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Inside Ukraine’s Push to Cultivate Trump From the Start https://nyti.ms/33hzYxy

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Inside Ukraine’s Push to Cultivate Trump From the Start

Former President Petro Poroshenko alternately flattered President Trump, signed deals with U.S. firms and met with Rudolph Giuliani.

By Mark Mazzetti, Eric Lipton and Andrew E. Kramer | Published Nov. 4, 2019, 3:00 AM ET | New York Times | Posted November 4, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — Long before a telephone call with Ukraine’s president that prompted an impeachment inquiry, President Trump was exchanging political favors with a different Ukrainian leader, who desperately sought American help for his country’s struggle against Russian aggression.

Petro O. Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president until May, waged an elaborate campaign to win over Mr. Trump at a time when advisers had convinced Mr. Trump that Ukraine was a nest of Hillary Clinton supporters.

Mr. Poroshenko’s campaign included trade deals that were politically expedient for Mr. Trump, meetings with Rudolph W. Giuliani, the freezing of potentially damaging criminal cases and attempts to use the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort as a back channel.

From the start, Mr. Poroshenko’s aides also scrambled to find ways to flatter the new American president — advising their boss to gush during his first telephone call with Mr. Trump about Tom Brady, the star New England Patriots quarterback whom Mr. Trump has long admired.

An examination of the first year of Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine shows how the White House also saw the relationship as a transactional one that could help Mr. Trump politically.

Mr. Poroshenko, so eager to gain favor as Russian-backed separatists were escalating a fight against the Ukrainian military, did his part to encourage this belief. He helped plant the seeds for Mr. Trump’s July quid pro quo request to his successor, Volodymyr Zelensky — a request that prompted the impeachment inquiry into whether he manipulated American policy toward Ukraine for personal gain.

Mr. Poroshenko’s strategy yielded results. The Trump administration reversed an Obama-era moratorium on sales of lethal weapons that Ukraine sought for its fight against the separatists in the country’s east.

Near the end of 2017, just as the government in Kiev was trying to get final approval from the Trump administration on the sale of the Javelin anti-tank weapons, Mr. Poroshenko’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, had begun freezing cases in Ukraine relevant to the Mueller investigation, including an inquiry tracing millions of dollars that Ukrainian political figures paid to Mr. Manafort.

Now, impeachment investigators are examining the two years of interactions between Mr. Trump and Mr. Poroshenko, according to a congressional Democrat. And Mr. Zelensky’s team is researching back-channel communications between Ukrainian officials and Americans from both political parties going back to 2017, according to a Ukrainian with knowledge of the effort. No evidence has surfaced of an earlier quid pro quo of making the Javelin missile sale contingent on the halting of investigations relevant to the Mueller inquiry.

But congressional investigators want to know what political factors, if any, influenced Mr. Trump’s actions.

Deals With American Firms

It started with some carefully scripted remarks on the eve of the Super Bowl.

On Feb 4, 2017, just two weeks into the Trump presidency, the two leaders were due to talk. Mr. Poroshenko’s advisers rushed to find ways to connect with a new American leader with little political history and an uncertain agenda on Ukraine. With the Super Bowl the next day, they researched Mr. Trump’s football preferences and soon told Mr. Poroshenko to speak glowingly on the phone call about Mr. Brady and the Patriots.

Mr. Poroshenko then turned to the important business: asking Mr. Trump to appoint a special envoy for settlement talks with Russia.

Mr. Poroshenko knew he faced an uphill struggle to win Mr. Trump’s favor. Among other things, he had a highly publicized meeting with Hillary Clinton in the final months of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Mr. Trump’s allies saw Mr. Poroshenko and his embattled country as hostile to a Trump presidency. Mr. Manafort, who had done consulting work for a pro-Russian party in Ukraine, had also peddled as far back as June 2016 the theory that Ukraine played a role in the hacking of Democratic email systems, according to documents prepared by the special counsel’s office and released as a result of lawsuits by BuzzFeed News.

Fearing recriminations, allies of Mr. Poroshenko nonetheless reached out to Mr. Manafort to try to convince the Trump team of Ukraine’s determination to work closely with the new administration, Mr. Manafort told associates. They were “panicked that they bet on the wrong horse, and that they have no access to the right horse,” according to someone who discussed the matter with Mr. Manafort.

