.
These early confrontations and energy shocks would become a regular feature of Russian-Ukrainian relations and as Europe’s dependence on Russian sources of energy increased the relationship between these two countries increasingly had continental implications.
Much of the natural gas that made its way to Ukraine came from Turkmenistan. As Turkmenistan was landlocked and captive to a pipeline system that travelled through Russia, the country had no choice but to deal exclusively through Gazprom.
The establishment of shadowy intermediary companies with opaque ownership siphoned off profits from the natural gas trade which served to enrich corrupt officials in Gazprom, as well as connected insiders in the Turkmen dictatorship and politically-connected oligarchs in Ukraine.
The first such company involved in this process was called ITERA (later changing its name to ARETI).
Behind all of this, lurking in the shadows, was the influence of organized crime, with the name of the Eurasian Organized Crime leader Semyon Mogilevich appearing repeatedly.
With the ascension of Putin to the Presidency in Russia and his takeover of Gazprom through the promotion of crony loyalists to its board and upper management, ITERA was eventually replaced by Eural Trans Gas (ETG) which itself was replaced by RosUkrEnergo (RUE).
The latter two, and possibly all three, have links to Mogilevich. The chief Ukrainian beneficiary in both ETG and RUE was the oligarch and head of the “gas lobby” Dymtro Firtash, who became one of the most politically influential figures in Ukraine after being showered with Russian money.
According to a leaked State Department cable, Firtash admitted to American Ambassador William Taylor that he needed Mogilevich’s approval to get into the gas business. The Department of Justice describes Firtash as an “upper-echelon [associate] of Russian organized crime.”
“Leonid Kuchma presided over the total criminalization of the Ukrainian government and civil service,” writes author and investigative journalist Misha Glenny. “Most people understandably associate organized crime with drugs, prostitution, people trafficking, and similar activities. But the biggest bosses in Russia and Ukraine understood that if you wish to strike the really big money, you should invest in two “legitimate” businesses — the arms industry and the energy sector.”
Kuchma’s flagrant corruption and criminality were placed in stark relief on November 28th, 2000 with the release of a series of tape recordings of Kuchma’s conversations made by Major Mykola Melnychenko, an officer in the Directorate of State Protection.
While the FBI and independent European laboratories have authenticated fragments of the tapes and various Ukrainian politicians have verified that it was in fact their voices on them, it is important to note that Melnychenko received $100,000 from the notorious Russian oligarch and alter bitter Putin foe Boris Berezovsky while in exile in London, likely in an attempt to undermine Putin and his allies in Ukraine.
The tapes revealed that Kuchma’s intermediaries with organized crime were Ihor Bakay and his business partner Oleksandr Volkov.
Bakay, also a business partner of Dmitry Firtash, served as the head of Naftogaz and as Kuchma’s property management office. He was later wanted by Ukrainian authorities for allegedly defrauding the state of $300 million. Bakay fled to Russia, where he was granted citizenship by Vladimir Putin for his contributions on “behalf of Russian culture and art.” Putin was reportedly upset by Ukrainian investigations into ETG and RUE, which were later shut down by Ukrainian authorities.
Oleksandr Volkov, a close aide of Kuchma’s, was a representative of an international company called Seabeco, owned by the Russian Boris Birshtein.
Birshtein has been linked to organized crime by the FBI and according to a former KGB officer who spoke with The Financial Times, Birshtein was one of the businessmen cultivated by Russian intelligence to develop international business interests.
Kuchma placed Birshtein in charge of a company called Ukraina AG, which was allowed to purchase Ukrainian steel and fertilizer at depressed prices and sell them abroad for a substantial mark-up. Birshtein hired an ex-KGB officer as the company’s Vice President and Belgian prosecutors have traced payments of at least $5 million dollars to members of Kuchma’s inner circle.
Seabeco has been accused of funding Kuchma’s 1994 Presidential campaign, along with another international company, Nordex.
