I remember Manafort clearly during the inauguration of Victor Yanukovych, the former president of Ukraine. On a cold February morning, men and women wearing tailcoats and evening gowns hurried towards the Lenin monument. There was a little bit of commotion at the entrance – Rinat Akhmetov, the richest Ukrainian man and the right arm of Yanukovych, was trying to make way for an inconspicuous American. It was only me and a few of my colleagues who recognized the mysterious stranger’s face: it was Paul Manafort.
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Sergii Leshchenko: Ukrainians saw Paul Manafort’s political impact up close – and it wasn’t pretty
Ukrainian journalist and member of parliament Serhiy Leshchenko holds pages showing allegedly signings of payments to Donald Trump's presidential campaign chairman Paul Manafort from an illegal shadow accounting book of the party of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych during a press conference in Kyiv on August 19, 2016.
Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's campaign chairman, has only recently become familiar to Americans. But in Ukraine, Manafort has played a decisive role in politics for nearly a decade - one that is being closely scrutinized after his name has appeared in documents that are being examined in a corruption investigation. That is why on Friday, I helped to make public more documents related to Manafort's dealings with the Party of Regions, which he used to consult for.
