Despite FBC’s best efforts, Tymoshenko’s conviction in October 2011—she was sentenced to seven years in prison, ordered to pay $194 million in restitution, and barred from running in the next presidential election—was seen in government offices across the West for what it was: a hit job by Yanukovych on his most able political opponent. So Manafort’s dirty trickster public relations team kept at it. They got excellent help from emerging alt-right media sites like Breitbart News, which tossed a guilt-by-association anti-Semitism spray grenade: “One prominent Jewish leader, who asked to remain unnamed, says that [Hillary] Clinton’s New York Times op-ed ripping the current Ukrainian administration [Yanukovych] has ‘created a neo-Nazi Frankenstein by issuing a de facto endorsement of Mrs. Tymoshenko and her choices.’ ” A twofer. Tymoshenko and Clinton! “Gentleman, Here is the first part of a series of articles that will be coming as we continue to build this effort,” Manafort’s business partner Rick Gates wrote in an email forwarding the Breitbart piece to Alan Friedman, the former Wall Street Journal reporter who helmed the slime shop FBC. “Alan, you get full credit for the Frankenstein comment.”
Manafort also got some backup from more mainstream and burnished quarters, though this help was a bit pricier. He arranged for a respected American law firm to produce an “independent” report on the Tymoshenko legal proceedings. That firm—Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom—didn’t appear to rush to judgment. The three-hundred-page report (with eleven separate appendixes, including a helpful dramatis personae) was not released until December 2012, more than a year after the completion of the trial and more than a year into Tymoshenko’s prison term.
Turns out, according to the Skadden legal eagles, the Tymoshenko prosecution had been on the up and up. There were certain irregularities that might be frowned upon in Western courts, the report found, but the conviction itself was solid. “The trial court based its finding of Tymoshenko’s guilt on factual determinations that had evidentiary support in the trial record,” said the report. It also made this straight-ahead assertion: “Based on the record, Tymoshenko has not provided clear and specific evidence of political motivation that would be sufficient to overturn her conviction under American standards.” Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice, which had officially commissioned the report, the independent report, pronounced itself “grateful…for this professional analysis that unconditionally lays out the facts of the matter.”
According to ministry officials back in Kyiv, Skadden had done all this expert legal work on a more or less pro bono basis—how nice! Ukraine claimed to have paid the firm a meager $12,000 fee for the report. The lead attorney on the report—Obama’s first White House counsel, Greg Craig—refused to divulge how much or how little his fancy rich-guy law firm had actually been paid. But it would turn out that Skadden had the same mercenary tendencies as Firtash and the rest. Thanks to an arrangement fixed up by Paul Manafort, Skadden received from private sources in Kyiv $4,657,568.91 (accounted for by federal prosecutors right down to the last penny!). Oh, and: “In addition to being retained to write the report,” read one of Special Counsel Mueller’s legal filings, “[Skadden] was retained to represent Ukraine itself, including in connection with the Tymoshenko case and to provide training to the trial team prosecuting Tymoshenko.” So much for the idea that Skadden was supposed to be an impartial observer of these proceedings.
While the firm’s official report stated that the trial court’s finding of Tymoshenko’s guilt “had evidentiary support,” the report left out one of the American law firm’s own conclusions—a conclusion that Attorney Craig had written into a private “Memorandum to File”—that in fact evidence of any criminal intent by Tymoshenko was “virtually non-existent.” Documents hidden by the Yanukovych government would later show that an early draft of the Skadden report had been handily annotated by Ukrainian government officials in an effort to make the report “more sympathetic” to the Tymoshenko prosecutors. Skadden claims to have held the line on the most egregious suggestions, but it did let Manafort know that “tweaks have been made.”
Anyway, corruption-wise, things were going along pretty swimmingly in Ukraine. With Tymoshenko stashed in prison, trashed by American PR firms and law firms and anything else Manafort could cook up, Russia’s man in Ukraine—Dmitry Firtash—got back into the gas deal, which was better than ever. His company’s operating profit for the years 2012 and 2013 added up to nearly $4 billion. With that kind of money available for corrupting any actual governance in the interests of the people in Ukraine, Putin’s natural gas supplier monopoly hovered over the heads of the Ukrainian people like a sword.
