This shadowy Kremlin-connected Ukrainian energy oligarch seems to be at the center of everything.
Franklin Foer takes a look at his story and the various strands connecting him to both the Mueller probe and this Ukraine scandal. He would seem to be a likely source of much of the money that’s been floating around.
Somewhere near the heart of the Ukraine scandal is the oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Evidence has long suggested this fact. But over the past week, in a televised interview and in documents he supplied to Congress, Rudy Giuliani’s former business partner Lev Parnas pointed his finger at the Ukrainian oligarch. According to Parnas, Giuliani’s team had a deal with Firtash. Giulani would get the Justice Department to drop its attempt to extradite the oligarch on bribery charges. In return, according to Parnas, the oligarch promised to pass along evidence that would supposedly discredit both Joe Biden and Robert Mueller. […]
The rapid ascent of Firtash, a fireman from western Ukraine, remains mysterious—although he once disgorged details from his past in a long chat with the U.S. ambassador to Kyiv, Bill Taylor, a description of which eventually emerged in a WikiLeaks document dump. But it’s been widely reported that Firtash attached himself to the gangster Semion Mogilevich, one of the region’s most important Mafia bosses, a man the FBI placed on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. (His lawyers vociferously deny any connections to gangsters.)
When Putin ascended to power in 2000, he gained control of his country’s natural-gas business. He placed his allies at the helm of the country’s gas monopoly, Gazprom, and he has routinely wielded that company as an instrument of Russian foreign policy. In 2002, Firtash became Gazprom’s most important middleman: He was responsible for selling Russian gas to Ukraine. Thanks to an extraordinary Reuters investigation, which burrowed into Customs documents, contracts, and Cyprus bank accounts, the details of this arrangement are now well known. Gazprom sold Firtash gas at four times below the market price. When Firtash resold the gas to the Ukrainian state, he pocketed a profit of $3 billion. Even as he amassed this fortune, bankers close to Putin extended Firtash an $11 billion line of credit.
According to close watchers of Gazprom, a chunk of this cash cycled back to Moscow in the form of kickbacks. Another chunk of this money was spent bankrolling Russian political influence in Ukraine. Firtash was one of the two primary patrons of the deposed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and his political party. (He also bought a television network for the sake of promoting the cause.) This meant that Firtash was also writing the checks that covered the cost of Paul Manafort’s services to Yanukovych. It’s worth pausing to marvel at the narrative symmetry of this scandal: Both Manafort and Parnas shared the same Russian-alligned paymaster.
In 2014, just after a revolution chased Yanukovych from power, the FBI issued an arrest warrant for Firtash. Austrian authorities detained Firtash near his Vienna mansion. The indictment alleged that he had bribed Indian officials on behalf of Boeing, which desperately wanted to acquire rare materials for the construction of its 787 Dreamliner. (McKinsey & Company, the now-vilified consulting firm, apparently vetted Boeing’s decision to work with Firtash and didn’t recommend against it, according to a New York Times investigation.)
When Firtash needed someone to pay his bail—which the Austrians set at $155 million, the highest in the nation’s history—the oligarch Vasily Anisimov, a member of Putin’s inner circle, supplied the cash. Over the past five years, Firtash has successfully battled the Justice Department’s attempts to extradite him. He’s hired an army of American lawyers, lobbyists, and consultants, including the notorious Jack Abramoff and the longtime Clinton friend Lanny Davis, as well as the Donald Trump–supporting lawyers Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing. His spokesman is Mark Carollo, who worked for Trump’s legal team during the Mueller investigation.
Foer suggests that Firtash’s involvement raises some important questions about the Ukraine scandal;
Is it possible that the plot against biden began with firtash?
According to the Daily Beast, Firtash has long seethed at Joe Biden. As vice president, Biden vigorously promoted an anti-corruption agenda that included liberating Ukraine’s energy sector from Firtash’s dominance. In fact, when Biden visited Kyiv in 2015 and spoke before Parliament, he seemed to praise the Ukrainian government for “closing the space for corrupt middlemen who rip off the Ukrainian people.” Firtash raged against this speech. He described Biden as an “overlord.” He said, “I was ashamed to look at this. I was repulsed.” If Firtash promised Parnas material that could be used against Biden, he was fulfilling a long-held grudge.
Foer points out that everyone seems to believe that the Biden plot originated with the corrupt Prosecutor Viktor Shokin because he was fired at the insistence of the United States, represented by Biden. It turns out that Shokin and Firtash are allies, with Shokin even filing an affidavit in Austria testifying to Firtash’s innocence. Foer wonders if they might have been working together on this from the beginning.
He also wonders if Parnas and Fruman’s attempt to get a natural gas contract to export American gas to Ukraine (!) and install new leadership in Naftogaz, the company Firtash believes owes him money and is blocking him from selling stores of gas he thinks he owns., might have been on Firtash’s behalf?
And, of course, the big question is what in the world was Rudy Giuliani doing for Firtash? He has tried to distance himself from the oligarch but he’s had to admit that he has met with Firtash’s lawyers and others, here and in Europe. Giuliani met with the Justice Department to discuss the case of a foreigner who was accused of bribery and he won’t name the client.
Finally, Foer asks:
What did the russians know? Given Firtash’s past involvement with the Kremlin—given that the Russian state supplied him with his fortune, given that he did its political bidding in the past, given that a Putin insider loaned him the money for his bail—it seems fair to ask: Did he keep the Russians in the loop about his involvement with Parnas and Giuliani? Did he ever seek to enlist their help? These are admittedly speculative questions, but the oligarch’s background demands their consideration.
Dmytro Firtash’s work in Ukraine undermined that nation’s democracy. He spent hundreds of millions entrenching the forces of kleptocracy. His machinations kept the country locked in Russia’s orbit. That he may have been involved in spreading disinformation about Biden for the sake of avoiding extradition is the most important allegation from Lev Parnas’s trail of cable-news interviews. It suggests that he may have attempted to reprise his past work on American soil, and maybe even succeeded.
We may never know why Donald Trump seems to constantly be surrounded by people who are determined to sabotage our elections. Many of them seem to be centered in Russia and Ukraine but it’s clear he’s happy to rig the election by any means necessary. He doesn’t see anything wrong with it. He’s made that clear.
At this point, I don’t even care why. He’s betrayed his country for his own personal benefit over and over again. And his accomplices in the Republican Party are as faithless and disloyal as he is. His reasons no longer matter.
Image via Herbert Neubauer via AFP/Getty