The approach went nowhere, so Mr. Poroshenko began pursuing other avenues. Advisers came up with an idea that they were certain would appeal to Mr. Trump’s base: a plan to buy tens of millions of dollars’ worth of American-mined coal to help supply Ukrainian power plants.

Ukraine faced a coal shortage in 2017. Some of its largest mines had wound up in separatist-controlled territory three years earlier, and nationalist protesters objected to what had been a brisk trade with the enemy. That cut off its primary domestic supply of coal.

Kostiantyn Yelisieiev, the chief foreign policy adviser to Mr. Poroshenko, saw the plan to buy coal from American mines as a perfect move. “It was a deal that pleased Trump,” Mr. Yelisieiev said. “He had promised work for Pennsylvania coal miners. It was a win-win situation.”

Ukraine sent executives from its state-owned electric utility Centrenergo to Pittsburgh to meet with a potential coal suppliers, with the help of the United States Commerce Department. Mr. Poroshenko met with Mr. Trump and separately with Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, both of whom helped secure the deal.

Within weeks — unusually fast for an international deal — a Latrobe, Pa.-based supplier, Xcoal Energy & Resources, signed a contract to deliver 700,000 tons of coal to Ukraine.

Ernie Thrasher, the chief executive of Xcoal, traveled to Ukraine to mark the arrival of the first shipment to the Black Sea port of Odessa, along with the United States ambassador to Ukraine at the time, Marie L. Yovanovitch. Later, Mr. Thrasher personally handed Mr. Poroshenko a small bag of the just-delivered coal, with a red ribbon tied to the bag.

“This is a great beginning,” Mr. Poroshenko said, laughing, as he took the gift during a ceremony and shook Mr. Thrasher’s hand.

Mr. Poroshenko’s advisers packaged the coal deal as a present of their own. When the two presidents met at the United Nations months later, Mr. Poroshenko produced a small red gift box containing some of the Pennsylvania coal, according to Mr. Yelisieiev.

The economic impact of the deal was relatively small for the United States: just 70 American jobs, according to a Commerce Department estimate. But it was just the first of three similar deals intended to warm relations between the United States and Ukraine.

The Ukrainian government signed a separate $1 billion deal in early 2018 with GE Transportation to build 30 new train locomotives in Erie, Pa., and to retrofit other aging Ukrainian train systems. And Pennsylvania-based Westinghouse Electric Company also signed its own deal to supply more fuel for Ukraine’s nuclear power plants. The contract gave Westinghouse a greater share of the business of supplying nuclear fuel to Ukraine, which Russia used to dominate.

Ukraine backed up the commercial push with an expanded lobbying effort in Washington. It hired the BGR lobbying firm in 2017, led by the former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour. Ukraine wanted its lobbyists to build a “comprehensive government affairs and business development strategy” to help strengthen relations with the American government.

The lobbyists immediately began reaching out to diplomats, lawmakers and the news media, Justice Department filings showed. And the envoy Mr. Poroshenko sought was also drawn from the lobbying firm. Kurt D. Volker, an adviser and former manager at BGR who became enmeshed in the impeachment scandal, agreed to work for the Trump administration for free.

“We did our homework,” Mr. Yelisieiev said of the overall approach that the Poroshenko administration crafted to warm relations with Mr. Trump.

Welcoming Giuliani

Ukraine had another element in its pursuit of warmer relations with the Trump administration: embracing Mr. Giuliani.

He had ties with Ukraine dating to at least 2008, when Vitali Klitschko, a former boxing and kickboxing champion then running for mayor of Kiev, hired Mr. Giuliani to serve as a crime-fighting consultant.

After Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Giuliani secured a new contract paid by Pavel Fuks, a wealthy Ukrainian-Russian developer, to help improve emergency services in the city of Kharkiv in northeast Ukraine, 300 miles from Kiev.

The work would seem to have little to do with international diplomacy — and Mr. Giuliani insisted in an interview on Sunday that he was not serving as a foreign lobbyist targeting the United States as he took up the assignment through his New York-based consulting firm, Giuliani Security & Safety.

