I’m not sure I understood all the causes of the current conflict in Ukraine until I read this excellent article. I knew bits and pieces but not the bigger picture. Comments welcomed. (Hopefully not paywalled.)
is the article fair? Accurate? Informative?
Snippets (from above, very long article, a very small percentage is quoted below).
“Kilimnik shared a secret plan whose significance would only become clear six years later, as Vladimir V. Putin’s invading Russian Army pushed into Ukraine. Known loosely as the Mariupol plan, after the strategically vital port city, it called for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded and -directed “separatists” were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead. The new republic’s leader would be none other than Yanukovych. The trade-off: “peace” for a broken and subservient Ukraine.
“The scheme cut against decades of American policy promoting a free and united Ukraine, and a President Clinton would no doubt maintain, or perhaps even harden, that stance. But Trump was already suggesting that he would upend the diplomatic status quo; if elected, Kilimnik believed, Trump could help make the Mariupol plan a reality.”
“As Manafort rose to become Trump’s campaign chairman — and as Russian operatives were hacking Democratic Party servers — the candidate took stances on the region that were advantageous to Putin’s ambitions for Ukraine. Ahead of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July, Trump shocked the American foreign-policy establishment by [voicing only tepid support for NATO.]… He also told aides that he didn’t believe it was worth risking “World War III” to defend Ukraine against Russia, according to the Senate intelligence report released in the summer of 2020…. The Ukrainians would have reason to be upset, and the Russians pleased, all over again a few days later, on July 27, when Trump, at a news conference, said he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory, effectively ending Obama-administration sanctions and normalizing relations that had been strained since the illegal annexation. He also, famously, invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.“
… Manafort accuses Weissmann of crafting a “made-up narrative” from unconnected facts… For Weissmann, the revelations made for an aha! moment. The partition plan, he realized, was the “quo” Putin wanted for the “quid” of helping Trump’s campaign…. “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 a President Donald Trump, as it took over Ukraine’s richest region.”… Putin has sought to justify his war in Ukraine with a barrage of propaganda — that Ukraine, with a Jewish president, is ruled by Nazis; that Russian atrocities, amply captured in photographs, videos and witness accounts, are Ukrainian false-flag attacks, staged to smear Russia; that Ukraine is preparing to detonate a “dirty bomb,” even as Moscow stokes global fears of a Russian nuclear attack. Putin’s propaganda forces, in fact, had been employing such fictions for years to sow division and confusion in Crimea and Donbas, as he road-tested a new doctrine of hybrid warfare, a mix of weapons and words.“
There’s a paywall, but based on your snippets, unless there is no hard evidence to back it up, it seems to be fair and informative.
There may have been much more behind the scenes between Vladimir and Donald, but this was certainly something that Putin wanted, and Trump seemed more than willing to bargain for it.
Apologies. A quick Google search has revealed an unpaywalled version here.
Factually, the story seems to be pretty firmly told from the vantage of the US Federal government’s agents, with little thought to how Manafort or Russia might view the matter. So, when you ask whether the story is fair, the answer is “not entirely”.
That said, fair or not, I’d guess that the technical details are accurate and that all you’d get by letting Manafort defend himself is a bunch of BS. He’s a guy that it’s reasonable to be unfair to.
For me, the more interesting question would be: Why now? Why today?
If the US government was tracking Manafort deeply enough to know what he was chatting about with Kilimnik, face-to-face, that’s unlikely to be some new revelation. It’s something that they’ve probably known since 2016 and it’s probably the sort of information that they were showing the judge, during Manafort’s plea deal hearings, to demonstrate that he was not being honest and forthcoming with them.
While he was in prison, there may have been value in keeping the information secret. After he was pardoned, there probably wasn’t anything restraining the release of this information, really.
I’ll grant that there was no particular need to dump everything that the FBI/CIA knew about Manafort, right at that moment, when he was released from prison. But - to my knowledge - there hasn’t been any reason at any point since then nor at this exact moment, either. So what changed?
Maybe it’s simply a matter of the reporters nagging the right people, regularly enough, to squeeze the information out of them at long last. But, plausibly, it’s some sort of shot across the bow to someone. That would be my hope.
I suspect the article was published with the information all in one place to inform, for the sake of completeness, and possibly as a rebuke to Individual Number One or Many. I could not say if it was considered how this article would be viewed internationally. Should this be the major focus of journalists?