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July 6, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
prime minister of Italy and president of the Eu- ropean Commission, argued that the European Parliament monitoring mission to Ukraine — run by Kwasniewski — should examine the Tymoshen- ko case as “the correct framework 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 group- ing 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 one of the Lovochkin family’s private jets. Manafort had assembled the speak- ers 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 Asso- ciation Agreement conditional on the release of Tymoshenko.
At Ukraine’s prestigious Yalta European Sum-
mit conference on September 9, 2012, EU com- mission 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 over Ty- moshenko. He was running a kleptocracy that had already triggered economic stagnation. Yanuko- vych faced re-election in early 2015 and his recipe for staying in office was to win kudos (and cash) by signing the Association Agreement with the
EU – while keeping opposition leader Tymoshenko out of politics.
Manafort was Yanukovych’s ace 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 Agreement with Ukraine in Vilnius, without having secured Tymoshenko’s release.
Instead she was to be allowed to leave Ukraine for medical treatment, exiling her from Ukraine.
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. On Novem- ber 21, 2013, Ukraine’s government announced
it would not sign the Association Agreement with the EU on November 28.
The Hapsburg PR
Five years on, and the convoluted history of Yanu- kovych’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 elec- tion campaign — which Manafort ran from March to August of that year — and the Kremlin.
On February 28, US Special Counsel Robert Mu- eller 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 “se- cretly retained a group for former senior Euro- pean 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 independent 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 “chancellor” as heading the group. An initially unredacted document filed on June 13 identified former Austrian chancellor Guse- nbauer by name as part of the Hapsburg group.
The document was a memorandum to Mana- fort authored in June 2012 by Italian-based US journalist Alan Friedman — the man who chaired the March 2013 conference in Rome.