(Author’s Note: Just when you thought you were safe from Donald Trump, Putin’s Plan B blitzkrieg into eastern Ukraine is beginning to look like a “back door” takeover scheme once secretly promoted by Trump insiders and Russian operatives. On top of this, it was Trump who piqued Putin’s worst instincts in the first place, by encouraging him to believe our strategic partnerships are transactional and our aid commitments up for barter. Ukrainian patriots are now paying the price in blood. Source notes appear at the end of this essay.)
No one would ever accuse the murderous Vladimir Putin of going soft on Ukraine. But the recent shift of his military operations to Ukraine’s eastern borderlands, following his failed assault on Kyiv, represents a dramatic step away from his original goal of outright military victory. It also suggests a growing preference for a “backdoor” approach to victory along lines once envisioned by operatives from his own intelligence services — and two of Donald Trump’s closest associates.
On March 25, Colonel General Sergei Rudskoy, first deputy chief of Moscow’s General Staff, declared that Russian forces, having accomplished the “first stage” of their Ukraine “operation,” would now concentrate on their “top goal — the liberation of Donbas.”
This is the storied region in the easternmost section of the country where Donetsk and Luhansk have proclaimed themselves “republics” and pro-Russian separatists backed by Putin operatives have been battling government forces since the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The Donbas is 450 miles from Kyiv and therefore a secondary theater of operation, not exactly where you would expect to see Russia’s final victory parade. But given its location, it is key to one of Putin’s major fallback objectives, creation of the Russia-controlled enclave along the eastern border.
A shadow of this “Second Ukraine” is already taking shape. Putin’s forces appear to be consolidating their control along a crescent bending from an area east of Chernihiv in the north down through Kharkiv, Donbas, Mariupol and along the Sea-of-Azov coastline to the Crimea peninsula.
Once fortified, this enclave will be Putin’s political ace in the hole, a powerful force multiplier in any future negotiations and a secure rear base area from which he can launch military strikes to strengthen his bargaining hand. It may also provide a home for a Putin-backed front government capable of lending an aura of legitimacy to his demands for “restoring” all occupied territory to Mother Russia.
Zelensky could find himself under pressure to treat the puppet “president” of Donbas as a political equal, a legitimate sparring partner in any international forum to determine the fate of his country.
As an old Saigon hand, I am reminded of the communist effort in 1973 to set up a supposedly self-governing mini-state along South Vietnam’s western border – a “Third Vietnam” – fronted by a “Provisional Revolutionary Government” and designed to give throw-weight to Hanoi’s political demands.
If Putin is headed in this direction, or somewhere near it, he has two fully developed roadmaps in his knapsack, two faux “peace proposals,” to guide him.
They were devised several years ago by spies and surrogates operating on his string and promoted by two prominent recruits from MAGA World, Trump’s one-time campaign Manager Paul Manafort, and his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen (whose wife happens to be Ukrainian).
These two “peace” plans differ from each other in various particulars. But both would secure Russian control of eastern Ukraine under the guise of a negotiated settlement and establish a Trojan Horse regime there to wreak havoc on the rest of the country.
The Cohen Gambit
Much of what we know about the politics and policies that produced these plans comes from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose separate Trump-Russia reports were published in 2019 and 2020 respectively. But for unexplained reasons, neither volume provides specific background on the proposal associated with Michael Cohen. (1)
What we know about it is based on extensive real-time press coverage.
A bombshell story, published in The New York Times on February 19, 2017, right after the Trump inauguration, introduced the Cohen plan to the public. (2)
Follow-up reports in The Atlantic magazine, Mother Jones and Vanity Fair, among other periodicals, added colorful, often lavish detail. A year later, in May 2018, a brief news item highlighted a Mueller Q & A with Cohen’s Ukrainian collaborator, a far-right pro-Putin parliamentarian named Andrey Artemenko. (3)
Reporters variously described this unlikely peace-maker as “burly,” overbearing, obsessed with his own importance and marginal in terms of real power in Kyiv. By general account he fancied himself a Slavic version of Donald Trump, with an inside track to the man himself since his wife professed to know Melania from shared modeling gigs in eastern Europe.
In early 2017, many reformers in Kyiv seemed convinced (according to their own press leaks) that Artemenko had been plucked from obscurity by Putin himself to carry out the single mission of bringing his concept of a Ukrainian “peace” to Trump and his minions.
“All these signals are coming either from the Russian Federation or from allies within the country,” Ukrainian parliament member Mustafa Nayyem assured The Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe. (4)
Artemenko himself gave credence to the theory by bragging to The New York Times (as reported in its original story) that he had “received encouragement” from “top aides to Mr. Putin.”
The peace formula he and Cohen espoused called for a lifting of US sanctions levied on Russia for seizing Crimea, a Putin-endorsed ceasefire in the embattled separatist east, and an agreement by all parties to support a nationwide referendum on whether Crimea, already in Putin’s pocket, was to be “leased” to Russia for a period of 50 to 100 years.
“Maybe it’s dual management of Crimea, or maybe it’s a lease like the Panama Canal and Hong Kong,” Artemenko told Foreign Policy, adding that his proposal more closely resembled a “road map” than a set plan. (5)
“It should be obvious that there is no military solution, only a diplomatic one,” he insisted.
The cast of characters who assembled around Cohen and his Ukrainian pal to make their dream come true would have shamed a clown car.
The most colorful of them was Felix Sater, a Russian-born American who allegedly brokered Artemenko’s introduction to Cohen.
A self-professed “investment” adviser to Trump, Sater boasted an impressive rap sheet, having done jail time for smashing a glass into a tormentor’s face during a Manhattan bar fight. Before that, he had pleaded guilty to stock manipulation in a mafia-related scam.
For nearly two years Sater had worked with Cohen to advance plans for a Trump Tower project in Moscow, the same undertaking that was now feeding fevered speculation about Trump’s own ties to Russia.
Funding for the Cohen initiative came from Russian oligarch Viktor Veselberg whose assets had been impacted by US sanctions – this, from Vanity Fair. A cheering section, led by former Republican Congressman Carl Weldon, whose cozy ties to Russia had unsettled fellow lawmakers, rounded out this comedy act. (6)
The story of how these guys got their proposal to the White House is a case of Forrest Gump-meets-Mr. Bumble.
