Page 26 - bne_Magazine_July_2018

26 I Cover story bne July 2018
Association Agreement, and the issue of Tymoshenko’s imprisonment, should be kept separate from each other.
“The question of the destiny of Ukraine and its European future cannot depend on one single case,” Alfred Gusenbauer, former chancellor of Austria, said. “In the case of Tymoshenko it is necessary to look for solutions without making
a complicated situation more compli- cated,” said Alexander Kwasniewski, former president of Poland, who was also the senior partner in the European Parliament’s “monitoring mission” to Ukraine that had been tasked with resolving the impasse caused by Tymosh- enko’s imprisonment.
Concluding the conference, Romano Prodi, former prime minister of Italy and president of the European Commission, argued that the European Parliament monitoring mission to Ukraine – run
by Kwasniewski – should examine the Tymoshenko case as “the correct frame- work for a European Union that helps promotes rights, but at the same time does not close off a relationship which is valuable for Ukraine and Europe.”
As the audience applauded the awkward grouping on the podium, one man in
the audience may have been particularly happy: US spin doctor Paul Manafort, who had flown to Rome that day with Lovochkina in a private jet owned by her brother Serhii. Manafort had assembled the speakers sitting in front of him on the podium, and was pulling the strings at the meeting.
Jailing Yulia Tymoshenko
A few months earlier Western leaders and EU officials had made Ukraine’s signing of an Association Agreement conditional on the release of Tymoshenko.
At Ukraine’s prestigious Yalta European Summit conference on September 9, 2012, EU commission head José Barroso said that in the light of Tymoshenko’s jailing, “[w]e still don't see the necessary political conditions to take another step towards the signing of the Agreement.”
But Yanukovych refused to back down
www.bne.eu
over Tymoshenko. He was running a kleptocracy that eventually stole the equivalent of the country’s entire hard currency reserves and had already trig- gered economic stagnation. Yanukovych faced re-election in early 2015 and his recipe for staying in office after 2015 was to win kudos (and cash) by signing the Association Agreement with the EU. Keeping opposition leader Tymoshenko, his most effective political rival, locked up was a key part of this strategy.
Manafort was Yanukovych’s trump card in the campaign to win over the west.
In part as a result of Manafort’s lobbying efforts, by November 2013 the EU had agreed to sign the Association Agree- ment with Ukraine in Vilnius, without having secured Tymoshenko’s release. Instead she was to be allowed to leave Ukraine for medical treatment unpar- doned, exiling her from Ukraine and political life, and leaving the field open for Yanukovych.
This was Manafort’s hour of triumph. But Russian fury at the thought of Ukraine slipping from its grasp meant that it was short-lived. The Kremlin pulled out all the diplomatic stops – clean and dirty. Yanukovych kept the EU leaders guessing until the last minute when the Ukrainian president finally came down on Russia’s side in a dramatic conclusion to the meet- ing. On November 21, 2013, Ukraine’s government announced it would not sign the Association Agreement with the EU on November 28.
What swung the issue was the EU insist- ed on a deal where transition loans were to be parcelled out, linked to reforms and legislation, whereas Putin offered $15bn in cash, no strings attached. Yanukovych was increasingly desperate for money as the reserves were depleted and the country was already facing a currency crisis.
As bne IntelliNews wrote on the eve of the summit, the EU had badly miscalcu- lated and underestimated Yanukovych’s desperation to raise some cash and his total disinterest in reforms. He took the Russian money. The first $3bn arrived a few weeks later in the form of a Euro-
bond issued on the Irish Stock Exchange and bought by Russia.
The Hapsburg PR
Five years on, and the convoluted history of Yanukovych’s Association Agreement tango with the EU has resurfaced, but
in an entirely different context. It has become a central theme of the inquiry into collusion between Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign – which Manafort ran from March to August of that year – and the Kremlin.
On February 28, US Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted Manafort for illegal lobbying. The details of the indictment point to Manafort pulling the strings at the March 6 Rome conference.
Mueller’s indictment states that Manafort “secretly retained a group for former senior European politicians to take positions favourable to Ukraine. The plan was for the former politicians, informally called the “Hapsburg Group,” to appear to be providing an indepen- dent assessment of the government of Ukraine actions, when in fact they were paid lobbyists for Ukraine.”
According to the indictment Manafort paid over €2mn to the “super VIPs” from offshore accounts in 2012 and 2013. While the politicians were unnamed, the indictment specifies a European “chan- cellor” as heading the group. An initially unredacted document filed on June
13 identified former Austrian chancel- lor Gusenbauer by name as part of the Hapsburg group.
The document was a memorandum
to Manafort authored in June 2012 by Italian-based US journalist Alan Fried- man – the man who chaired the March 2013 conference in Rome.
In the memo, Friedman suggested recruiting Kwasniewski to the group. But he noted that Kwasniewski would have a conflict of interests because Kwasniewski was the leading figure in the European Parliament’s monitoring mission to Ukraine.
The monitoring mission was tasked with judging whether Ukraine was fit