Based out of Vienna, Nordex is owned by the Latvian residing in Israel named Grigori Luchansky (also spelled Loutchansky), its Ukrainian representative was the oligarch Vadim Rabinovich.
In congressional testimony, the CIA linked Nordex with organized crime and a confidential report by the Swiss Federal Office of Police stated Luchansky had been recruited by the KGB to set up international business interests in the same way Seabeco had.
Curiously enough, less than a month after he had been barred from entering the United States, Rabinovitch attended a 1995 fundraiser in Miami for Bill Clinton and Al Gore and even managed to pose with a picture with the President and Vice President.
Luchansky had previously been invited to a DNC fundraiser in 1995 but was disinvited after the White House intervened.
In 2007, Boris Birshstein’s then son-in-law, Alex Schnaider, collaborated with Donald Trump on the now defunct Trump Tower Toronto Project.
According to a leaked FBI Intelligence Section report dated August, 1996:
“Semion Mogilevich attended a summit meeting of Russian OC [Organized Crime] figures in Tel Aviv, Israel, from October 10–19, 1995. Participants included Sergei Mikhailov, the head of the Moscow-based Solntsevskaya criminal syndicate, Viktor Averin, Boris Birshstein, Vadim Rabinovich, Leonid Bilounov, and Arnold Tamm. The subjects met in Boris Birshstein’s office in the diamond center of Tel Aviv. The subject of the meeting was the sharing of interests in Ukraine. While in Israel, the group traveled around the country, including a visit to a shooting range. The INP [Israeli National Police] obtained telephone coverage of the hotel rooms, detecting telephone calls to Russia, Hungary and Paris.”
The Melnychenko tape that aroused the greatest reaction both domestically and internationally linked Kuchma to the murder of Georgiy Gongadze, a half-Ukrainian, half-Georgian publisher of the muckraking Ukrayinska Pravda (Ukrainian Truth).
Gongadze’s severely beaten, decapitated body had been discovered earlier in the same month as the Kuchma tapes. The flesh from his legs had been flayed which suggested to a local coroner “that sadists had been at work.” Kuchma was recorded ordering a Ukrainian Interior Minister to arrange for the beating of Gongadze.
In November of 2002, the Governor of Donetsk Viktor Yanukovych had been appointed by Kuchma to serve as his Prime Minister as a reward for managing two positive local election outcomes. Two years later, due to the failure of a constitutional reform effort, Yanukovych was automatically made a presidential candidate.
Years of economic malaise and corruption had motivated an activist opposition in the south and west who anxiously awaited an opportunity to seize the reins of government. Kuchma was never very sanguine about skills and leadership acumen of his would be successor, nor was their sponsor in Moscow, Vladimir Putin.
Viktor Yanukovych was born in the Donetsk Oblast, the easternmost region of Ukraine, while was still part of the Soviet Union. In campaign literature he has described his childhood as “difficult and hungry,” claiming that he “went around barefoot on the streets.”
The industrial city of Donetsk, originally founded in 1870 by a Welsh entrepreneur seeking to construct a full-cycle metallurgical-plant, is located in the Donbas region. In the days of the Russian Revolution, two-thirds of Ukraine’s Communist Party members resided in Donbas.
The region was profoundly shaped by the Stalinist terror and Nazi atrocities, which virtually wiped out Ukrainian nationalism in the area. As a result, this largely Russian speaking region has been a bastion of support for closer relations with Moscow.
In 1967, at the age of 17, Yanukovych was imprisoned by Soviet authorities for robbery and assault. In 1970, he was incarcerated again for, “infliction of bodily injuries of medium seriousness.”
There has long been reporting and discussions in Ukraine that Yanukovych may have been involved in a case related to rape or sexual assault, but his his criminal files were “misplaced” by a court led by a man who was ultimately made President of the highest Ukrainian court while Yanukovych ruled the country.
