n the summer of 2016, somebody, perhaps Vladimir Putin himself, sketched a peace plan for Ukraine. The provenance of the proposal remains deliberately vague. Had the suggestion been accepted, it would have avoided Russia’s war on its neighbor five years later. The so-called “Mariupol plan,” named for eastern Ukraine’s largest industrial city, would have split off four prosperous Donbass counties to form an autonomous republic, to be led by Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed president of Ukraine who had fled Kyiv for Russia two years before. In effect: East and West Ukraine
The trouble is, the proposal was conveyed, via intermediaries, amid elaborate secrecy, to just one man, US presidential candidate Donald Trump. Rival candidate Hillary Rodham certainly would reject the plan were she to be elected. So the loosely-worded proffer was said to be enhanced by a sweetener: Russia would take a hand in the American election, denigrating Clinton through a massive hacking campaign.
That’s the burden of a Sunday magazine article in The New York Times today: “The Untold Story of ‘Russiagate’ and the Road to War in Ukraine,” by reporter Jim Rutenberg. It is a long and complicated tale, and sticks closely the NYT’s editorial position: that Russia’s war was unprovoked by NATO expansion.
In fact, the story of the “Grand Havana Room meeting,” atop 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, between Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik, manager of Manafort’s international consulting office in Kyiv, has been told before, though never as concisely as has Rutenberg: by the Mueller Report, the thousand-page Senate Intelligence Committee report, and by The Atlantic’s George Packer in his review of Andrew Weissmann’s book about his service as a top aide to Robert Mueller, Where the Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation.
Ruteberg drew on these accounts, and on his own reporting, in a mostly successful attempt to connect two narratives. “Thrumming below the whole (US) election saga was another story – about Ukraine’s efforts to establish a modern democracy….” From the platform battles of the Republican convention to the turmoil of the transition to the first impeachment, the main business of the Trump presidency all had to do with Ukraine. “Even now” he writes, “some influential voices in American politics, mostly but not entirely on the right, are suggesting that Ukraine make concessions of sovereignty similar to those contained in Kilimnik’s plan, which the nation’s leaders categorically reject.”
The trouble is, the proposal was conveyed, via intermediaries, amid elaborate secrecy, to just one man, US presidential candidate Donald Trump. Rival candidate Hillary Rodham certainly would reject the plan were she to be elected. So the loosely-worded proffer was said to be enhanced by a sweetener: Russia would take a hand in the American election, denigrating Clinton through a massive hacking campaign.
That’s the burden of a Sunday magazine article in The New York Times today: “The Untold Story of ‘Russiagate’ and the Road to War in Ukraine,” by reporter Jim Rutenberg. It is a long and complicated tale, and sticks closely the NYT’s editorial position: that Russia’s war was unprovoked by NATO expansion.
In fact, the story of the “Grand Havana Room meeting,” atop 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, between Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik, manager of Manafort’s international consulting office in Kyiv, has been told before, though never as concisely as has Rutenberg: by the Mueller Report, the thousand-page Senate Intelligence Committee report, and by The Atlantic’s George Packer in his review of Andrew Weissmann’s book about his service as a top aide to Robert Mueller, Where the Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation.
Ruteberg drew on these accounts, and on his own reporting, in a mostly successful attempt to connect two narratives. “Thrumming below the whole (US) election saga was another story – about Ukraine’s efforts to establish a modern democracy….” From the platform battles of the Republican convention to the turmoil of the transition to the first impeachment, the main business of the Trump presidency all had to do with Ukraine. “Even now” he writes, “some influential voices in American politics, mostly but not entirely on the right, are suggesting that Ukraine make concessions of sovereignty similar to those contained in Kilimnik’s plan, which the nation’s leaders categorically reject.”
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