Several days after the inauguration, Cohen reportedly received a final draft from Artemenko and Sater over a liquid breakfast at a posh Washington-area hotel. He then popped over to the White House and dropped it off at the office of Trump’s newly installed National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn. But before Flynn could act on it, literally a day or two later, he was ousted for having lied about discussions he’d had with Moscow’s Ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak, during the transition period – about Russian sanctions, no less.
The coup de grace followed quickly when The New York Times published its inaugural story about the Cohen-Artemenko demarche. Carl Weldon, the iffy ex-Congressman, was outraged at what he saw as untimely media intrusion on Ukraine’s last best chance for peace. “We were so close,” he wailed to a confidante who promptly leaked his plaint to The Atlantic.
Affecting a stiff upper lip, Artemenko continued to slog around Capitol Hill for a while, flogging the proposal to gullible lawmakers. One of his contacts, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, sponsored a resolution in mid-April 2017, calling airily for a political solution in Ukraine. Artemenko claimed his proposal had shaped the measure. Portman’s press office denied it. (7)
The last we heard of Artemenko in any major news story came a year later when Politico quoted him as saying he had recently been questioned by Robert Mueller. (8)
The Manafort Gambit
Investigators for the Mueller and the Senate teams gave exhaustive treatment to the other Ukraine peace plan, the one linked to Paul Manafort.
Its true author, they discovered, was a pint-sized Russian dynamo named Konstantin Kilimnik. Mueller described him as having ties to Russian intelligence. The Senate panel pegged him outright as a Russian spy and found it likely that he had collaborated with the Putin hackers who broke into Democratic campaign computers in 2016. (9)
According to Senate investigators both Kilimnik and Manafort answered to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with extensive investments in Ukraine and elsewhere. The Senate report described him “as a proxy for the Russian state and intelligence services,” and cast him as a specialist in precisely the kind of cyber intrusion and disinformation initiatives that drove Russia’s assault on the US electoral process. (10)
In 2004 Deripaska hired Manafort and Kilimnik to consult for his business ventures in Ukraine and elsewhere, then had them do double duty as strategy advisers to pro-Russia politicians, including thuggish Viktor Yanukovych who, with their help and some ballot tampering won the Presidential election of 2010.
Four years later, amid the Euromaidan uprising, a spontaneous eruption of pro-western sentiment, Yanukovych was booted out of the presidential palace in Kyiv and fled to Russia.
But gone was not forgotten. He would soon become a key player in the peace scenario cobbled together by Kilimnik in collaboration with Manafort and Deripaska.
If the plan had been implemented – let’s call it the “Manafort” draft for convenience – Yanukovych would have been hauled out of exile and installed as front man for the prospective Putin-controlled enclave in east Ukraine.
The Mueller and Senate reports have Deripaska and/or his operatives waxing conspiratorial about the peace plan and Yanukovych’s role in it through 2018. (11)
The Plan Evolves
Yanukovych’s ouster had left Putin stunned. Obsessed as he was with restoring Russia to its past imperial glory, he could not abide the idea of once fully owned-and-operated Ukraine tilting westward — and promptly sought to rebalance the scales by seizing Crimea, then restoking separatist fighters in the Russian-speaking Donbas region.
The following September, 2014, he put a happy face on his banditry by acceding to the so-called Minsk Protocol, which had been drawn up by Moscow and Kyiv, with international mediators looking on, and underwritten by representatives of the separatist regions in east Ukraine.
While advertised as a ceasefire pact with frills, it effectively froze the violence-wracked status quo and conferred a crude legitimacy on Putin-bred fifth columnists in Donbas decked out as persecuted Russian-speaking locals.
To make sure they had every advantage, Putin soon flooded the region with the same “little green men” who had nabbed Crimea, Spetsnaz operatives with no insignia on their olive-drab fatigues but plenty of firepower at their disposal.
Hostilities re-ignited. Negotiations resumed amid heavy breathing from western capitals and in February 2015 Minsk II was born. It was mostly a reassertion of noble intent by the signatories and endorsers of the original agreement.
One of the unintended consequences of Minsk II was a sudden scramble among freebooters and grifters who spied an opportunity to ingratiate themselves with Putin by helping him wage war on Ukraine by other means.
Enter Kilimnik and Manafort with their peace proposal.
The first reference to it in any of Kilimnik’s extant writings appears in an email he posted to the chief political officer at the US embassy in Kyiv on May 21, 2015. Claiming to be keying off something overheard from third parties, he raised the prospect of mounting a new political movement in eastern Ukraine with Yanukovych as its figurehead. (12)
A few weeks later, in the United States, another cog fell into place. In July 2015, during a GOP rally in Las Vegas, an “exchange student” from Siberia, Maria Butina, who would eventually admit to being a Russian agent, asked the dark horse at the podium if he supported sanctions against Russia. (13)
Donald Trump responded: “[W]here we have the strength, I don’t think you’d need the sanctions.”
For Kalimnik and Manafort this was an invitation to dance. Here was a media-savvy mogul with financial ties to Russia and oversized (potentially blackmailable) appetites playing to Putin’s core obsession.
Could Ukraine bring them together?
The answer to that question became increasingly apparent as Trump climbed up the popularity polls, dropping bons mots about Putin at every whistle stop, exuding limitless admiration for all things Russian and a commensurate distaste for NATO.
Manafort leapt to the opportunity. Through an old friend, political dirty trickster Roger Stone, and capitalizing on his own past advisory services to Gerry Ford and Bush I, he thrust his way into Trump’s campaign and landed a job there as manager of the upcoming party convention.
For Manafort this was a hustler’s equivalent of killing two birds with one “stone.” Not only was he now positioned to manipulate the candidate himself; the political payoff he could deliver for Russia would enable him to square accounts with his controller, Deripaska, to whom he had become indebted financially because of busted business deals between them. Turning Trump into a tightly managed agent of influence for Putin would clear the ledger with Deripaska as nothing else would.
It wouldn’t hurt Manafort’s standing with Putin, either.
On April 11, according to the Mueller report, Manafort secretly discoursed with Kilimnik by email about possible ways of cashing in on his new access to Trump. He soon whetted appetites by forwarding campaign polling data to Kilimnik that would have been pure gold for anyone (like Russian intel operatives) interested in microtargeting a dirty-leaks campaign against Hillary Clinton. (14)
The following July Manafort nudged the candidate in the desired direction on Ukraine (in furtherance of Putin’s interests) by rejiggering the party platform to remove a stated commitment to lethal aid for Kyiv.