But for Mr. Poroshenko, the multiple trips that Mr. Giuliani and his staff took to Ukraine in 2017 offered another opportunity to influence the Trump administration. Mr. Trump had appointed Mr. Giuliani in early 2017 as a cybersecurity adviser, and they were in touch sporadically. Mr. Giuliani became the president’s personal lawyer in 2018.

Mr. Giuliani secured special access to Mr. Poroshenko, meeting with him twice in 2017, first in June when Mr. Giuliani was in Ukraine to give a speech and then again in November.

“We met him as a friend of Trump,” Mr. Yelisieiev said.

Mr. Giuliani said the main purpose of the meeting was to get Mr. Poroshenko’s approval for the emergency services project in Kharkiv.

But the two touched on other topics, he said. “The second part of the meeting was him telling me that the Russians are still killing us,” Mr. Giuliani said.

A summary released by Mr. Poroshenko’s office characterized the meeting as decidedly diplomatic. “The parties discussed ways to overcome Russian aggression against Ukraine,” it said.

Prosecutions and Politics Intersect

Mr. Giuliani arrived in Kiev just weeks after Mr. Manafort was indicted on charges related to his work in Ukraine. Mr. Trump’s advisers were increasingly concerned that continuing investigations inside Ukraine might provide more fuel for the expanding inquiry by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

Earlier that year, Ukrainian law enforcement had quietly allowed a potentially key witness in the Mueller investigation, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, to escape to Russia, putting him out of reach of Mr. Mueller’s team. Mr. Kilimnik was an aide to Mr. Manafort believed to have ties to Russian intelligence.

In June 2017, shortly after Mr. Giuliani visited Kiev, Mr. Lutsenko — Mr. Poroshenko’s prosecutor general — took control from an anti-corruption bureau of a criminal investigation related to Mr. Manafort. Mr. Lutsenko would later coordinate closely with Mr. Giuliani to promote an investigation into the family of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Lutsenko took further steps to slow walk the Ukrainian cases related to the Mueller investigation in November and gave an official order to freeze them in April 2018.

One examined possible money laundering in a $750,000 payment to Mr. Manafort from a Ukrainian shell company. Another scrutinized a Ukrainian politician who signed entries designated for Mr. Manafort in a secret ledger of political payoffs uncovered after the 2014 revolution in Ukraine.

The other two involved the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, which wrote a report with Mr. Manafort’s help that came to be seen as whitewashing the arrest and imprisonment of a Ukrainian politician.

The hold on the investigations came as the Trump administration was finalizing plans to sell Ukraine hundreds of the Javelin anti-tank missiles that Mr. Poroshenko hoped could be used as a possible deterrent against a wider Russian military intervention into Ukraine.

Serhiy Horbatyuk, a special prosecutor who lost control over the cases, said during an interview that he had little doubt that Mr. Poroshenko ordered the slowdown. “In Ukraine,” he said, “every president can order a prosecutor to run, walk or stand still.”

Mr. Lutsenko has denied freezing the cases to curry favor with the Trump administration.

Separately, Mr. Lutsenko also opened a case into how the details of Mr. Manafort’s financial dealings had surfaced in the news media during the 2016 campaign. A member of Parliament characterized the inquiry as an investigation of Ukrainian meddling to favor Mrs. Clinton — the same issue that Mr. Trump raised on the phone call with Mr. Zelensky two years later.

Ukraine had come into play in domestic American politics. “For years, Ukraine and its fight for independence had united political opponents in the United States” in bipartisan support for Kiev, said Danylo Lubkivsky, a former deputy foreign minister. “Nobody of sane mind had ever doubted that if Ukraine failed, a gray zone of Russian influence would appear here.”

But Mr. Yelisieiev, the Poroshenko foreign policy adviser, said the flattery and deal-making kept relations on an even keel — and left Ukraine in a stronger position in its war.

The Javelin sale did at one point appear to encounter some interference, said Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia, who has participated in depositions of witnesses during the impeachment inquiry.

Citing testimony late last month of Catherine M. Croft, a State Department employee who worked on Ukraine issues for the National Security Council, Mr. Connolly said that the White House Office of Management and Budget briefly held up the weapons sale after the Pentagon and the State Department had both approved it. The reason for the holdup, first reported by The Daily Beast, is unclear.

The logjam eventually broke, and in April 2018 the first of 210 Javelins and 35 launching units were shipped to Ukraine. They are stored in a warehouse — ready for use in case of Russian attack.