Putin could tell things were going well when Yanukovych reneged on his campaign promise (hey, he had to get elected, didn’t he?) to move Ukraine toward greater cooperation with, and perhaps even membership in, the European Union. Putin knew that wouldn’t—that couldn’t—ever happen. The problem was the Ukrainian people appeared to really like the idea. Even when Putin promised $15 billion worth of new aid to Ukraine, while the EU couldn’t even come up with $1 billion, the will of the Ukrainian people was clear. They wanted the EU, no matter Putin’s largesse. The Orange side revolted again, and what started on November 21, 2013, as a small demonstration in the Maidan grew in just a few days to another 100,000-person protest. The demonstrators took over the Maidan and refused to leave. A violent crackdown by police in the last days of November didn’t quell the enthusiasm. In the face of Yanukovych’s armed and ready-to-fire security forces, determined Don Quixote–like protesters strapped on pots and pans as makeshift armor and took to the streets. The crowds kept on coming. And growing.
Putin thought the cold Kyiv January would break the crowd if the security forces could not. He was wrong. In February, as the Sochi Olympics kicked off, they were still there. By the tens of thousands, wearing their makeshift twenty-first-century defensive kitchenware, huddled for warmth around trash can fires. The protest had morphed from a demonstration about the EU question into a demonstration about democracy itself—the will of the governed. Ukrainians were calling it the Revolution of Dignity. The demonstrators in Kyiv were gaining courage in numbers. On February 18, 2014, they armed themselves with rocks and bats and slingshots and braved a gauntlet of Yanukovych’s brutal security forces—many of them hired thugs with billy clubs, tear gas, and guns—to march on the Ukrainian parliament, the Rada. When Yanukovych’s security forces started killing protesters that afternoon, the crowds retreated to their barricades in the Maidan and remained there through a terrifying night, protected by a ring of fire. Yanukovych’s security forces broke out machine guns and scrambled more rooftop snipers the next day, and the civilian casualty list just kept growing. “We are not afraid to die for freedom,” yelled one defiant protester, standing behind a makeshift shield, wearing a plastic helmet and a surgical mask. “Freedom is for us. Freedom is ours. We will win, and Ukraine will be part of Europe, and Ukraine will be part of the free world! And we’ll never be slaves. We will be free.” Putin watched it all with a growing sense of dread and a growing sense of anger. Here, at his doorstep, was the Western conspiracy! America was the cause of all this mess. He was sure.
He was also very much aware of other reports lately coming out of Ukraine—very disturbing news on the energy front. Ukrainian companies were ratcheting up their own production in the country’s oil and gas fields, signing production deals with the major Western oil companies. They could frack, too! Ukraine had almost 400 million barrels of proven oil reserves, and God only knew how much natural gas once the serious fracking got going. Ukrainian officials were already talking about being able to produce every cubic meter of natural gas the country needed, inside the country. And to be able to export gas to Europe at a profit. This was revolting to Putin, whose lifeblood income came from Russia’s natural gas sales in Europe and whose gravitational pull over countries in his orbit was the control, corruption, and cash that energy supplies afforded him. Pu
tin could at least manage Ukraine’s fractious and corruptible lurches at political independence. He could not countenance the idea of Ukraine’s energy independence, which would certainly lead to Ukraine’s actual independence. Woe be unto the Russian leader who loses control of Ukraine. Especially now.
Then it happened. On the eve of the final day of the Sochi Olympics. Yanukovych lost his nerve, called off his security forces, turned tail, and ran. He gave over Kyiv and the federal government to the Orange revolutionaries. The Ukrainian parliament met in an emergency session; legislators voted Yanukovych out of office in absentia. The Rada ordered the immediate release of Yulia Tymoshenko. And it voted to refer Yanukovych and his henchmen to the International Criminal Court to answer for “crimes against humanity.” Members of the Rada even introduced a new law making Ukrainian the official language of the country. No more Russian.