In early August, just after Trump had publicly invited Russian hackers to search for Hillary’s “hidden emails,” Kilimnik traveled to New York with a newly defined line of march. (15)
He and Manafort met discreetly at a mid-town cigar bar to discuss mobilizing the candidate behind their ever-gestating Ukraine peace deal. But there was a new wrinkle. Yanukovych wouldn’t just head up an emergent pro-Putin political movement in the east. He would be “elected” to lead a new “autonomous republic” in the “more industrialized region of Donbas.” (16)
Manafort would later acknowledge to Mueller’s investigators that this was simply a “backdoor” means for Putin to gain control eastern Ukraine. (17)
The stage was set.
But later in the month, the show fell apart when Ukrainian reformers leaked word that Manafort had once received black funds, never reported to the IRS, from Yanukovych and his equally pro-Putin political cronies. The resulting furor forced Manafort off the campaign and into political limbo.
His co-conspirator, the ever-resourceful Kilimnik, remained unfazed. Indeed, once it became apparent in early fall that Trump had a real shot at the prize, everybody who saw him as a potential pawn for Russia, including Kilimnik, Andrey Artemenko, and other advocates of a Trump-Putin “peace” in Ukraine, went into overdrive.
Simultaneously, Russia-backed insurgents in Donbas upped the carnage, aiming to sabotage the Minsk agreements and clear the way for a better deal for Moscow.
Julia Ioffe of The Atlantic mused sagely about these developments in an article published soon afterwards. “According to my U.S. sources,” she wrote, “the Russians started putting sticks in the wheels of the Minsk ceasefire negotiations in October, when they saw Trump’s election as increasingly likely, hoping that with Trump in the White House, they would get more favorable terms in Ukraine.” (18)
With Trump’s surprise victory, Putin achieved the unimaginable, installation in the Oval Office of someone who walked, talked and seemingly thought like a Manchurian Candidate though it was always anybody’s guess what was on Trump’s mind.
On December 8, during the transition period, Kilimnik reminded Manafort, who was hovering on the fringes of the President-elect’s brat pack, that there was unfinished business to attend to – the peace deal they had concocted.
In an extraordinarily explicit email, extensively referenced by Mueller and his Senate counterparts, Kilimnik explained to Manafort how the proposal was to be implemented and how Trump (“DT”) could nudge things along. (19)
“All that is required to start the process is a very minor wink (or slight push) from DT,” he noted, “and a decision [by DT] to authorize you to be a special representative.”
Once that switch was thrown, he said, Manafort could be in Russia “within ten days and could count on Yanukovych’s full support.
Yanukovych “guarantees your reception at the very top level,” he assured his friend. He also described Yanukovych as being confident “DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.”
There was no immediate follow-through on any of this. The “why” remains elusive. Perhaps it was because of intensifying FBI interest in the Trump-Russia relationship and growing public unease about the same.
Also, as a newcomer to Washington, Trump had neither the savvy nor the staff to address even the most uncomplicated policy issues.
But shutting down was not an option for Manafort and Kilimnik. They had convinced Deripaska, Yanukovych and possibly Putin himself of Trump’s exploitability and knew there would be no forgiveness if the prize slipped away.
So, they kept on plugging — discreetly. According to the Senate investigators, Kilimnik, Manafort and one or two close associates conferred secretly about the peace plan in January, February, and August of 2017, at which point Kilimnik came up with a written prospectus ponderously titled, “Reframing the Russia Ukraine Conflict In pursuit of an Outside-the-box Pathway to Peace.” (20)
He and Manafort were back at it early the following year, honing and polishing their handiwork.
Anyone who cares to slog through the first 123 pages of the Senate report will find a copy of the peace plan as it stood at that point. It is a three-page update of Kilimnik’s original draft from two years before, now slugged, “A New Initiative to Settle the Conflict in South-East of Ukraine.” (21)
Senate investigators wrote that it was designed “to gain Trump’s support,” though they didn’t explain how that would work.
On February 21, 2018, Manafort posted a copy to Trump’s official pollster Tony Fabrizio, an old friend of Manafort’s from Ukraine. Based on the Senate findings, Fabrizio was under instructions to use it in preparing a public opinion survey to determine how Ukrainian citizens might respond to Yanukovych’s return to the political scene.
It is not clear whether the survey was ever conducted. But Yanukovych’s popularity or lack of it would not have mattered. The plan in this latest iteration called for Putin and President Trump to impose Yanukovych on the intended beneficiaries.
Kilimnik’s voice comes through loud and clear in the draft. Far from being a neutral explicator of dry political precepts, he rages and thunders like Moses newly arrived from the Mount.
Citing increased violence in the eastern region of Ukraine, he accuses President Petro Poroshenko of having brushed aside the Minsk agreements and the ceasefire they prescribed. The only way to restore law and order, as he sees it, is for Trump and Putin to wade arm in arm into this mess and get the new semi-republic up and running.
If everything goes as planned (and as dictated by Kilimnik), this new “Autonomous Region of Donbas” (ARD) will have its own Parliament and Prime Minister and sufficient backing from the US and Russia to hold its own against Kyiv in negotiating a permanent peace.
Collaboration between Trump and Putin is the “key driver,” as Kilimnik explains it, the only thing that can bring the ARD into being and ensure the involvement of “Mr. Yanukovych in the peaceful settlement process.”
Trump, acting on his own, is to make a “practical effort” to convince Poroshenko to accept this new entity. But he and Putin must then, according to Kilimnik, join forces to persuade the ARD’s parliament to anoint Yanukovych prime minister.
“Election of Mr. Yanukovych as head of the ARD with consent of the United States and Russia will significantly increase chances of peaceful settlement of the conflict,” he writes. “Implementation of the plan… can in fact become a starting point for [a] return of peace into Ukraine, where the United States should play a leading role in restoring peace and territorial integrity of Ukraine.
“Personal participation of the US President will lead to stopping the bloodshed, returning political balance and stability in Ukraine, creating a stable and effective pro-European legislative majority, [capa]able of implementing effective reforms.”
