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bne July 2018 Cover Story I 25
Infamous US lobbyist Paul Manafort organised EU luminaries to plead with Brussels to sign off on an Association Agreement with Ukraine without the freeing of jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko in 2012-2013, his flight records, revealed
by bne IntelliNews for the first time, show.
Manafort organised the lobby-
ing campaign on the orders
of Ukrainian president Vik-
tor Yanukovych, who was ousted by mass demonstrations in Kyiv when he eventually failed to sign the deal, despite Manafort successfully removing Tymosh- enko’s freedom from the deal.
The information backs up allegations made by US special consul Robert Muel- ler that, as part of the campaign to do
an Association Agreement deal without conceding the EU demand that Tymosh- enko be freed first, Manafort retained EU “super VIPs” to lobby for Yanukovych.
The flight records also reveal Manafort remained a player in Ukraine after the Maidan revolution and played a leading role in Ukraine’s political settlement after the fall of Yanukovych in February 2014.
For the first time the records provide evi- dence that Manafort remained intensely involved in Ukraine until as late as 2015 – only months before he signed up as US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign manager.
VIP trips
The story starts with a key meeting in Rome in 2013. Flanked by EU elder statesmen, all former heads of their respective states, Yulia Lovochkina, a charismatic Ukrainian politician at the heart of the Yanukovych administration, addressed a select gathering in Rome on the topic of Ukraine’s goal of signing an Association Agreement with the EU.
Yanukovych has since been dubbed as “pro-Russian” but in the last two years of his administration he worked very hard to try and close the European trade deal that is still the central plank of the country’s “turn to the west” in the hopes
it would open up Ukraine to more trade and investment from western Europe.
“Ukraine has made its irrevocable choice and is committed to being a part of Europe, part of the European Union,” she said, referring to plans to sign an Association Agreement with the EU at a summit in Vilnius slated for November 2013. “The president of Ukraine reiter- ated that he is ready to implement all the necessary measures,” she added.
It was a comment that could have been made by the populist Tymoshenko, and Ukraine was in the midst of wooing Europe to counter Russia’s increasing aggression following the first “gas war”
Tymoshenko, leader of Ukraine’s opposi- tion at the time, was out of the game, languishing in prison. She had lost to Yanukovych in the presidential elections of 2010 by a whisker in what is probably still the only free and fair election ever to be held in eastern Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union. Yanukovych promptly jailed Tymoshenko in 2011. The interna- tional community were outraged, calling her jailing politically motivated and linking her release to the passage of the Association Agreement deal.
All the speakers at the Rome meeting were united by a desire to do the Associ- ation Agreement deal, but the undercur- rent to their speeches was an insistence
“The flight records also reveal Manafort remained a player in Ukraine after the Maidan revolution”
when it cut the country’s energy off for non-payment of bills as well as push-
ing Ukraine to join President Vladimir Putin’s newly created Customs Union free trade area. The deal had actually been agreed by former president Viktor Yushchenko after the Orange Revolution in 2006 but Brussels had put it on ice until it suddenly became clear that Putin was about to take Ukraine into his new trade block.
The date of the Rome meeting was March 6, 2013, and Yanukovych’s front person was Lovochkina – the sister of Serhii Lovochkin, the president’s power- ful chief of staff. Despite the assurances of commitment to the EU, less than a year later, Yanukovych’s security forces would massacre 100 pro-EU protestors in the heart of Kyiv and he would flee the country for Russia and a life in exile.
that the signing of the agreement and Tymoshenko’s fate were two separate issues, which was in stark contract to Brussels’ official line.
In her speech, Lovochkina was explicit: the Association Agreement should be signed independently from Tymoshenko’s case. “It [signing the Association Agree- ment] cannot be held hostage by a single criminal case [...] by the future of Yulia Tymoshenko because it is an issue con- cerning the future of Ukraine,” she said.
As a representative of the Yanukovych administration, Lovochkina’s line was predictable. But more surprisingly was the support she got from the eminent European VIPs who backed her up. Using a variety of euphemisms, they pushed essentially the same argu- ment: that the issue of the EU-Ukraine
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