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Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lipton reported from Washington, and Andrew E. Kramer from Kiev, Ukraine. Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New York.

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A Disgraced Ukrainian Oligarch’s Bizarre Ski Resort Plan

By Andrew Higgins | Published Nov. 3, 2019 | New York Times | Posted November 4, 2019 |

CHORNA TYSA, Ukraine — With Ukraine besieged by questions about President Trump, mysterious goings-on along a dirt road through a mountain forest are raising what, for many Ukrainians, is a far more urgent and important question: Just what is one of the country’s most powerful and scandal-singed oligarchs up to?

A sudden flurry of work to widen the near-impassable track in the Carpathian Mountains in the country’s southwest has added new fuel to growing alarm in Ukraine that Ihor Kolomoisky, a disgraced billionaire now seeking rehabilitation, is making a comeback and widening his already substantial influence.

In 2017, Mr. Kolomoisky went into self-imposed exile in Switzerland and then Israel after the government seized his prize asset, Privatbank, and accused him of embezzling billions of dollars. He returned to Ukraine this year after the comic Volodymyr Zelensky, a former business partner of the oligarch, won the presidential election in April.

Mr. Zelensky came to office promising an all-out assault on Ukraine’s chronic corruption and out-of-control oligarchs, so his relations with Mr. Kolomoisky are being treated as a sensitive barometer of his sincerity and capability in following through on his pledges.

Mr. Zelensky, asked recently about Mr. Kolomoisky at a meeting with journalists in Kiev, the capital, said that the state was not going to return any seized assets. But he added that he was ready to hold talks about the future of Privatbank and other matters.

Officials say the road work in the mountains is part of regular repairs. Opponents of a stalled ski resort project in the area, however, see the first concrete signs that, thanks to Mr. Kolomoisky’s revived clout, one of Europe’s most fragile, pristine and inaccessible wilderness areas is under threat.

Enabled by corruption, illegal logging has ravaged the Carpathian forests. Conservationists say the proposed ski resort — whose plan includes 33 lifts, 142 miles of ski runs, scores of hotels and 120 restaurants — threatens to extend the damage to a particularly vulnerable high-altitude woodland zone known as the Svydovets massif.

Mr. Zelensky’s spokeswoman, Iulia Mendel, said that the fate of a ski resort was not a matter for the president to concern himself with, but opponents of the resort proposal beg to differ.

“Svydovets is a test for Ukraine’s new president of whether he is under the control of Kolomoisky or independent from him,” said Iris Del Sol, a Franco-Ukrainian environmental activist who grew up in the mountain region. Along with her father, she has helped spearhead a campaign inside Ukraine and abroad — known as Free Svydovets — to halt the resort project.

The area proposed for the resort contains the source of the Tysa River, an important tributary of the Danube, as well as old growth forests, plant species that have mostly vanished elsewhere and endangered animals like the European brown bear. It also hosts part of a primeval beech forest that has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Why Mr. Kolomoisky, a shrewd businessman with holdings in some of Ukraine’s most profitable companies, would want to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into a risky project offering uncertain returns is a mystery.

“A lot of what our oligarchs do does not make much sense under normal economic rules,” said Bohdan Prots, a botanist at Ukraine’s State Museum of Natural History and vocal opponent of the Svydovets

Mr. Kolomoisky did not respond to interview requests. His longtime business partner in the region, Oleksandr Shevchenko, who runs a nearby ski resort, Bukovel, that was funded in its early years by the oligarch, insisted that Mr. Kolomoisky has never had any interest in building a bigger resort at Svydovets.

Mr. Shevchenko, who travels around his own resort in a bulletproof Range Rover escorted by bodyguards, dismissed all talk about Mr. Kolomoisky’s role in the new resort as “rumor” and “fairy tales.”

Corporate records, however, name Mr. Kolomoisky as co-owner of Skorzonera LLC, a company that official government documents have identified as the driving force behind “the development of a detailed plan of Svydovets tourist and recreational complex.”

In a July 2016 letter to local authorities in the area, Mr. Kolomoisky’s company trumpeted the huge scale and economic advantages of the Svydovets project, saying Skorzonera “is convinced that we can realize an outstanding tourism project.”

