The first official in exiled ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s government has been convicted.
But not in a Ukrainian court — rather, prosecutors from the U.S. special counsel investigation into Russian meddling secured the conviction on Aug. 21 of Paul Manafort, the former Party of Regions adviser and 2016 Trump presidential campaign manager.
Barring a pardon from Trump, it looks like the end of the line for Manafort, whose career took him from the Reagan White House to tennis matches at Mezhyhirya, Yanukovych’s sprawling billion-dollar estate.
Many in Kyiv’s civil society celebrated Manafort’s conviction, while bemoaning how such an investigation — targeting corruption by the wealthy and politically connected — remains unthinkable in Ukraine. Manafort’s trial showed how oligarchs and politicians like Rinat Akhmetov and Serhiy Lovochkin funnelled millions of dollars to the now-convicted felon for his political work, arguably in violation of Ukrainian law.
In fact, the Ukrainian side appears so unafraid of accountability that when the Kyiv Post presented the half-dozen oligarchs and politicians with direct evidence of Cypriot payments to Manafort, they either denied it or ignored repeated requests for comment.
But let’s absolve ourselves of the fiction that Ukraine is somehow “more corrupt” than the West, or that Manafort was somehow behaving unusually.
Both Kyiv and Washington are filled with operators that trade influence for cash, operating in legal gray areas to enjoy the proceeds of power while keeping it away from U.S. and Ukrainian state treasuries.
The difference comes in whether the law is enforced.
Manafort leaves behind him a decades-long trail of alleged wrongdoing. In fact, much of the evidence gathered against him for his current conviction came from an FBI investigation conducted in 2014 into Yanukovych’s assets, after which they declined to prosecute him.
That decision came amid a broader failure to prosecute white collar crime in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, after which not one top US executive was prosecuted, despite overwhelming evidence of fraud. Meanwhile, unknown millions continue to pour into luxury Western real estate, much of it corruptly obtained in the former Soviet Union.
Many analysts have argued that the only reason Manafort is being held accountable is because of the attention drawn to him by his closeness to Trump and the alleged Russian interference in the election. Had Trump lost, the argument goes, Manafort would have gotten away scot-free.
Ukraine needs to thoroughly investigate the oligarchs that paid Manafort for the damage he and the Party of Regions did to Ukraine, and bring them to justice, as well as combat the corruption scandals that continue to suck the country dry.
But let’s not kid ourselves. The United States also has a responsibility to enforce its laws against its wealthiest and most politically connected citizens — an obligation that it far too often fails to uphold.
