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Paul Manafort put a favorable spin on his work in Ukraine during a recent radio interview.
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Manafort said he knows Ukraine “extremely well” and predicted that its citizens wouldn’t “give in.”
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The former Trump campaign chairman claimed that Vladimir Putin hated him for his past work.
In his past, pre-criminal conviction career as a Republican political operative, Paul Manafort made millions working for a Russia-backed president of Ukraine who fled the country in 2014 and is now believed to be living in Belarus.
Now, with Russia waging war against its neighbor to the west, Manafort is fashioning himself as something of a Ukraine expert.
In a rare radio interview with New York-based WABC Radio, the former chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign put a favorable gloss on his time working for the Kremlin-aligned former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych.
“I ran four parliamentary elections and a presidential campaign there, got to know the country extremely well. I think I know it better than Putin does right now,” Manafort told host Frank Morano’s “The Other Side of Midnight” show.
In the nearly hour-long interview, Manafort said the Ukrainian people would never “give in,” even as Russian leader Vladimir Putin oversees a carpet-bombing of the country that has caused thousands of civilian casualties.
“They want to be they want to be free. They cherish their freedom and they know what freedom means,” Manafort said.
“Afghanistan is going to look like a cakewalk compared to what Ukraine will be like if Putin does get control of the country,” he added.
Manafort, who briefly served as chairman of Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, said he didn’t “think Trump would have ever allowed Putin to take any territory from Ukraine.” And he said the US government should be “getting more weapons into Ukraine” and give the country the MiG-29 fighter jets that President Volodymyr Zelensky has requested.
Left unmentioned was that Trump withheld congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine in 2019 as he pressured Zelensky to announce an investigation into now-President Joe Biden — then a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination — and his family. The episode led to the first of Trump’s two impeachments.
‘Putin hated Yanukovych,’ Manafort says
With regards to another past client, Yanukovych, Manafort said his work was widely misconstrued as pro-Russian when, in fact, he was seeking to push Ukraine closer to Europe. Yanukovych fled Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, after his refusal to sign a free-trade agreement with the European Union sparked months of protests. Amid the protests, police shot dozens of antigovernment demonstrators.
Manafort asserted in the radio interview that Yanukovych had wanted to sign the agreement but felt he couldn’t because Putin threatened to shut down trade with the country — “which was 70% of Ukraine’s business,” he said — and the European Union declined to provide subsidies.
“Putin hated Yanukovych, and I had to have security guards when I was in Ukraine because he didn’t like me either,” Manafort said. “He blamed me for what I was doing, for what was happening. So that’s why I never took seriously, when it first came out, that there was Russian collusion, and I was the link to Russia, because it was such a joke.”
But Putin would take credit for helping Yanukovych flee the protests.
“I will say it openly – he asked to be driven away to Russia, which we did,” Putin said, according to the BBC.
In 2019, a Ukrainian court found that Yanukovych committed treason by inviting Russia to invade Ukraine and reverse the pro-Western uprising that ousted him from power.
With his longtime cash cow deposed, Manafort grew desperate to maintain a lavish lifestyle that featured luxury properties and seven-figure clothing purchases, federal prosecutors later alleged. In 2018, a jury in Alexandria, Virginia, found Manafort guilty on a raft of financial fraud charges, in the first trial win for former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team.
Manafort later pleaded guilty to separate charges in Washington, DC, related to his lobbying work in Ukraine.
He was serving a seven-and-a-half year prison sentence, albeit from home confinement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, when Trump pardoned Manafort and several other allies in the waning weeks of his presidency.
Read the original article on Business Insider
