Yes, Manafort is on trial for crimes in the U.S. But his work in Ukraine helped to destroy a country
By Diana Pilipenko
August 17 at 1:57 PM
Diana Pilipenko is the associate director for anti-corruption and illicit finance at the Center for American Progress.
During Paul Manafort’s trial for tax evasion and bank fraud, the public has heard over-the-top tales of illicit trysts in London, ostrich leather jackets and overpriced antique rugs. Bankers, IRS agents and accountants have testified at length about how Manafort defrauded financial institutions and the U.S. government. Yet little attention has been paid to the constituency that perhaps suffered most from Manafort’s deeds: the people of Ukraine.
I grew up in Ukraine, and reading the court documents detailing Manafort’s work for the country’s former president, Viktor Yanukovych, left me disgusted and depressed. The people who suffered from Yanukovych’s corrupt regime are my relatives, my friends and my former neighbors. They are not abstractions or numbers on a ledger, and under Yanukovych their lives took a back seat to state-sponsored greed.
Many in Ukraine credit Manafort with the 2010 resurrection of Yanukovych, who lost a bid for president in 2004 after serious electoral fraud on his behalf was exposed, triggering massive protests.
“Manafort worked for a long time so that Yanukovych could come to power and use that power for his own corrupt schemes, not reform,” said Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of Ukraine’s parliament and the investigative journalist who published evidence of the $12 million in payments from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions to Manafort. As another Ukrainian reporter put it, what’s been happening in the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, is actually “the first serious trial to address political corruption in Ukraine under Yanukovych.”
Yanukovych defanged law enforcement and the courts, stifled the free press, undermined integration with the European Union, welcomed Kremlin influence and, along with his cronies, allegedly stole up to $100 billion from the country — equivalent to nearly 90 percent of Ukraine’s economic output last year. In March 2014, the U.S. Department of Treasury sanctioned Yanukovych as someone who contributed to destabilizing Ukraine, alongside his Russian allies. In this respect, Manafort also bears part of the blame for Russia’s illegal takeover of Crimea and Moscow’s bloody war in the east, which has claimed at least 10,000 lives and continues today.
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