The Russian cause wasn’t helped when regular Ukrainian citizens raided Yanukovych’s lakeside presidential retreat outside Kyiv. They emerged with photographs of his zoo full of peacocks and ostriches and wild boars, expensive wines, gilded clocks and toilets, a gold bar in the shape of a life-sized loaf of bread, a sauna, dozens of vintage cars, fake ruins (they tried to appear to be Ionic), an eighteen-hole golf course, and a floating replica of a Spanish galleon that served as the president’s private restaurant. Beats chicken smuggling in the provinces.
Yanukovych resurfaced a few days later in the city of Kharkiv, a Party of Regions stronghold in the Russia-friendly eastern part of the country, and reminded everyone that whatever happened in Kyiv, he remained “the legitimately elected president.” But he ran into protests even there. Thousands of his countrymen faced him down right there on his home streets, chanting, “Ukraine is not Russia! Ukraine is not Russia! Ukraine is not Russia!” Yanukovych fled to Moscow.
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Putin was done trying to make nice. He had had it with the United States meddling on his turf. He figured the United States had put $5 billion into moving Ukraine into the Western win column. Vice President Joseph R. Biden had been in and out of Kyiv for years, insisting the Obama administration would protect Ukraine from Russian aggression. “We do not recognize—and I want to reiterate it—any sphere of influence,” Biden reminded. And he followed that up with what sounded like an insult: “[The Russians have] a shrinking population base. They have a withering economy. They have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next fifteen years. They’re in a situation where the world is changing before them and they’re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.” Privately, American officials were even tougher on Russia’s decline—pointing to the increasing death rates among the country’s younger set, its rampant alcoholism, its military’s decline into second-tier status, and its rampant corruption. Hey, just saying, it can’t be easy being a former superpower.
Putin sort of took it personally—on behalf of himself and on behalf of Russia, which were pretty much one and the same in his mind. And by 2014, in spite of his iron hold on the Russian presidency, Putin was very, very wary. All political opposition in Russia and in the near abroad, in Putin’s mind, sprang from an aggressive, zero-sum U.S. foreign policy game—one that would ultimately put him in its crosshairs. “He is said to have watched the video of [the Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s gruesome lynching] over and over,” Julia Ioffe later reported in The Atlantic. As one of Obama’s key foreign policy advisers explained to Ioffe, the pro-Western revolt in Ukraine seemed to take Putin’s paranoia to a new level. “Ukraine was such a part of Russia that he took it as an assault on him,” said Ben Rhodes. “Putin had always been an antagonist, and aggressive. But he went on offense after the Maidan. The gloves were off, in a way.”
The ukases from the Kremlin in the days after Yanukovych’s embarrassing flight were swift, and swiftly executed. Some were clearly symbolic. Boris Nemtsov and the recently released Pussy Riot ladies were arrested and jailed again. The most important move was intended to project Russia’s revivified superpower power. We’re done sulking. Putin dispatched a Russian military force (sans uniforms) into Crimea, Ukraine’s southernmost landmass, to take it for Mother Russia, while sending his spokesmen out to deny the presence of any regular Russian soldiers in the area. This was all an impromptu campaign by separatists in Crimea, Kremlin officials explained, who were prodded to action by the terrifying events of the Maidan. Whatever aid came from Moscow was simply to avoid a humanitarian crisis and a slaughter of innocent Russian-speaking people in Crimea by the crazed neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists. Startled Western leaders warned the newly formed Ukrainian government not to fight back in Crimea, for fear Russia would use it as an excuse to invade the entire country.
In less than three weeks, Putin ripped Crimea from Ukraine and took it for Russia. The “exit of Crimea from Ukraine,” the Kremlin claimed, was the result of “complex international processes.” It was the first time since World War II that one country had rewritten another’s borders by force and seized an entire landmass and its people for itself. Putin had blatantly violated Russia’s vow to respect Ukrainian sovereignty, and he didn’t seem content to stop at Crimea. He was already moving his forces toward other oblasts in the east of Ukraine, which also happened to be the oblasts with promising fields of oil and gas.
