I can finally breathe a sigh of relief as the Donald Trump era is coming to the end. Its policy, where truth is mixed with fiction, seriously affected my life.
I was one of the advisers to Volodymyr Zelensky during his winning presidential campaign in 2019. I began supporting him in December 2018.
During the campaign, we discussed his ambitious anti-corruption program with then-U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Gale, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius and then-Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland.
But a few days before Zelensky’s inauguration in May 2019, Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani told the world that I was convicted of interfering in the 2016 U.S. election and was a personal enemy of the American president. It was a lie.
Giuliani referred to the illegal and later annulled ruling of the Kyiv District Administra-tive Court — which has long had a reputation as the most corrupt in Ukraine. It ruled in December 2018 that I had acted illegally in 2016 when I published information about secret payments of the overthrown Viktor Yanukovych regime, including to their political consultant Paul Manafort. After working for Yanukovych, Manafort surfaced as Trump’s campaign manager in 2016.
The notorious court is currently under investigation for corruption. As for Manafort, a federal judge in the U.S. sentenced him to 7.5 years in prison for his many crimes.
Despite the obvious injustice of Giuliani’s slander, it was clear to me that my presence on Zelensky’s team could complicate his relations with the American authorities. I had no right to risk that: Ukraine needs the support of the U.S., especially due to Russia’s military aggression. So I distanced myself from the new administration, and didn’t seek a position in it.
But then Giuliani and his associates tried to get compromising information from Ukraine to hurt Trump’s opponent, former U. S. Vice President Joseph Biden, and influence the 2020 U.S. elections. Their efforts backfired, eventually resulting in impeachment proceedings against Trump.
Yet even then, Giuliani kept repeating this lie about my alleged interference in the U.S. election four years ago. That is why the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election bring moral satisfaction to me.
Russia’s interference
At the same time, I am worried because, in today’s America, I see problems that were previously typical for Ukraine — political hatred, polarization of society, attempts to undermine election results, the spread of fake news and fake accounts on social media.
All these technologies were brought to Ukraine by agents of Russian influence. This proves that the Kremlin has long spread its influence beyond Russia’s neighbors, and across the ocean.
Fifteen years ago, the furthest western country for Russian influence was Montenegro, where Manafort and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska tried to shape the political land-scape. Now the testing ground for Russian methods is the U.S. itself, which for many years has been a model for democratic change in the post-Soviet space. Biden’s administration will have to find a way to curb Russia’s technology of spreading false narratives.
In Ukraine, Biden’s victory provided a reason for optimism for a large group of reformers, civil society leaders, and anti-corruption activists who have been targeted by pro-Russian media claiming that they are trying to reshape Ukraine’s electoral map.
Using the technologies of manipulation, buying and launching TV channels, filling air-time with their puppet experts and inventing conspiracy theories, these agents have already penetrated deep into Ukrainian society. Thanks to these efforts, Viktor Medvedchuk’s pro-Russian Opposition Platform — For Life party performed well during last month’s elections in Ukraine and secured their position in local councils.
And even now, after Biden is recognized as the president-elect by all leaders of the democratic world, this infrastructure of political deception, created with Russian money in Ukraine, is promoting the fake narrative that the victory was stolen from Trump.
This is done with the simple goal of delegitimizing the new U.S. administration in the eyes of Ukrainian society, especially since that administration will be more intolerant to corruption and pro-Russian influence in Ukraine and will continue the bipartisan fight to stop Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
Russian propaganda and its agents in Ukraine are already creating the preconditions for “poisoning” Zelensky’s relations with the new American leader.
It’s not hard to predict what message Russian propaganda will be pushing in Ukraine. Twenty years ago, Medvedchuk and his brainwashing machine demonized former U. S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski as an evil foreign puppet master. In recent years, they have demonized philanthropist George Soros and his “agents” in Ukraine. Now they will start labeling all pro-Western reformers as “Biden’s agents.”
Another line of work of pro-Russian forces in Ukraine is growing anti-American politi-cians for their further integration into the government in order to influence Ukraine’s geopolitical vector and try to turn it towards Russia.
Therefore, I have to warn the incoming U.S. administration and the American expert community not to underestimate the risk that pro-Russian forces pose for the pro-Western vision that Ukraine adopted after the EuroMaidan Revolution that toppled Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014.
What the US can do
Russian agents in Ukraine rely on the U. S. They use American-created social media, transfer money through American correspondent accounts, send their children to study in the United States and go there for vacations and medical treatment.
It is time for the U.S. to react.
Recently, YouTube deleted the channel of former Prime Minister of Ukraine Mykola Azarov, who fled to Russia and from there spread false narratives around the world. Medvedchuk was also banned. But his party’s TV channels NewsOne, ZIK, and Channel 112 continue to carry out a similar mission on YouTube, as does their political satellite Anatoly Shariy, a pro-Russian video blogger who even created a pro-Russian political party which won seats in local councils — a success entirely based on his YouTube popularity.
If YouTube, a platform that belongs to U.S. company Google, tightened its policies on misinformation and removed the channel of Shariy and similar Russian propaganda accounts, it would have been a great service to Ukraine.
Besides, the U.S. should not limit itself to sanctions against one lawmaker, Andriy Derkach, who was recognized by the U.S. government as a Russian agent trying to influence the 2020 elections. Punishment should be imposed on all of Derkach’s allies. He listed them in his fake dossier he called “DemoCorruption.” These are former and current lawmakers Oleksandr Dubinsky, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, Oleh Voloshyn, Andriy Artemenko, former prosecutors Yuriy Lutsenko, Viktor Shokin, Kostyantyn Kulik and others.
I hope that the Biden administration will pay more attention to the viability of anti-corruption reforms in Ukraine. In particular, the United States should become an ally of Ukrainian civil society to preserve anti-corruption achievements, which in recent months have become targets for pro-Russian forces and Ukraine’s Constitutional Court, which is destroying the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, depriving the work of the National Agency for Preventing Corruption of meaning and threatening the Supreme Anti-Corruption Court.
I also fully support the idea of American political scientist Anders Aslund to conduct targeted campaigns to curb Ukrainian oligarchs, who are also media moguls like Medvedchuk, Ihor Kolomoisky and Dmytro Firtash. However, it should not be limited to this list. The U. S. government should also help curb the oligarchic influence of Rinat Akhmetov, who has spent hundreds of millions to whitewash his reputation through PR and lobbyists, but continues to live and run his business in Ukraine by the principles of predatory crony-capitalism.
And one last thing: President-elect Biden has never met with Zelensky. But the two have an unusual connection: In 2019, Trump demanded that Zelensky start an investigation into Biden’s son, in exchange for U.S. military aid to Ukraine and an invitation to the Oval Office. Zelensky never gave him that, and never got the meeting.
So Biden could start by doing what his predecessor never did — name the date of his meeting with the Ukrainian president in the White House.
Sergii Leshchenko is a Kyiv Post columnist, investigative journalist and former member of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament.