Conflicting accounts of Mr. Kolomoisky’s involvement are a measure of the confusion surrounding his broader role in Ukraine since Mr. Zelensky took office in May — and named the oligarch’s former lawyer as his chief of staff.

Before his bank was seized by the government amid accusations of fraud, Mr. Kolomoisky enjoyed strong public support. Using his own money and influence, he rallied resistance in 2014 to pro-Russia separatists in his hometown, Dnipro in eastern Ukraine, preventing them from seizing control there.

This favorable image crumbled after the debacle at Privatbank. But since his return to Ukraine just days before Mr. Zelensky’s inauguration, Mr. Kolomoisky has steadily reasserted himself on the public stage and as a skilled behind-the-scenes operator.

With many of his assets still frozen, however, Mr. Kolomoisky’s spending is limited, and even some opponents of the Svydovets resort complex doubt he is ready to invest in a project expected to cost well over a billion dollars.

What he really wants, said Oksana Stankevich-Volosyanchuk of the ecology group Ecosphere, is to gain control of Svydovets’s supplies of water, a scarce resource that Bukovel, once partly owned by Mr. Kolomoisky, needs to keep its snow machines running and dozens of hotels operating. Mr. Shevchenko denied this, insisting that Bukovel has plenty of water and has shed its ties to Mr. Kolomoisky.

The Svydovets project was first announced in 2016 by the governor of the Trans-Carpathia region at the time, Gennady Moskel, who said the planned resort would accommodate as many as 28,000 visitors at once — an ambitious target in an area that currently has no asphalt roads, virtually no people and is five hours by car on often bone-bruising mountain tracks from the nearest airport in Ivano-Frankivsk.

On a visit to southwestern Ukraine this summer, Mr. Zelensky made no public mention of the Svydovets project or the movement to halt it. But he did meet with Mr. Shevchenko to discuss rebuilding Ivano-Frankivsk’s ramshackle Soviet-era airport and spoke of the importance of lifting the area’s dim economic prospects. Mr. Kolomoisky’s company, Skorzonera, runs the airport under a concession from the government.

While strongly supported by many local officials, the new resort project quickly ran into legal and other troubles. Some villagers, angry that they had not been consulted or informed about the governor’s plans, successfully sued in a regional court in 2017 to have the project shelved until more information was provided.

A higher court reversed that decision and, after an appeal by the villagers, the matter is now before the nation’s Supreme Court.

Valery Pavluk, the co-owner of a sawmill, who was among those who brought the case, said that his opposition to the resort brought immediate retaliation from the authorities: His business was suddenly in the sights of tax, health and other government inspectors.

“They just wanted to frighten me,” he said at his home in Lopukhovo, a village to the west of the planned resort.

He said he did not vote in the April presidential election won by Mr. Zelensky..“Elections never really change anything here,” Mr. Pavluk said. Real power in Ukraine, he added, has always rested with billionaires like Mr. Kolomoisky.

The region’s current governor, Ihor Bondarenko, who was appointed this summer by Mr. Zelensky, said he understood opposition to tearing up a forest wilderness to make way for a giant resort. Nevertheless, he added, Trans-Carpathia, one of Ukraine’s poorest regions, desperately needs investment to fund development and provide jobs. “There are two sides to every coin,” he said.

Fedin Shandor, a professor at Uzhgorod University and adviser to the government on tourist development, said he shared local officials’ interest in attracting investment but was “100 percent against” the new ski resort.

“We know these people and know how it will end,” he said, referring to Mr. Kolomoisky, whom he described as “a leech who sucks our blood here and puts it in Switzerland.”

Ivan Pavlyuchuk, the mayor of Chorna Tysa, a village in the foothills of the Svydovets massif, dismissed concerns about Mr. Kolomoisky, saying he did not know or care who was behind the project but was determined to see it get off the ground. “If this project does not happen,” he said, “nothing will get done here: no new roads, no new schools, no jobs. Nothing.”

Mr. Prots, the Museum of Natural History scientist, said that he understood the mayor’s eagerness for better economic prospects, but that he and other mountain people were being sold a bill of goods.

“For Kolomoisky, this is just a toy,” Mr. Prots said. “He is not really bothered about developing a ski resort. He just wants to show his influence.”

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