There is some awkwardness to Kilimnik’s attempt to make all this seem palatable to Kyiv. “This plan will be beneficial for the Ukrainian government,” he maintains, “because Poroshenko will be able to implement his election promise of 2014 and end the war.”
As for the delicate issue of what comes next, Kilimnik prefers to leave it up to the parliament in Kyiv to “determine the legal status and timeframe of incremental reintegration of the ARD into Ukraine.”
But until that happens, the ARD Prime Minister (Yanukovych) will be much more than a place holder. Instead, he is to serve, in Kilimnik’s imagining, as “a legitimate and plenipotentiary representative of the ARD in talks with international structures within the framework of programs to rebuild the economy and overcome the consequences of the armed conflict.”
Doubtless realizing that Yanukovych will be a hard sell, Kilimnik rewrites history to make him seem a man for all seasons, not just a flak for Putin who got tossed out the door in 2014.
Ignoring Yanukovych’s proven talent for exacerbating factional tensions, he claims this Putin proxy “did everything possible for peaceful settlement in 2011 and signed a plan of peaceful settlement with the Opposition on February 21, 2014.” If these initiatives didn’t work, the fault, as Kilimnik sees it, lies with the pro-democracy agitators who toppled Yanukovych. “This plan subsequently was blown up by the radicals,” he declares flatly.
Kilimnik engages in some doubletalk about democracy with the emphasis on “double.” Despite insisting that Trump and Putin force Yanukovych on the ARD, he argues incomprehensibly that “support of this initiative by the United States will be a fair and democratic decision with respect to Mr. Yanukovych.”
Any way you read it, this is an exquisitely filigreed prescription for cramming a pro-Putin “peace” down Ukrainian throats – and a chilling look forward to a “Plan B” ending to Putin’s current offensive.
It is particularly relevant to the latter because reports out of Ukraine indicate Putin’s preferred candidate to replace embattled President Zelensky is – Viktor Yanukovych. In early March of this year a Kyiv news site, Ukrayinska Pravda, posted that Yanukovych is to be put in charge if Russian troops topple Zelensky. (22)
This conjures a prospect that would test the nerves and conscience of any right-minded decision-maker 5,000 miles west of ground zero — e.g., Joe Biden.
If Putin were to attempt in the near future to negotiate an opportunistic peace based on the Manafort-Kilimnik model, Biden’s role would be baked in. He would be expected/forced/abjured to collude in the process, implicitly or on paper, just as Trump was invited to do. How could Biden do that, given the atrocities we now know Russian troops have committed?
Peace Plans, Extortion, Escape and Collusion
One of the more interesting aspects of Kilimnik’s final draft is its time stamp. Why did he and Manafort choose early February 2018 to unveil it?
Simple answer: It was their last best chance. The clock was running out on any peace bargain. The Ukrainian presidency would be up for grabs in a year, and it was highly unlikely that as the election approached any viable candidate would be willing to embrace a controversial peace deal favorable to Putin, especially given surging pro-western sentiment in the country. Thus, if the Manafort-Kilimnik proposal didn’t gain traction now, it might never do so.
But scoring a win was never going to be easy – Manafort and Kilimnik knew that — and a series of complicated events was already unfolding that would upstage all further lobbying for the peace deal and give Trump and Poroshenko something of far greater immediacy to worry about.
Just a few weeks before, on October 30, 2017, Manafort had been indicted in a US Federal Court on charges of money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent among other things. Much of the evidence against him had been dredged up and funneled to Mueller by muckrakers in Ukraine, official and private, and was now being re-investigated by President Poroshenko’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko. Trump (and Manafort) had every reason to want that investigation shut down and an end to cooperation with Mueller. And, as reported by The New York Times, Poroshenko had every reason to want to do Trump some favors. (23)
The incentive was an urgently needed US arms package, 211 Javelin missiles and their launchers, slated to be delivered to Ukraine. By late fall, at about the time of the Manafort indictment, Trump had begun dragging his feet on the transfer.
The public story, amplified in subsequent press reporting, was that he was irked by corruption in Ukraine and wanted the handover to be a sale, not a gift, in keeping with his mantra about strategic partners paying their own way. (24)
But the real reason, according to speculation in Kyiv and Washington, was that Trump was trying to force a shutdown of Ukraine’s case against Manafort, using the javelin holdback as leverage. (25)
The veracity of this story would never be determined; neither Mueller nor the Senate investigators delved deeply into it. But the unspooling sequence of events argued strongly that extortion was in the air.
Only after much dithering did Trump’s Pentagon finally approve sale of the javelins. The dotted line was signed around Christmas, 2017. But it would take nearly three months, until the following March, for the sale to be finalized and deliveries wouldn’t be completed until May.
Meanwhile, prosecutor Lutsenko had shuffled his Manafort investigation off onto a slow-moving conveyor belt. In early April he announced to Mueller that he would cease sharing investigative files with him. (26)
“President Petro Poroshenko is trying to sell to Trump a deal,” a disgusted Ukrainian lawmaker explained to The Daily Beast. “We bury the Manafort case, and you become our best friend.” (27)
“Poroshenko is happy to please Trump in exchange for the weapons and support,” remarked the disgruntled director of Interfax Ukraine. (28)
The New York Times published a well-sourced story two weeks later examining whether there had been a tradeoff – a deep-sixing of Ukraine’s case against Manafort in order to cinch the javelin sale. (29)
Three US Senators, keying off the Times story, sent a letter to prosecutor Lutsenko, asking him to come clean. They got no reply. (30)
Why does any of this matter to the key theme of our story, the fate of the Manafort-Kilimnik peace proposal? Because it helps set up the dizzying denouement.
A month later, on June 8, 2018, a Federal Grand jury indicted Manafort and Kilimnik for obstructing justice and manipulating witnesses in connection with the Mueller probe. Though Manafort was already under house detention, Kilimnik had flown the coop. Poroshenko and his prosecutor general had allowed him to escape to Moscow, where he would remain forever inaccessible to Mueller’s team. (31)
It was a gut punch to anyone determined to get to the bottom of the Trump-Russia scandal.
