Aid for Ukraine

This is a historical perspective of events and US involvement leading up to the war in Ukraine.


heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-17-2024

February 17, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
FEB 17, 2024

Although few Americans paid much attention at the time, the events of February 18, 2014, in Ukraine would turn out to be a linchpin in how the United States ended up where it is a decade later.

On that day ten years ago, after months of what started as peaceful protests, Ukrainians occupied government buildings and marched on parliament to remove Russian-backed president Viktor Yanukovych from office. After the escalating violence resulted in many civilian casualties, Yanukovych fled to Russia, and the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, returned power to Ukraine’s constitution.

The ouster of Yanukovych meant that American political consultant Paul Manafort was out of a job.

Manafort had worked with Yanukovych since 2004. In that year, the Russian-backed politician appeared to have won the presidency of Ukraine. But Yanukovych was rumored to have ties to organized crime, and the election was full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe. The U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results, while Russia’s president Vladimir Putin congratulated Yanukovych even before the results were officially announced.

The Ukrainian government voided the election and called for a do-over.

To rehabilitate his reputation, Yanukovych turned to Manafort, who was already working for a young Russian billionaire, Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska worried that Ukraine would break free of Russian influence and was eager to prove useful to Vladimir Putin. At the time, Putin was trying to consolidate power in Russia, where oligarchs were monopolizing formerly publicly held industries and replacing the region’s communist leaders. In 2004, American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of Forbes in Russia, was murdered as he tried to call attention to what the oligarchs were doing.

With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych finally won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. In November 2013, Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the European Union, refusing to sign a trade agreement and instead taking a $3 billion loan from Russia. Ukrainian students protested the decision, and the anger spread quickly. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power and he fled to Russia.

Manafort, who had borrowed money from Deripaska and still owed him about $17 million, had lost his main source of income.

Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in U.S. territories. These sanctions were intended to weaken Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.

By 2016, Manafort’s longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone—they had both worked on Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign—was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort was happy to step in to help remake it. He did not take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”

Manafort began as an advisor to the Trump campaign in March 2016 and became the chairman in late June.

Thanks to journalist Jim Rutenberg, who pulled together testimony given both to the Mueller investigation and the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, transcripts from the impeachment hearings, and recent memoirs, we now know that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “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.”

In exchange for weakening NATO, undermining the U.S. stance in favor of Ukraine in its attempt to throw off the Russians who had invaded in 2014, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign.

Now, ten years later, Putin has invaded Ukraine in an effort that when it began looked much like the one his operatives suggested to Manafort in 2016, Trump has said he would “encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies that don’t commit 2% of their gross domestic product to their militaries, and Trump MAGA Republicans are refusing to pass a measure to support Ukraine in its effort to throw off Russia’s invasion.

The day after the violence of February 18, 2014, in Ukraine, then–vice president Joe Biden called Yanukovych to “express grave concern regarding the crisis on the streets” and to urge him “to pull back government forces and to exercise maximum restraint.”

Ten years later, Russia has been at open war with Ukraine for nearly two years and has just regained control of the key town of Avdiivka because Ukrainian troops lack ammunition. President Joe Biden is warning MAGA Republicans that “[t]he failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten.”

“History is watching,” he said.

I don't agree with his politics, but he's one of the very few Republicans that I respect. He even recently said that he regretted his vote on Trump's first impeachment. He thought the 2nd impeachment might have been successful if more R's voted for the first. His perspective in interesting. I don't agree with all of it, in particular the part about President Obama's foreign policy. However, the last part about Trump supporters being pro-Russian is very chilling. I thought most of them were ignoring, unaware or didn't care about Trump's love of Putin.



adamkinzinger.substack.com/p/heres-how-the-gop-became-pro-russia

Did you hear? Tucker Carlson considers Moscow better than every major city in the United States. Are you aware that he recently reported with a sense of awe that Russian supermarkets are superior to ours and this was enough to make him “radicalized” against America’s leaders?

Do you know that GOP Representative Paul Gosar said, “Russia is not our enemy.” Or that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene believes Moscow’s invading army is fighting “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine? How about former White House advisor Peter Navarro’s belief that since it was once part of the USSR, Russia has a right to invade Ukraine because it “is not really a country.” Did you know he said this?

Lastly, have you heard that Nick Fuentes, head of the pro-Trump America First Political Action Conference, said, “I wish Putin was our president?”

Led by Donald Trump, who recently said he might encourage Russian attacks on our allies, the GOP is becoming more and more pro-Russia every day.

All of the above represents my attempt to show that before Trump, an extreme element of the GOP had become pro-Russia and pro-Putin. These folks refused to recognize any problem associated with the aid Trump received from Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign. The rest of the Republican Party embraced a similar stand. At the Republican National Convention, Trump beat back an attempt to include an anti-Russia plank in the party platform.

Today there’s almost nothing Russia or Putin could do that Trump would criticize.

For evidence look at his statement on the death of Putin’s main opponent, Alexei Navalny. A hero to pro-democracy Russians, Navalny had been jailed on bogus charges. He died in a prison located above the Arctic Circle. In response, Trump sent a coded message to the large number of Republicans and conservatives who like Russia because of its traditionalism. On social media he wrote, "The sudden death of Alexei Navalny,has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country," He added that liberals and government officials are “DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION!"

Knowing that Navalny was surely killed on Putin’s orders, Trump’s statement struck his critics at home as bizarre and politically tone-deaf. What they don’t understand is that most Americans won’t care about Navalny come Election Day. In contrast, his base will appreciate Trump’s support for Russia’s regime. They have been waiting and hoping for a president like him for decades.