An enduring gulag/prison culture across much of the former Soviet Union was one of Joseph Stalin’s most pernicious legacies. Millions upon millions of people in the Soviet Union, approximately one out of every six citizens, spent time in prison. Donbas is the region of Ukraine most impacted by this legacy. Home to 36 prisons between Donetsk and Luhansk in Soviet times, one out of every three residents had either been in prison or would be incarcerated in the future.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a combination of absent or weakened state structures, dire economic circumstances and a deep-seated prison subculture created a perfect spawning ground for organized crime.
After being released from prison, Yanukovych went to work in the coal-industry and eventually emerged as a transport executive. Following the end of Communism, Yanukovych rose within local politics, culminating in his being elevated by Kuchma to become the Governor of Donetsk in 1997.
In this role, he oversaw the formation of the “Party of Regions,” the political wing of the Donetsk Clan, which consisted of former Soviet industrial leaders, known as “Red Directors,” a rising class of powerful oligarchs, trade unionists and organized crime figures.
Yanukovych’s and the Party of Regions’ most influential sponsor was Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s wealthiest and one of its most powerful oligarchs.
An ethnic Volga Tartar, Akhmetov was born in 1966 into a coal-mining family and grew up in Donetsk. While his early years are obscure, it is believed that Akhmetov was linked to the leader of the Donetsk Oblast criminal underworld and owner of the locally popular Shakhtar Donetsk Football Club, Akhat Bragin (AKA Alik Grek).
Some scholars have gone as far as describing Akhmetov as Bragin’s “mentor.” Bragin was assassinated by a bomb blast at his Football Stadium in October 1995, with Akhmetov having narrowly escaped being killed himself having apparently been stuck in traffic on his way to the match. However, as Akhmetov ended up inheriting Bragin’s considerable assets, which provided him with the capital that eventually led to him becoming the wealthiest man in Ukraine.
Little is known about Akhmetov’s early years and he uses his wealth to field a formidable PR team and libel lawyers who make life miserable for those who look too closely into his past.
Following Bragin’s assasination, Akhmetov became a shareholder in the Donetsk-based Dongorbank and quickly began to snatch up local mines, companies and plants primarily related to the metallurgical industry. In 1997 Akhmetov lobbied Kuchma to promote Yanukovych into the Governorship of Donetsk and became his chief financial sponsor.
It proved to be an extraordinarily lucrative alliance for both parties and together their fortunes rose rapidly. The majority of Akhmetov’s assets are held in System Capital Management (SCM), which is 100% owned by Akhmetov. As of 2012, SMC total assets were estimated to be worth $31 billion.
Akhmetov at one point owned London’s most expensive penthouse, One Hyde Park, which he allegedly purchased for $213 million before dropping another $120 million in renovations. The prospect of Yanukovych taking over the presidency from Kuchma in 2004 offered Akhmetov the potential for even greater opportunities to add to his already vast fortune.
In July of 2004, Vladimir Putin traveled to Yalta, a resort city on the south coast of the Crimean peninsula to meet with Kuchma and Yanokovych at Lividia Palace, the same location where nearly 60 years earlier Stalin met with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to determine the future of post-war Europe.
While not particularly impressed with Yanukovych, that hadn’t stopped Putin from introducing him to American Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice while giving her a tour of his dacha in May. Rice recounts in her memoirs coming face-to-face with Yankovych after he emerged from a side office while she was being shown Putin’s office.
“Oh, please meet Viktor,” Putin said. “He is a candidate for President of Ukraine.”
“I greeted the pro-Russian politician and took the message that Putin had intended,” Rice writes in her memoir, “the United States should know that Moscow had a horse in the race to defend its interests.”
Putin saw a Yanukovych victory as a matter of vital strategic importance.
A year earlier, the Rose Revolution in Georgia had brought a Western-friendly government with aspirations to join NATO to the very border Russia and Putin couldn’t afford to have the same thing happen in Ukraine. Kuchma had not established the same ironclad control in Ukraine that Putin had fostered in Russia. In his weakened position following the controversial tape revelations, should legitimate elections be held an opposition victory was a very real possibility.
