Page 5 - bne_newspaper_July_06_2018 700.png

Top Stories
July 6, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 5
By the end of 2012, the lobbying effort was begin- ning to pay off. The crowning came on December 18, 2012, when Manafort’s visit to Kyiv coincided with the 11th Cox-Kwasniewski mission visit. Kwasniewski confirmed meeting Manafort on this occasion.
Yanukovych, originally scheduled to be visiting Moscow, cancelled on the Kremlin with no notice to meet Cox and Kwasniewski.
In return, Cox and Kwasniewski heaped praise
on Ukraine’s then prime minister Mykola Azarov on the occasion of his birthday in an open letter. This was a huge turnaround compared to seven months earlier, when President of the European Council Herman van Rompuy had told journalists that Azarov “should stay at home” instead of visit- ing Brussels.
The road to Vilnius
The lobbying effort accelerated in 2013, starting with the March 2013 Rome conference. The EU’s Vilnius summit slated for November 2013 was ap- proaching where Ukraine was expected to sign the Association Agreement.
On May 15-17, 2013, Manafort flew again for a weekend in Warsaw and Brussels, returning on a Lovochkin executive jet. In Warsaw he met one- on-one with Kwasniewski. On May 17, Prodi and Gusenbauer were in Brussels for the Ukraine on the road to Vilnius conference.
Two months later, Manafort was again air bound on a Lovochkin plane, on a one day visit from Frankfurt, landing from the US, bound for the Crimea on July 29. He flew back from Crimea to Frankfurt on the same day.
One day before, Russia and Ukraine had jointly celebrated the Soviet-era Navy Day with a shared display of their two fleets that was attended by Putin and Yanukovych. Join manoeuvres displayed the close contacts between the top brass of the two fleets that prefigured Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula only nine months later.
But it was not for Navy Day that Manafort flew to Crimea, together with his assistant Konstantin Kilimnik, one day later. His mission was to bolster Yanukovych’s decision to go for Europe.
Cox and Kwasnievski arrived in Crimea on the same day as Manafort. On the morning of July 30, they were scheduled to meet with Yanukovych in Crimea for another session on Tymoshenko’s fate. Kwasniewski said Manafort did not meet with the monitoring mission in Crimea that day.
But as the pace of events quickened in summer and autumn 2013, Manafort had a series of one- to-one meetings with Kwasniewski in Warsaw, the former Polish president acknowledged.
These culminated in Manafort flying to Warsaw on October 18 – on Lovochkin’s plane – to meet Kwasniewski. Later the same day Yanukovych said he would be ready to let Tymoshenko depart to Germany for treatment, as soon as Ukraine’s parliament passed legislation enabling this.
The Firtash connection
The private jet flights and personal connections show that Manafort’s partner in this lobbying ef- fort was Yanukovych’s chief of staff Lovochkin.
Lovochkin said that he had also “always been
a strong supporter of the European integration of Ukraine,” but denied that he had supervised Manafort’s lobbying. Kwasniewski confirmed that Lovochkin was in the pro-EU camp.
Lovochkin is the junior partner of billionaire oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who had made his for- tune trading gas via notorious company Rosukr- energo, that allegedly skimmed off hundreds of millions of dollars for the Russian and Ukrainian elite. Lovochkin and Firtash together also control Ukraine’s largest TV channel, Inter.
Manafort’s continued participation in post-Yanuk- ovych Ukraine also points to his ties to Lovochkin and Firtash. While most members of the Yanuko- vych administration fled to Russia or were arrest-