In August, a jury in Federal Court found Manafort guilty of eight felony counts of money laundering, tax avoidance and bank fraud. With more charges in the works, he quickly struck a plea deal with Mueller, pledging to confess all in exchange for leniency. But the drying-up of the evidence flow from Ukraine and Kilimnik’s disappearance into the mists apparently prompted a change of mind. In November, Mueller’s team caught Manafort out in “multiple discernible lies” as they explained to the court. He thus forfeited his get-out-of-jail-free card.
Even on his best days Manafort’s interchanges with Mueller had been grudging and dodgy – and never more so than when he was asked about the peace proposal.
Mueller’s lead prosecutor Andrew Weissmann had become convinced the defendant’s evasiveness about it was a tell, a token of its significance. He suspected that the plan, or more precisely Trump’s implementation of it, represented the long elusive quid pro quo behind the collusion question, the price Trump was expected to pay for Putin’s help in winning the election (through the hack-leak operation Russian intel agencies had run against Clinton).
In a statement to the judge handling the Manafort plea deal, Weissmann provided a teasing glimpse of his theory. Recalling the Manafort-Kilimnik cigar-bar meeting of August 2, 2016, where we now know the peace deal was discussed, he said that what took place “goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.” (32)
In his recent book about the Mueller investigation, aptly titled Where The Law Ends, Weissmann elaborates on his point. (33)
“The facts we’d established even amid Manafort’s attempts to muddy them were staggering,” he writes. “On August 2, if not earlier, Russia had clearly revealed to Manafort – and by extension, to the Trump campaign – what it wanted out of the United States: a ‘wink,’ a nod of approval from President Trump, as it took over Ukraine’s richest region.
“It was a tremendous thing for Russia to ask for,” he continued. “It would seem to require significant audacity – or else leverage – for another nation to even put such a request to a presidential candidate.
“This made what we didn’t know, and still don’t to this day, feel monumentally disconcerting; namely why would Trump ever agree to this? Why would Trump ever agree to a Russian proposal, if the candidate were not getting something from Russia in return? Both Manafort and Trump were too transactional to give away something for nothing.”
What did Trump Know?
It is hardly surprising that Weissmann recognized the Manafort-Kilimnik peace plan as a recipe for Trump-Russia collusion.
Kilimnik provided the tip-off himself when, in his email to Manafort in early December 2016, he referred to the need for that “wink” from Trump, his personal authorization, to get the peace process rolling. In the updated version of the plan provided to pollster Fabrizio, Kilimnik assigned what can fairly be described as superhero roles to Putin and Trump, like Batman and Robin out to remake Gotham.
Still, the question remains: Was Trump ever made aware of the part he was expected to play in betraying Ukraine to Putin under cover of negotiations?
The Mueller and Senate reports provide no insight into Trump’s knowledge or ignorance of the Artemenko-Cohen peace proposal since it gets short shrift from them. But media coverage of it in the spring of 2017 was so extensive and in-your-face that it would have been difficult for anyone with a pulse to ignore.
Mueller and his Senate counterparts are only slightly more helpful in clarifying Trump’s grasp of Manafort-Kilimnik initiative. Though Trump declined to be interviewed in person by the Mueller team, he did agree to provide written responses to written questions.
In his carefully lawyered offering about the peace plan, he claimed that he did “not remember Manafort communicating with him any particular positions that Ukraine or Russia would want the United States to support.” (34)
Nor did Mueller, speaking for himself, “uncover any evidence of Manafort passing along information about Ukrainian peace plans to the candidate or anyone else in the campaign or the Administration.” (35)
Really?
Shortly after the inauguration, Kilimnik gave an interview to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a flag-waving information service funded by the US government. He spoke of the “Mariupol plan,” his name for the Manafort proposal, and his own efforts to promote it. (36)
A related article, circulated by RFE/RL under the headline “Who is Paul Manafort’s Man in Kyiv?” received respectable internet exposure.
Given this history – and the role played by RFE/RL, a government mouthpiece after all — it is difficult to believe the story went unnoticed at the CIA, the State Department, or the White House.
Moreover, at key moments in the Trump-Russia investigations, news of the proposal slipped into the mainstream press.
A New York Times report, published in early January 2019 recalled Kilimnik’s RFE/RL interview, noting that he had “suggested the [proposed] plan would have involved reviving the political fortunes of Mr. Yanukovych, the ousted Ukrainian leader.” (37)
Three weeks later, as part of the legal maneuvering over Manafort’s broken plea agreement, his own lawyers inadvertently released sealed testimony pertaining to the peace plan. (38)
And then of course there was Weissmann’s related presentation in court. Though the hearing was closed, The New York Times published a major readout of it, including direct quotes from Weissmann, which, in combination with the mistakenly released testimony, provided a pretty clear picture of what Manafort and Kilimnik had been up to, and what Manafort was trying to keep hidden about it.
It wasn’t something that could have escaped any keenly interested party in the White House.
But we don’t have to keep chasing moonbeams about what Trump knew and when he knew it. There is a provocative new clue that tends to anchor speculation.
In recent remarks about Putin’s on-going savagery in Ukraine, Trump has hinted he had a far better understanding of the Ukraine peace issue than he ever let on to Mueller.
“I was with Putin a lot,” he told a friendly CPAC audience on February 26 of this year. “Someday, I’ll tell you exactly what we talked about. And he did have an affinity — there’s no question about it — for Ukraine. I said, ‘Never let it happen, better not let it happen’.” (39)
The President’s phrase, “better not let it happen,” seems freighted. It suggests that at some point Trump felt pressure to satisfy Putin on Ukraine but resisted out of concern for something else. It is not hard to imagine one major stumbling block. Given the expanding scope of the Mueller and Senate investigations, he may have finally decided that delivering Ukraine to Putin under the cloak of a peace deal would be politically unsafe at any speed.
Though there is no context for Trump’s remarks cited above, we know that over a period of four years he and Putin conducted more than 16 private discussions, mostly by phone, and met secretly at the G20 conference in Hamburg, July 2017, at the infamous Helsinki summit a year later and over dinner in Osaka in June 2019. (40)
The Helsinki get-together came shortly after Manafort and Kilimnik had finalized their peace proposal. It provided a perfect opportunity for Putin and Trump to discuss the draft privately face to face. If they did so, and if Trump’s attitude was “better not let it happen,” his behavior at the subsequent press conference, where he fawned all over Putin and trashed US intelligence reporting on Russian election tampering, begins to make sense. In retrospect it looks like an act of penance, an effort to compensate Putin for his disappointment.