While Kuchma was a kleptocrat, he had spent his term in office hedging his bets with the West, even providing Ukrainian troops to assist with the American war in Iraq. Putin took the opportunity to demand that Kuchma end his flirtations with the European Union and especially NATO, which in March had added the Baltic states and former Soviet republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to the military alliance.
Instead, Putin proposed that Ukraine join what he termed the Common Economic Space, a tentative economic alliance between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan that would eventually pave the way for an economic bloc meant to compete with the European Union. Under Putin’s withering pressure, Kuchma bent to the Russian leader’s will.
It was also during this meeting that Putin and Kuchma quietly established the mafia-linked RosUrkEnergo to replace Eural Trans Gas as the corrupt natural gas intermediary between the two countries.
According to the former FSB agent Alexander Livtinenko, Vladimir Putin enjoyed a “good relationship” with Semyon Mogilevich, whose links to RosUkrEnergo and Eural Trans Gas were described above. Litvinko was assassinated in London in 2006 through the use of radioactive polonium at Putin’s personal order.
Similar to Kuchma’s belief that the release of the tapes had been orchestrated by an American covert operation, Putin was convinced that the West was actively conspiring to thwart his plans.
In a statement following the Lividia Palace meeting, Putin used KGB terminology to suggest that networks of agents and informants were working to divide Russia and Ukraine. “The agentura,” Putin claimed, “both inside our countries and outside, are trying everything possible to compromise the integration between Russia and Ukraine.”
Yanukovych’s chief opponent in the election was Viktor Yushchenko, the dapper former Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine. Between late-1999 and 2001, Yushchenko had briefly served as Prime Minister under Kuchma, during which time he supervised reforms that improved the Ukrainian economy. However, after Yuschenko and his striking blond Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko clashed with oligarchs controlling the mining and natural gas interests in the country, he was removed from office.
In an ironic twist of fate, the oligarchs banded together with the Communists in the Rada to get the necessary votes. Following his removal, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko would become the de-facto leaders of the Ukrainian opposition and challenge Yanukovych in the 2004 election.
On September 5th, almost exactly a month after Putin’s meeting with Kuchma and Yanukovych, Yuschenko joined General Ihor Smeshko, the head of the KGB’s successor agency in Ukraine known as the SBU, for dinner at the home of Smeshko’s deputy Volodymyr Satsyuk. By this point Yushchenko was Yanukovych’s leading opponent.
That evening the three men ate a dinner prepared by Satsyuk’s personal cook consisting of beer, boiled crawfish and salad and later enjoyed fresh fruit with vodka and cognac for dessert. Yushchenko left at around 2am and a few hours later he developed a throbbing headache and pain in his spine. Within days, his face soon grew blighted by ugly, discolored cysts. Already fearful that someone might try to kill him, Yushchenko decided to travel to an Austrian hospital, not willing to risk staying in Ukraine.
While being treated in Vienna, Western toxicologists determined that Yushchenko had been poisoned. Professor John Henry of St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, London determined that the marks on Yushchenko’s face were chloracne, an acute form of acne caused by the poison caused by dioxin poisoning.
Subsequent analysis by Dr. Michael Zimpfer of the Rodolfinerhaus clinic indicated that Yuschenko had more than 1,000 times the usual concentration of TCDD Dioxin in his body. The strain of dioxin was only developed in a handful of countries, which included Russia but not Ukraine among them.
While Yuschenko miraculously survived the assassination attempt, his face was permanently disfigured with deep pockmarks. Nor was this the only attempt at Yushchenko’s life. Two Russian citizens with fake passports were arrested outside of Yuschenko’s campaign headquarters with hexogen-based explosives in their car. In June 2005, Volodymyr Satsyuk fled to Russia and was granted Russian citizenship.
