As the investigations continue into Russian links to U.S. President Donald J. Trump and his 2016 election campaign, a spotlight has been shed on the involvement of U.S.-based lawyers.
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom have come under scrutiny for receiving Ukrainian government contracts to prepare reports supporting the criminal conviction and imprisonment of ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko in 2011. (The political opponent of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych was imprisoned until Yanukovych fled power on Feb. 21, 2014 amid the EuroMaidan Revolution).
Yet there have no reports of another U.S. law firm, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, who were employed by Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarch and a political ally since the 1990s of Yanukovych. I was at the receiving end of one of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld’s attempts at censoring published work in the West. In 2013, they threatened the University of Toronto Press with a libel case if they published my book “Ukraine. Democratization, Corruption and the New Russian Imperialism,” which is a modern history of Ukraine from 1953 to the present.
Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld demanded the University of Toronto Press send them my manuscript for them to check over – just as censors had checked publications in the Soviet Union for their suitability for publication. The hard-line position adopted by Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld led to the University of Toronto Press canceling my book contract, thereby losing me two years of work in its preparation for publication. (Akhmetov’s Systems Capital Management spokesman Jock Mendoza-Wilson said that the law firm objected to passages of Kuzio’s book that “contained numerous libels” and inaccuracies.)
“Ukraine. Democratization, Corruption and the New Russian Imperialism” was published in 2015 by U.S. publisher Praeger. The irony of Manafort’s exporting of censorship to the West was that Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld could only threaten libel in countries like Canada and the United Kingdom, where legislation did not protect authors strongly. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld could not threaten libel in the U.S., where authors are protected more strongly.
In Ukraine, there is little transparency in politics and business, and the early biography of Akhmetov covering the missing decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s is opaque. Although Akhmetov and his U.S. lawyers repeatedly denied allegations of his ties to criminal groups they have never provided an alternative biography. Akhmetov was the only Ukrainian oligarch to hire a Western law firm to suppress any criticism in Western media and academic books and articles.
The early biography of Akhmetov is missing but can be pieced together. Akhmetov is the son of a coal miner who moved to Donetsk during the Soviet period from the Russian autonomous republic of Tatarstan. In 1984–1986 (when he would have been 18–20 years old), Akhmetov did not undertake his military conscription service in the Soviet armed forces. At the time, it was common for young Soviet people to buy their way out of military service because they had no wish to serve in their country’s occupation forces in Afghanistan where casualties were high. In the first half of the 1990s in Donetsk, Odesa, and Crimea, the business–politics–crime nexus was commonplace.
Akhmetov rose to the top after his allies were killed in the Donetsk civil war that lasted until the late 1990s. The most notorious of these were Akhat Bragin (“Alek the Greek”), who was blown up in an explosion in 1995, and member of parliament Yevhen Shcherban, who was assassinated in Donetsk Airport a year later. From 1997 through to 2014, Akhmetov and Yanukovych supported one another. They united the Donetsk warring clans into the Party of Regions in 2000-2001.
The pinnacle of Yanukovych’s rise to power was being elected president in 2010 which gave him access to Ukraine’s budget that was stripped bare during his presidency.
Yanukovych complied with all of Russia’s demands and, if there had been no EuroMaidan Revolution, he would have taken Ukraine into Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Union. Manafort and U.S. law firms Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld defended Yanukovych’s criminal regime. The final leg of the treachery was when, allegedly, Yanukovych invited Russian occupation forces into the Crimea and Akhmetov was passive as separatists took power in the Donbas. (Mendoza-Wilson’s response to the allegation of Akhmetov’s passivity: “We actively opposed separatism. We did lots of work on the ground to organize and support protests against the separatist and in support of a united Ukraine, we patrolled Mariupol and other cities with our people, and issued firm statements and called them terrorists and then remained when war began to be the biggest provider of aid on both sides of the contact line to Ukrainians in need. We were far from passive. These actions are clearly documented. We and the Ukrainian state were not successful, but we worked hard to turn back the Russian tide and our people and business have suffered greatly as a consequence.”