Sycophancy had always been Trump’s default position with the Kremlin leader, and his performance at Helsinki was a bell ringer. But if he was trying to mollify Putin with consolation prizes, the best was yet to come. Although a backdoor takeover of Ukraine now seemed a non-starter for Russia – goodbye to the Manafort-Kilimnik peace plan –Trump remained fully prepared, as he had already demonstrated, to undercut Kyiv’s defense capabilities by playing fast and loose with US aid. It was an impulse born of his own political interests, so it could be considered dependable.
The finale to our story is just plain sickening.
End Game
As Ukraine’s presidential sweepstakes entered their final months in 2019, Poroshenko did his darndest to stay in Trump’s good graces in hopes of profiting politically. According to a later New York Times report, he waged an “elaborate campaign to win over Mr. Trump at a time when advisers had convinced Mr. Trump that Ukraine was a nest of Hillary Clinton supporters.” (41)
Poroshenko’s need for Trump love was so intense, by the Times account, that his aides “scrambled to find ways to flatter the new American president — advising their boss to gush during his first telephone call with Mr. Trump about Tom Brady, the star New England Patriots quarterback whom Mr. Trump has long admired.”
Ticking off other outreach initiatives by Poroshenko, The Times listed his support of trade deals “politically expedient for Mr. Trump,” his retention of Paul Manafort as a backchannel emissary to the White House, and “meetings” with Trump’s itinerant lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who was nosing around Kyiv, looking for dirt on Joe Biden’s son and smear material to discredit the then-US Ambassador to Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch, who apparently was too straight-arrow for the President’s tastes.
On the home front Poroshenko tried to catch the latest wave of pro-western sentiment by hopping aboard a newly enacted constitutional amendment expressing support for Ukraine’s eventual membership in NATO and the EU. Rhapsodizing about the measure, which was approved February 7, 2019, he declared it a constitutional “landmark” for “movement of Ukraine to the European Union and the North Atlantic Alliance.” (42)
Putin could hardly have been pleased. All remaining hope for the one-sided Manafort-Kilimnik peace proposal seemed to be slipping away.
Was this the moment when Putin first glimpsed the need for a “special operation?”
The most immediately recognizable contender for Poroshenko’s job boasted the Trump-like advantage of being a media celebrity. As we all now know, Volodymyr Zelensky had gained fame by playing a fictional Ukrainian president in a wildly popular TV comedy.
Poroshenko warned voters during the campaign that anyone so green as Zelensky could be outfoxed by the Russians. But after the first overcrowded round of balloting, Zelensky won the two-man runoff, notching nearly 74 percent of the vote to Poroshenko’s 25 percent.
Trump by all accounts was crestfallen. So was Giuliani. Both had worked strenuously to rally Poroshenko and his prosecutor general behind Trump’s two gambits for getting himself re-elected: casting shade on Hunter Biden and finding anyone but Putin to blame for Putin’s election hacking.
Now, with Poroshenko gone and the prosecutor general on his last legs, they had to start all over again.
You know what happened next.
Trump reverted to the javelin model and froze a new Ukraine-bound arms delivery to reduce Zelensky to beggar’s status. Then in a “perfect” call on July 25, 2019, Trump made clear to him that the shipment would be released only in exchange for a “favor” – or two.
Zelensky hadn’t been an actor for nothing and deftly finessed the squeeze play. Only after a now famous anonymous whistleblower from the CIA exposed Trump’s flimflam were the arms released.
But the damage had been done, just as surely as if Trump had attempted to rope Zelensky into a bogus peace treaty on Putin’s terms. Indeed, the collateral effects were the same. America’s credibility as an ally took a major hit. Kyiv’s ability to gird itself rationally against threatened aggression slipped several notches. And Putin had one more reason to believe he could count on the Trump administration and its GOP slum dogs to abet his ruthless designs on that country.
Six months after the January 6 (2021) assault on Congress, as Trump and his rabble continued to howl down the legitimacy of the election and threatened to overturn American democracy, Putin began building up an invasion force on the Russia-Ukraine border. (43)
Colonel Alexander Vindman, who handled the Ukraine portfolio for Trump’s National Security Council and later testified against him in the first impeachment proceedings, traces the current Ukraine crisis to Trump’s epic sleaze and bad faith.
He told Vice News on February 26 that the cynical manipulation of US aid commitments had “arrested what should have been a very, very robust relationship with Ukraine” and had imposed a cost in terms of lost opportunities that had crimped Kyiv’s capabilities and slowed “ramp-up” efforts by the Biden administration. (44)
“We lost time,” says Vindman. “All that time Ukraine could have been hardening. It could have been preparing. It could have been making itself unpalatable [as a target]. It is because of Trump’s corruption that we have a less capable, less prepared Ukraine.”
And what can we say about the larger geopolitical stakes? Veteran diplomat Bill Taylor summed them up at the first impeachment hearings while he was still acting-US ambassador to Kyiv:
“If we believe in the principle of the sovereignty of nations on which our security and the security of our friends and allies depends, if we believe that nations get to decide on their own economic, political, and security alliances, we must support Ukraine in its fight against its bullying neighbor. Russian aggression cannot stand.” (45)
Meanwhile the two prime architects of the tricked-out sellout-that-might-have-been – and still-might-be – are chortling into their crystal goblets. Kilimnik dwells lavishly like an elder of the temple in a gated Moscow compound reserved for Putin’s top spies – this, according to his Wiki page. In December 2020 Manafort shed a seven-year prison sentence for tax and bank fraud and walked free to preen in his ostrich-skin dinner jacket and wallow in offshore riches, thanks to a Trump pardon.
As for Trump himself, the jury is still out – and may never convene at all.
May the brave citizens of Ukraine be spared the “peace” these three con men might wish on them.
(This piece was first published at Spytalk.co.)