Despite the attempts on his life, Yushchenko refused to stand down as a candidate and campaigned with verve and vigor. Putin, hoping to breathe life into Yanukovych’s lacklustre campaign, visited Ukraine seven times in the lead up to the election.
Despite Putin’s endorsement and active participation, Yuschenko emerged as the frontrunner out of 24-candidates participating in the first round of the October election, holding a narrow lead over Yanukovych who came in second place. As the election proceeded to go into the second round in November, independent exit polls showed that Yuschenko had won a commanding victory, with 53% to Yanukovych’s 44%.
The 2004 Ukrainian election results were rigged through a far reaching campaign of fraud and falsification involving the corrupt apparatus of the state supporting Yanukovych. Voter rolls were filled with the names of the deceased, who suddenly decided to support the Party of Regions. Later released telephone intercepts revealed that the Yanukovych campaign had tampered with the Ukrainian electoral commissions server to falsify election results on a mass scale.
In a showing of mass solidarity and indignation, millions of Ukrainians refused to take the blatant theft and an election sitting down. In the immediate aftermath tens of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets in Kyiv, congregating in the Maidan, the city’s central square.
As the inflamed crowds gathered in size and passion, an increasingly panicked Kuchma called Putin, who was on an official visit to Brazil, to ask for advice on what to do. Putin offered Kuchma two options, he could either declare a state of emergency, or he could immediately transfer power over to Yanukovych.
“[H]ow on earth can I hand over power to him, Vladimir Vladimorovich?” an exasperated Kuchma asked. “He is just a Donetsk bandit.”
Before long legions of Ukrainains erected tents all across the Maidan and demonstrations reached into the hundreds of thousands. Protestors adopted the color orange, the color used by Yushchenko’s campaign, and the momentous events came to be known as the Orange Revolution.
All told, one in five Ukrainians, primarily from the south and west, participated in the Orange Revolution, making it one of the largest and most significant post-war protest movements.
While the Ukrainian Central Election Commission initially declared Yanukovych as the victor, nearly every major Western government and institution refused to recognize the election results.
On November 28th, Yanukovych gave a verbal order to deploy Interior Ministry internal troops to disperse the protestors but they turned back when the military informed them that they would defend the protestors. Eventually, the parliament voted to not recognize the legitimacy of the Yanukovych government and on December 3rd, the Ukrainian Constitutional Court invalidated the results of the election and called for another round of voting. On December 26th, a new round of voting took place, and Viktor Yuschenko was elected President.
The Orange Revolution was a stinging defeat and humiliation for Putin and would fundamentally shape not only his views and actions vis-a-vis Ukraine, but towards the West as well.
For Yanukovych, it would seem that the stunning turnaround should have spelled his political demise. However, in Ukrainian politics very little goes to plan or is ever as it seems.
In order resuscitate his career, Yanukovych would need to find a virtuoso turnaround artist, PR genius and master of the political dark arts all wrapped in one, someone who could not only completely reimagine his look and feel as a candidate, but pull-off the seemingly impossible to bring him back to the heights of power.
In short, Viktor Yanukovych needed Paul J. Manafort.
The next article in this series will explore how Manafort helped Yanukovych resuscitate his political career.
Part 4 shows how Paul Manafort helped get Viktor Yanukovych, the Kremlin’s preferred Ukrainian candidate, elected as President.
Part 5 describes Paul Manafort’s activities on behalf of Oleg Deripaska outside of Ukraine, and how Deripaska uses his wealth to spread influence abroad.
Part 6 explains Paul Manafort’s money laundering and corrupt business activities with Oleg Deripaska and the Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash.
Part 7 shows how Paul Manafort and the law firm Skadden Arps laundered Viktor Yanukovych’s reputation.
Part 8 reveals how Manafort assembled a public relations team to smear Viktor Yanukovych’s political opponents.
Part 9 explains how Manafort lobbied on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych in the halls of the Capitol in Washington, DC.
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