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We have mentioned to you a few times what you almost certainly remembered: that President Trump’s first impeachment was over Ukraine and that Trump’s disgraced 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort’s work was in Ukraine for the Russia-aligned former President of Ukraine. But there’s more to it than that. If we step back we can see a thread stretching back at least a decade, weaving from one crisis to the next until this moment. We start in the uprising against Viktor Yanukovych, the so-called Maidan Revolution, an event which was triggered by Yanukovych’s decision to move away from integration with the European Union. Vladimir Putin has always blamed Yanukovych’s ouster from power on the U.S. And this was actually the context for an incident which people in the U.S. foreign policy and national security world later saw as a harbinger of what was to come.
States routinely monitor the conversations of their adversaries or even sometimes allies. This is basic intelligence collection. States try to guard against it but it is treated as entirely normal that other states attempt to do this. But during the Maidan Revolution Russia took a monitored conversation between then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt and posted it online to embarrass the U.S. Given what has transpired over the last decade, this now seems almost quaint. But it crossed a then-seldom crossed line, moving from intelligence collection to the weaponization of recorded intercepts.
In reaction to the overthrow of Yanukovych, Russia escalated the stakes and seized and annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea and occupied portions of eastern Ukraine under the guise of supporting “separatist” forces in the region. Both during and after this seizure of territory Russia expanded its campaign of information warfare both within Ukraine and beyond.
We know about Russia’s active measures campaign during the 2016 election. But the networks of bots, social media channels, websites and more actually got underway earlier. They appear to have gotten underway in the months after the fall of the Yanukovych government. Journalist Adrien Chen started seeing examples popping up about six months after events in Ukraine. There was a hoax chemical plant disaster in Louisiana. Then during the U.S. Ebola outbreak a short time later, there was a network of social media accounts playing up the scare and circulating disinformation about the outbreak. Chen eventually traced both back to an outfit called the Internet Research Agency in Russia. He published his article in June 2015 in The New York Times Magazine. Chen had created a Twitter list of the various accounts he had found during his reporting. Later that year he noticed something odd. The accounts that had been pushing Ebola disinformation, the chemical plant explosion hoax and more had transformed into Trump supporter accounts. This was late in 2015.
A few months after this in the Spring of 2016 Paul Manafort was trying to recoup his fortunes which had been wrecked when his Ukrainian client, Yanukovych, had been driven into exile in Russia two years earlier. He reached out to mutual friend Tom Barrack and asked for an introduction to candidate Trump. He was quickly brought on board Donald Trump’s campaign and by summer he was it. He was there in time for the Republican National Convention, when he used his new authority to remove a plank supporting the arming of Ukraine from the party platform. On to Trump’s presidency, from the beginning right until the end we have a steady stream of intermediaries making approaches on Russia’s behalf to various Trump cronies pressing various “peace plans” for Ukraine.
We’ve spent years now litigating just why Paul Manafort sought out and joined the Trump campaign and what level of on-going contact he had with Russian intelligence or Russian or Ukrainian oligarchs who were go-betweens for the same. But while that is a critical question it is sort of beside the point for the larger part of the story. Again and again, the major developments in U.S. history over the last decade have come back to this one country, Ukraine, its contested status between East and West and the Russian government’s belief that restoring Ukraine’s proper status as a satellite of Russia was the critical step in setting right the West’s and the United States’ role in humiliating and debilitating Russia at the end of the Cold War.
Some argue that this cycle really began in 2011 when Hillary Clinton prominently supported the anti-government protests in Russia. And that may be the case. Clearly we’re talking about a pattern of injury that in Vladimir Putin’s mind goes all the way back to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War and really back to the earliest years of the Cold War. So there’s no need to determine the exact origin point. But the point is that we should be seeing all of these events as an unfolding and escalating progression stretching back at least to February 2014. It’s not a series of interconnections or ironies or odd coincidences. And it’s not just fall out from whatever happened in 2016. They are each a progression of events, one driving the other into the future, that have dominated American political history for the last decade.