References – Putin’s Plan B for Ukraine: The Trump Primer
Ref. (1): “Much of what we know” –
Report On the Investigation Into Russian Interference in the 2016 Election, Volume 1, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, Washington DC, March 2019 (Mueller Report)
Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. election, Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities; 116th Congress, 1st Session (Senate Report)
Ref. (2): “A bombshell story” –
“A Back-Channel Plan for Ukraine and Russia, Courtesy of Trump Associate”, by Megan Twohey and Scott Shane, The New York Times, February, 19, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/us/politics/donald-trump-ukraine-russia.html
Ref. (3): “Follow-up reports” –
“Senate Investigators May Have Found a Missing Piece in the Russia Probe”, by Natasha Bertrand. The Atlantic, June 7, 2018 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/former-gop-congressman-embroiled-in-the-russia-probe/562343/
“The Curious Link Between Trump’s Moscow Tower Deal and a Ukraine “Peace Plan”, by Dan Friedman, Mother Jones, August 20, 2017 https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/08/the-curious-link-between-trumps-moscow-tower-deal-and-a-ukraine-peace-plan/
“Was Viktor Veselberg Bankrolling Michael Cohen’s Pro-Russia Peace Plan For Ukraine?”, by Abigail Tracy, Vanity Fair, June 8, 2018 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/06/victor-vekselberg-michael-cohen-andrii-artemenko-russia-ukraine
Ref. (4): “All these signals” –
Ref. (5): “Maybe it’s dual management” –
“Ukraine’s Back-Channel Diplomat Still Shopping Peace Plan to Trump”, by Reid Standish, Foreign Policy, April 18, 2017 https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/18/trump-ukraine-russia-artemenko-war-peace-plan/
Ref. (6): “Funding for the Cohen initiative” –
“Was Viktor Veselberg Bankrolling Michael Cohen’s Pro-Russia Peace Plan For Ukraine?”, by Abigail Tracy, Vanity Fair, June 8, 2018 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/06/victor-vekselberg-michael-cohen-andrii-artemenko-russia-ukraine
Ref. (7): “Affecting a stiff upper lip… claimed his proposal had shaped” –
“Ukraine’s Back-Channel Diplomat Still Shopping Peace Plan to Trump, As power Struggles Heat up Back home, Andrey Artemenko Is Pushing Policy In Washington To Play Politics In Kiev,” by Reid Standish, Yahoo News, April 18, 2017. Ukraine’s Back-Channel Diplomat Still Shopping Peace Plan to Trump (yahoo.com)
Ref. (8): “The last we heard…Politico reports” –
“What’s the Ukrainian peace plan accidentally revealed to be at the center of Manafort’s latest filing?”, Brendan Morrow, The Week, January 8, 2019 https://theweek.com/speedreads/816524/whats-ukrainian-peace-plan-accidentally-revealed-center-manaforts-latest-filing
Ref. (9): “Its true author” –
Mueller Report (re Kilimnik ties to Russian Intelligence) p. 133
Senate Report, (re Kilimnik as intelligence officer) p. vi
Ref. (10): “According to Senate’s investigators… to Oleg Deripaska” –
Senate Report, (re Deripaska) p. vi
Ref. (11): “The Mueller and Senate Reports have… through 2018’ –
Mueller Report, pp. 138-140
Senate Report, p. vi, p. 28
Ref. (12): “The first reference to it… the launch of Pravda” –
Senate Report p. 83
Ref. (13): “A few weeks later… Maria Butina…need the sanctions” –
“Trump Spoke to a Russian Activist About Ending Sanctions—Just Weeks After Launching His Campaign,’ by Mark Follman, Mother Jones, March 9, 2018. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/trump-spoke-to-a-russian-activist-about-ending-sanctions-just-weeks-after-launching-his-campaign/
Ref. (14): “On April 11, according to the Senate intelligence committee… cashing in on his new access to Trump” –
Mueller Report pp. 135-136
Ref. (15): “In early August… Kilimnik traveled…”
Mueller Report 138
Ref. (16): “He and Manafort…” –
Mueller Report p. 139
Ref. (17): “Manafort would later…” –
Mueller Report p. 140
Ref. (18): “Julia Ioffe of The Atlantic…sticks in the wheels of the Minsk ceasefire negotiations” –
“The Mystery of the Ukraine Peace Plan”, by Julia Ioffe, The Atlantic, February 20, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/02/ukraine-peace-plan/517275/
Ref. (19): “In an extraordinarily explicit email… very minor wink” –
Mueller Report, pp. 142-143
Senate Report, p. 99
Ref. (20): “So they kept on plugging…August…outside the box” –
Senate Report, pp. 103, 121, 122
Ref. (21): “Anyone who cares (p12)…any way you read it” –
Senate Report (re peace plan for Trump pollster Fabrizio) pp. 122-128
Ref. (22): “It is particularly relevant…to replace embattled Presient Zelensky is Viktor Yanukovych” –
“Viktor Yanukovych: The former Ukrainian president who is tipped to replace Volodymyr Zelenskyy with Moscow’s backing”, FP Explainer, FirstPost, March 03, 2022. https://www.firstpost.com/world/viktor-yanukovych-the-former-ukrainian-president-who-is-tipped-to-replace-volodymyr-zelenskyy-with-moscows-backing-10424071.html
Ref. (23): “And as reported by The New York Times Poroshenko had every reasons to do some favors for Trump” –
“Ukraine, Seeking U.S. Missiles, Halted Cooperation With Mueller Investigation”, by Andrew E. Kramer, The New York Times, May 2, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/world/europe/ukraine-mueller-manafort-missiles.html
Ref. (24): “The public story…sale, not a gift” –
“Dems raise fresh quid-pro-quo questions about Ukraine missile sale”, by Natasha Bertrand and Daniel Lippman, Politico, October, 8, 2019. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/08/trump-ukraine-missile-sale-040915
Ref. (25): “But the real reason…”
“Ukraine, Seeking U.S. Missiles, Halted Cooperation With Mueller Investigation”, by Andrew E. Kramer, The New York Times, May 2, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/world/europe/ukraine-mueller-manafort-missiles.html
“The Democratic Letter to Ukraine”, By Lori Robertson. FactCheck.org, Posted on October 15, 2019, Corrected on October 24, 2019. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/10/the-democratic-letter-to-ukraine/
Ref. (26): “Meanwhile, Prosecutor Lutsenko… stop sharing files” –
“Dems raise fresh quid-pro-quo questions about Ukraine missile sale”, by Natasha Bertrand and Daniel Lippman, Politico, October, 8, 2019. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/08/trump-ukraine-missile-sale-040915
“Ukraine, Seeking U.S. Missiles, Halted Cooperation With Mueller Investigation”, by Andrew E. Kramer, The New York Times, May 2, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/world/europe/ukraine-mueller-manafort-missiles.html
