tries to give him an “extreme makeover,” but also as belonging to a political party that is “a haven … [for] mobsters.”35 A 2017 Time article will describe Yanukovych’s mid-aughts political career as that of an “oafish and inarticulate” man with “rough manners and [a] criminal past,” including past convictions for both violence and theft.36 In the same article, the Party of Regions is described as “stained with blood” due to the abduction and beheading, organized by “some of Yanukovych’s political patrons,” of an investigative journalist, Georgiy Gongadze, who had been exposing high-level corruption in Ukraine.37 When Manafort successfully orchestrates a Yanukovych victory in Ukraine’s 2010 presidential election, “among the first official acts of [Yanukovych’s] tenure [will be] to legally bar Ukraine from seeking NATO membership—a move that effectively granted Russia one of its core geopolitical demands.”38 Six years later, Manafort finds work with another presidential candidate, this time in the United States, whose candidacy is both supported by the Kremlin and marked by an intense hostility to NATO.
Another of Yanukovych’s first acts as Ukrainian president is to jail his chief political opponent, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the “gold-braided heroine of the Orange Revolution”—a political movement that had successfully protested Yanukovych’s elevation to the presidency back in 2004, partly on the grounds that the Kremlin had interfered in that election.39 This, too, offers an echo of Manafort’s subsequent work as a U.S. campaign adviser, with Donald Trump calling for the jailing of his own chief political opponent, Hillary Clinton, just five years after Yanukovych jails Tymoshenko, and winning higher office only after substantial Kremlin interference in his 2016 election as president. In the case of Yanukovych, writes Reuters, Putin “bankrolled” the Manafort-managed candidate during his bid to become Ukrainian prime minister in 2006, “sowed division” in Ukraine as part of his plan to back his desired candidate, was suspected of supporting an attack against his chosen candidate’s opponent—Yanukovych’s anti-Kremlin rival was “not-so-mysteriously poisoned,” writes Reuters—and watched with satisfaction as Manafort “airbrushed” his favored candidate’s “record of corruption, mismanagement, and alleged ties to Russia.”40
Of Manafort’s first presidential campaign of the 2010s—Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign being his second—Reuters observes that “the [2010 Yanukovych] campaign came from Washington, but the money came from Moscow.”41 “There was no daylight between Yanukovych and Putin,” the media outlet writes of the Manafort-run campaign, “and no daylight between Yanukovych and Manafort.”42 Indeed, as part of his “more than a decade of service to a Putin puppet,” Manafort aided Yanukovych as the Ukrainian politician ensured that Ukraine was “allied with Russia,” anti-NATO, and gave preferential economic treatment to Moscow—an agenda strikingly similar to the one Manafort’s second candidate of the 2010s, Donald Trump, would propose in March 2016, in the midst of the Republican primaries.43
In 2006, Manafort signs a $10 million-a-year consulting and public relations contract with a man Reuters calls a “Putin crony,” Oleg Deripaska, who not coincidentally had also been the man who originally connected Manafort to Akhmetov’s Party of Regions.44 In May 2019, U.S. Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) will quote a Treasury Department document to describe Deripaska as “a designated [U.S.-sanctioned] individual. He possesses a Russian diplomatic passport. He regularly claims to represent the Russian government. He’s an aluminum—and other metals—billionaire and he’s been investigated by the U.S. government and by … our allies for money laundering. He’s been accused of threatening the lives of his business rivals. He’s been charged with illegal wire tapping [and] taking part in extortion and racketeering schemes. He’s bribed government officials; he’s ordered the murder of a businessman; and he has many links to Russian organized crime … he’s a bad dude … a bottom-feeding scum-sucker and … he has absolutely no alignment with the interests of the U.S. people.”45 Deripaska is also, beginning in 2006 and extending into the 2010s, Paul Manafort’s boss and the source of much of his annual income.
While the precise scope of the 2006 Manafort-Deripaska contract is unknown, just months earlier Manafort had pitched Deripaska a course of advocacy that would see Manafort working to “‘greatly benefit the Putin government’ by influencing politics, business dealings, and news coverage inside the United States” and abroad.46
Shortly after he begins working for Deripaska, Manafort purchases a $3.7 million condo in Trump Tower—Trump’s home—using an LLC called John Hannah rather than a personal account, suggesting that the purpose behind the purchase of the condo may be business-related. John is Manafort’s middle name, while Hannah is the middle name of Manafort’s business partner at the time, Rick Davis;