Did the Ukrainian authorities meddle in the 2016 presidential election in the United States?
The breaking point in the EuroMaidan Revolution came unexpectedly for President Victor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions. The president only had time to pack his most valuable possessions before escaping from his residence outside Kyiv on the evening of February 21, 2014.
There was no time to get rid of any potentially compromising paperwork; the staff at the residence simply dumped numerous paper files into the nearby river, where journalists found them floating the next day. The other leaders and administrative officers of the Party of Regions had even less time to escape from the capital. They were fortunate, however, in that the opposition did not think promptly about collecting evidence of the old regime's criminal misdeeds. The revolutionary crowds took some decorations and equipment as souvenirs, and some offices were set ablaze.Two years later, in May 2016, the Ukrainian public found out about the existence of a large ledger (dubbed in Ukraine “a farmer's barn-book”) with hand-written entries detailing secret expenses of the Party of Regions. It came as no surprise that this powerful and thoroughly corrupt political machine had a “black” ledger for bribes and other illegal payments, but Ukrainians were stunned to find out that it was kept in writing and the recipients or intermediaries actually signed in the last column. The notebook reportedly covered the period of 2007-2012, and the total expenditures amounted to approximately US$2 billion. The black ledger contained the names of numerous ministers, parliamentarians, judges, members of the Central Electoral Commission, political commentators, and journalists. Some of their signatures have since been authenticated, granting the black ledger certain credibility.
Whoever kept the ledger for two years was clearly waiting for the right moment to reap political or financial benefits from it.
In the Ukrainian political and justice systems, the records' chief value lay in the political damage they could do rather than in the uncertain possibility of anyone getting convicted. Some pages had possibly already been “cashed” by then, as it was difficult to confirm the completeness of the records and some pages were made public separately both before and after the surrender of the ledger to the Ukrainian authorities. The initial announcement in May 2016 came from two well-known investigative journalists, Serhii Leshchenko (since 2014 a member of the parliament representing Poroshenko's party) and Sevgil Musaieva, although they only had several pages in their possession. It was the freshly fired deputy head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Viktor Trepak, who simultaneously handed in the bulk of the ledger to the authorities. General Trepak had served in high positions under both Yanukovych and Poroshenko and had extensive contacts among security-service officers. He never explained how the folder had come into his possession, but the timing of its release was clearly connected to his firing rather than any developments in the United States. Trepak's subsequent media interviews focused on his revelation of the corrupt nature of Ukrainian politics both before and after the EuroMaidan Revolution.When the news broke in Ukraine, the public likewise focused more on the Ukrainian politicians who were implicated, especially the ones still prominent in public life. The then head of the Central Electoral Commission, Mykhailo Okhendovsky, was the only one to be officially charged, although in the end his case did not go to trial, as was common in cases of political figures. In early June, Leshchenko testified at the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, but then the summer began and with it, the dead season in Ukrainian politics. In mid-August Leshchenko broke some sensational news that was immediately confirmed by the head of the National AntiCorruption Bureau: The black ledger also listed the American lobbyist and political consultant Paul Manafort.
He was well known in Ukraine as a long-serving advisor to Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions. Manafort was credited with rebuilding Yanukovych's image inside Ukraine after his defeat in the Orange Revolution of 2004-2005, as well as making him more acceptable to American decision makers during his tenure as president from 2010. Little was known at the time about his role during the EuroMaidan Revolution; subsequently, messages allegedly hacked from his daughter's phone in 2017 seemed to suggest that he had proposed a violent scenario to end the revolution after a staged provocation,10 but he was also involved in early attempts to rebuild the pro-Russian forces into a viable opposition after the EuroMaidan Revolution. Not only did Manafort work for the discredited Yanukovych and other pro-Russian forces in Ukraine but also he had known connections to Russian oligarchs. His account in the black ledger was also one of the largest, with a total of US$12.7 million recorded between 2007 and 2012. (Two prominent businessmen who sat in parliament as members of Yanukovych's party signed as intermediaries on these disbursements.)For all the right reasons that patriotic Ukrainians had to dislike Manafort, the timing of Leshchenko's revelation was highly suspicious. Since June 2016 Manafort had been the manager of Trump's presidential campaign, and the release of any compromising material on him was bound to harm it. It is also telling that the announcement came from someone better known as a controversial investigative journalist than a politician, although the head of the Ukrainian anticorruption agency conveniently confirmed Leshchenko's words right away, adding that a name in the ledger in and of itself did not prove anything. The ever-present factionalism in Ukrainian politics and Leshchenko's reputation as a loose cannon cast some doubt on conspiracy theories presenting this affair as Ukraine's state policy of interference in the US elections.
But even if one accepts the view that the Ukrainian authorities sought plausible denial by allowing Leshchenko to break the story, Manafort's transgressions were very real, and concealing this information about his entries in the black ledger would have constituted interference as well, benefiting the Trump camp. The Poroshenko administration found itself in a predicament, and its strategy of issuing only a limited confirmation of Leshchenko's story from the technically independent National AntiCorruption Bureau was likely the safest choice. Doing so meant leaving this matter up to the American justice system.It has since been revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began investigating Manafort in connection with his work for Yanukovych back in 2014; other US agencies opened investigations into his activities in 2016, based in part on his communication with Russian agents. As soon as Manafort joined the Trump campaign in March 2016, Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian American consultant working for the Democratic Party on relations with ethnic communities and a former White House staffer, alerted the Democratic National Committee to Manafort's problematic connections in Ukraine and Russia. Chalupa then focused on investigating Manafort's record in Ukraine. She acknowledged involving in her search some unnamed Ukrainian investigative journalists. According to the investigation by Politico magazine, Chalupa also discussed this matter at Ukraine's embassy to the United States. Whether she received any research assistance from the embassy's staff is disputed; the embassy would only confirm the fact of the meetings rather than any help in investigating Manafort. Chalupa herself soon became the target of hacking attacks and break-ins, which she blamed on the Russian security agencies.11 In any case, her (and Leshchenko's) role in the Manafort affair was over, because the US justice system could work directly with the Ukrainian agencies. In June 2016 the FBI signed a memorandum of understanding with Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which enabled their cooperation in the investigation of international crimes related to corruption and money laundering.
It is difficult to blame the fall of Manafort on a conspiracy concocted by the Ukrainian government—he was convicted by a US court based on evidence from various international sources rather than the unconfirmed entries in the black ledger of the Party of Regions. If anything, it appears that the Ukrainian authorities were trying to distance themselves from the Manafort scandal by leaving a muckraking journalist to continue as the main spokesperson on this issue. It certainly was not a coherent state- coordinated campaign, as in the case of the Russian interference in 2016. Unlike Russia, Ukraine had little at stake in the 2016 elections because it enjoyed bipartisan American support, but a lot to lose if it were to be implicated in any wrongdoings. Yet, there was one important, if largely symbolic, aspect. To the Ukrainian public, Manafort came to represent the “wrong” side of America, one that was willing to cozy up to the Yanukovych regime and was open to various corrupt deals. His fall thus became the American echo of the EuroMaidan Revolution, Ukraine's fight for freedom and dignity.