The move left Western leaders in a pickle; they were clearly shaken and uncertain of the proper response. The wrong move could easily tip into regional or even global disaster. Europe was hugely dependent on Gazprom’s natural gas. “There is no sensible alternative to Russian gas to meet Europe’s energy needs,” Germany’s economy minister, Sigmar Gabriel, said at the time. “Many people acted as if there [were] plenty of other sources from which Europe could draw its gas, but this is not the case.”
President Barack Obama, meanwhile, was wary of punching back too hard and possibly inviting an escalation of the fighting. He believed the biggest foreign policy blunders of the postwar world were almost always the outcome of too little restraint, not too much. He did not want to go down in history as the U.S. president who allowed a dispute over Crimea to spiral into a serious military conflict. But Western leaders feared Putin would be emboldened if they allowed him to perpetrate international thievery without serious consequences. They settled on middle ground—a new and pointed set of economic sanctions against Russia. Or, more to the point, against Putin. The United States and the European Union drew up a list of Russian oligarchs and Kremlin officials, froze their assets in the West, and declared them off-limits for American and European businesses. The people on the list had one thing in common: they were Putin’s most trusted consiglieri. Among them were Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, Russian Railways’ president, Vladimir Yakunin. And Igor Sechin.
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This is when the Big Dog came out of the American Mercenary Pound. Rex Tillerson had too much at stake. Like potentially hundreds of billions of dollars of deals with Putin’s favorite oil company. ExxonMobil and Rosneft—Igor Sechin’s Rosneft—were just a few months away from spudding their first well in the Russian Arctic. The take there had the potential to fill ExxonMobil’s treasury and its reserves for decades to come. And that’s not even counting Exxon’s cut in all that oil and gas hiding in the untapped shale in western Siberia. Rex still had details of the still expanding partnership to finalize with Igor Sechin, no matter his new standing as an officially designated international pariah.
CEO Tillerson really had only one lens through which to see this problem. ExxonMobil stockholders didn’t care about the Helsinki Accords of 1975, or the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, or any other geostrategic niceties, let alone the rooftop government snipers shooting people trying to defend themselves with pots and pans. They cared about their return on investment. This blinkered way of looking at things might have encouraged a certain lack of self-awareness within the corporation, but on the plus
side it really simplified the equation. ExxonMobil had its own foreign policy to serve its own specific interests. And that corporate foreign policy only sometimes overlapped with the foreign policy of the United States. “I’m not a U.S. company,” Tillerson’s predecessor, Lee Raymond, once said, “and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.” ExxonMobil had never been shy about calling on the U.S. State Department when it was having trouble with some foreign government (costing the corporation money!), but ExxonMobil’s leaders felt no obligation to return the favor.
In fact, the ExxonMobil brain trust seemed to exhibit few qualms about pursuing corporate and shareholder interests even at the cost of America’s most dearly held foreign policy imperatives. Tillerson was pursuing a multibillion-dollar deal with the Iraqi Kurds in 2013 and 2014, for instance, to develop their oil fields and ensure the royalties flowed straight into Kurdish bank accounts and not into the central Iraqi government in Baghdad. The Obama administration asked ExxonMobil point-blank not to do that deal, and it was no idle request. Exxon’s exclusive pact with the Kurds was an existential threat to the already shaky coalition of Shia, Sunni, and Kurd in Iraq. More than four thousand American men and women had already died trying to stand up a sovereign, democratic, and united government in Iraq. And Americans were still dying there for that cause. “In [the Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-] Maliki’s view,” Dexter Filkins wrote in a 2017 profile of Tillerson in The New Yorker, “giving the Kurds their own revenue source would hasten the breakup of the country.” Maliki confronted Tillerson at a meeting at the Willard hotel across from the White House while the deal was being discussed. “Maliki argued bluntly, ‘You’re dividing the country. You’re undermining our constitution!’ ” Filkins wrote. “But Tillerson held firm….In the end, Exxon made the Kurdish deal.”
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