Paul Manafort’s Lucrative Ukraine Years Are Central to the Russia Probe
Jim Slattery arrived at the Stalin-era presidential headquarters in Kiev, Ukraine with an unusual gift for the nation’s strongman leader: a bust of Abraham Lincoln. It was March 2013, and the former U.S. congressman had travelled to Urkaine to persuade President Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, to free Yanukovych’s arch rival from prison. The statuette came with a hopeful message: You, Slattery told the president, could be the Lincoln of Ukraine – a leader who binds up the nation’s wounds. What Slattery didn’t know was that another American operative was helping the president defend the imprisonment of Yulia Tymoshenko, an act widely condemned in the Western world. His name: Paul Manafort.