Ref. (27): “President Petro Poroshenko is trying to sell to Trump a deal”-
“Ukraine Government Has Frozen Its Manafort Investigations. Critics Say It Is Currying Favor With Trump”, by Anna Nemtsova, The Daily Beast, updated March 28, 2019, published March 13, 2018. https://www.thedailybeast.com/manafort-who-ukraines-cover-up-could-undermine-muellers-probe
Ref. (28): “Poroshenko is happy…” –
“Ukraine Government Has Frozen Its Manafort Investigations. Critics Say It Is Currying Favor With Trump”, by Anna Nemtsova, The Daily Beast, updated March 28, 2019, published March 13, 2018. https://www.thedailybeast.com/manafort-who-ukraines-cover-up-could-undermine-muellers-probe
Ref. (29): “The New York Times published a well sourced story…” –
“Ukraine, Seeking U.S. Missiles, Halted Cooperation With Mueller Investigation”, by Andrew E. Kramer, The New York Times, May 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/world/europe/ukraine-mueller-manafort-missiles.html
Ref. (30): “Three US Senators…” –
“Menendez, Durbin, Leahy Raise Concerns Over Allegations of Ukraine’s Hampered Cooperation With Special Counsel Mueller”, Ranking Member’s Press, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, May 4, 2018. https://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/ranking/release/menendez-durbin-leahy-raise-concerns-over-allegations-of-ukraines-hampered-cooperation-with-special-counsel-mueller-
Ref. (31): “A month later, on June 8, 2018…” –
“Ukraine Continued: How a Crucial Witness Escaped”, Murray Waas, The New York Review of Books, October 8, 2019 https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/10/08/ukraine-continued-the-key-witness-who-was-allowed-escape/
Ref. (32): “In a statement to the judge… Weissmann” –
“In Closed Hearing, a Clue About ‘the Heart’ of Mueller’s Russia Inquiry”, by Sharon LaFraniere, Kenneth P. Vogel and Scott Shane, The New York Times, February 10, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/10/us/politics/manafort-mueller-russia-inquiry.html
Ref. (33): “In his recent book… Weissman” –
Where The Law Ends, by Andrew Weissman, Random House, New York, 2020, p. 303
Ref. (34): “In his carefully lawyered offering about the peace plan…he did not remember…
Mueller Report, Appendix C, p. C-22
Ref. (35): Nor Did Mueller, speaking for himself”-
Mueller Report, Vol. 1, p. 130
Ref. (36): “Shortly after the inauguration…Mariupol plan” –
Senate Committee, p. 126
Ref. (37): “A New York Times…recalled Kilimnik’s RFE/RL interview” –
“Manafort Accused of Sharing Trump Polling Data With Russian Associate”, by Sharon LaFraniere, Kenneth P. Vogel and Maggie Haberman, The New York Times, January 8, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/us/politics/manafort-trump-campaign-data-kilimnik.html
Ref. (38): “Three weeks later…Manafort’s…lawyers released sealed testimony pertaining to the peace plan” –
“Paul Manafort’s Lawyers Tried To Redact A Court Filing About Whether Manafort Lied To Investigators. It Didn’t Work”, by Zoe Tillman, Buzzfeed, posted on January 8, 2019. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zoetillman/paul-manafort-redacted-konstanin-kilimnik-lying
Ref. (39): “I was with Putin a lot… And he did have an affinity…”
“Donald Trump defends calling Putin ‘smart’, hints at 2024 presidential bid”, by David Smith, The Guardian, February 26, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/27/donald-trump-defends-calling-putin-smart-hints-at-2024-presidential-bid
Ref. (40): “Though there is no context…” –
“Trump has concealed details of his face-to-face encounters with Putin from senior officials in administration”, by Greg Miller. The Washington Post, January 13, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-has-concealed-details-of-his-face-to-face-encounters-with-putin-from-senior-officials-in-administration/2019/01/12/65f6686c-1434-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html
“Trump met Putin in Helsinki. More than 200 days later, will we ever find out what they said?”, By Adam Taylor, The Washington Post, March 5, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/03/05/trump-met-putin-helsinki-more-than-days-later-will-we-ever-find-out-what-they-said/
“Still a summit secret: What happened in Helsinki between Putin and Trump?” by Benjamin Siegel. ABC News, June 16, 2021. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/summit-secret-happened-helsinki-putin-trump/story?id=78273344
“Trump has spoken privately with Putin at least 16 times. Here’s what we know about the conversations”, By Adam Taylor, The Washington Post, October 4, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/10/04/trump-has-spoken-privately-with-putin-least-times-heres-what-we-know-about-conversations/
Ref. (41): “As Ukraine’s presidential sweepstakes… According to a later New York Times report, he waged “an elaborate campaign to win over Mr. Trump…” –
“Inside Ukraine’s Push to Cultivate Trump From the Start”, by Mark Mazzetti, Eric Lipton and Andrew E. Kramer, The New York Times, published November 4, 2019, updated November 11, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/us/politics/poroshenko-trump-ukraine.html
Ref. (42): “On the home front Poroshenko tried to catch he wave… movement of Ukraine to the European Union” –
NATO Relations Ukraine, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations
Ref. (43): “Six months after January 6 assault on Congress, as Trump and his rabble” –
“This Was Trump Pulling a Putin”, by Robert Draper, The New York Times Magazine, April 11, 2022.
Colonel Vindman quote: “Ukraine became radioactive for the duration of the Trump administration. There wasn’t serious engagement. Putin had been wanting to reclaim Ukraine for eight years, but he was trying to gauge when was the right time to do it. Starting just months after Jan. 6, Putin began building up forces on the border. He saw the discord here.”
Ref. (44): “He told Vice News” –
“Lt. Col. Vindman: Trump ‘Absolutely’ at Fault for Russia’s Ukraine Invasion”, by Cameron Joseph, Vice News February 26, 2022. https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7n9dq/alexander-vindman-russia-ukraine-invasion
Ref (45): “If we believe in… the sovereignty of nations” –
“Read Ambassador William Taylor’s full opening statement”, by Candice Norwood, PBS Newshour, October 22, 2019. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-ambassador-william-taylors-full-opening-statement