Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include background on Giuliani’s previous travels to Ukraine and the former Soviet Union and an additional comment from Leshchenko.
Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and currently United States President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, has announced he will cancel a planned trip to Ukraine to meet with President-elect Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other Ukrainian officials.
Giuliani had planned to encourage Zelenskiy and his nascent team to conduct investigations into two matters with significant public resonance in the United States and potential benefit to Trump, he told the New York Times on May 9.
The first issue in question was events surrounding the release of the “black ledger” of ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, which fueled the U.S. investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. It also led to a counternarrative pushed by the Trump Administration and conservative pundits that the Ukrainian government had attempted to interfere in the election in favor of Trump’s opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The second matter was the role of former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s son in Burisma Holdings, a Cyprus-based gas company owned by Yanukovych-era Ecology and Natural Resources Minister Mykola Zlochevsky. The younger Biden had worked for the company while his father served as vice president and the Barack Obama administration’s point-person on Ukraine.
But after significant pushback in both Ukraine and the United States, Giuliani reversed his plans.
“I’m not going to go because I think I’m walking into a group of people that are enemies of the president, in some cases enemies of the United States and, in one case, an already convicted person who has been found to be involved in assisting the Democrats with the 2016 election,” Giuliani said during an interview on television channel Fox News.
It is unclear whom Giuliani considers “enemies” of Trump and the United States. However, the former New York City mayor named the “convicted person”: Sergiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker who played a central role in revealing alleged illegal payments from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions to former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, at the time a political consultant for Yanukovych.
Manafort was later sentenced to nearly eight years in prison in the United States for various financial crimes.
Ukrainian Reaction
Giuliani’s planned visit was widely viewed as an attempt to help Trump combat allegations that he colluded with Russia in the 2016 election — a narrative which, while unproven and hotly contested, has gained widespread support among his opponents — and to undermine Biden, Trump’s probable opponent in the 2020 presidential race.
But the idea of Trump’s lawyer traveling to Kyiv to advance foreign investigations beneficial to the president was poorly received by people close to Zelenskiy.
Late on May 10, The Independent reported that Zelenskiy would likely not attend the meeting with Giuliani. Instead, he would send representatives, the newspaper wrote, citing two unnamed sources close to the president-elect.
The New York Times also reported that Zelenskiy’s advisors were urging him not to meet with Giuliani, citing an unnamed source “familiar with the conversations.”
Andrii Telizhenko, a former diplomat at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington who has supported the narrative that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, also told the Kyiv Post on May 10 that the meeting might not happen.
He said there were “pro-liberal-oriented politicians” like lawmaker Sergiy Leshchenko and former Finance Minister Oleksandr Danylyuk in Zelenskiy’s circle who oppose the meeting.
Both politicians are regarded as pro-Western reformers who joined Zelenskiy’s campaign team as advisors during the run-up to the election, which was held in two rounds on March 31 and April 21. Leshchenko denied advising Zelenskiy not to attend a meeting with Giuliani. Danylyuk could not be reached for comment.
Still, Leshchenko is a key figure in one of the matters motivating Giuliani’s now-cancelled trip to Ukraine.
In May 2016, Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist, published information from the Party of Region’s “black ledger” showing that the party spent large sums of money on paid advertising and the services of top state officials.
In August 2017, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine published a report indicating that Paul Manafort’s name was found in the ledger alongside a list of payments. It concluded that Manafort could have received more than $12 million from the Party of Regions since 2007.
That revelation helped force Manafort to abandon his role in the Trump campaign. However, it also proved controversial in Ukraine.
After Trump’s November 2016 election, Nazar Kholodnytsky, head of the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s office, said his agency could not prove the authenticity of Manafort’s supposed signature in the ledger. It also saw no grounds to press charges against Manafort.
In his interview with Fox News, Giuliani called the ledger “fraudulent.” However, Leshchenko argues that the document is real and that interrogations of people connected to the ledger and the Manafort investigation in the U.S. prove that.
“The Manafort transactions in the ledger were documented, which eventually proved his tax evasion and led to him being convicted in the U.S.,” Leshchenko said.
In January 2017, the news site Politico published an article suggesting that Ukrainian government officials attempted to use the “black ledger” to interfere in the U.S. presidential election in favor of Trump’s rival for the presidency, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
In December 2018, the Kyiv district administrative court ruled that Leshchenko and Artem Sytnyk, director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, had acted illegally when they revealed that Manafort’s surname and signature were found in the “black ledger.” Strangely, the court also concluded that Leshchenko had illegally interfered in Ukraine’s foreign policy and that the two men’s actions “had the consequence of interference in the electoral processes of the United States of America in 2016 and harmed the interests of the Ukrainian state.”
The administrative court has a reputation for questionable and controversial rulings. Leshchenko told the Kyiv Post that he is currently appealing the ruling — which he says comes from “Poroshenko’s pocket court” — and that, as a result, it has not come into force.
That distinction appears to be lost on Donald Trump and his media supporters. They have seized upon that narrative, arguing that Ukraine — and not Russia — is the country that actually interfered in the election. The U.S. president has tweeted and spoken out in support of the narrative.
Ukrainian politicians have also seized upon these claims. In a March interview with Hill.TV, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko alleged that National Anti-Corruption Bureau director Sytnyk — an individual with whom he has an fraught relationship — leaked the “black ledger” to help Hillary Clinton’s election effort. He also claimed that U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch had given him a list of defendants whom Ukraine should not prosecute.
The claims about Yovanovitch came shortly after the ambassador harshly criticized Kyiv’s anti-corruption efforts and called for the firing of Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky, whom wiretaps revealed helping powerful suspects in corruption cases avoid prosecution.
The U.S. State Department denied that Yovanovitch had ever given Lutsenko a list of “untouchables.” Nonetheless, the prosecutor general’s claims provoked the wrath of pro-Trump pundits against the ambassador. Even the U.S. president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., lambasted her.
“We need more @RichardGrenell’s and less of these jokers as ambassadors,” he wrote in a tweet, comparing Yovanovitch unfavorably to the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, a strong supporter of Trump.
On May 7, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration had recalled Yovanovitch ahead of her scheduled departure from the ambassador post.
Two U.S. congressmen from the Democratic Party — Rep. Steny Hoyer, the House of Representatives majority leader, and Eliot Engel, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee — have termed her removal a “political hit job,” the Foreign Policy news site reported.
“It’s clear that this decision was politically motivated, as allies of President Trump had joined foreign actors in lobbying for the Ambassador’s dismissal,” Hoyer and Engel said in a May 7 statement.
Biden Connection
After news of Giuliani’s planned visit to Ukraine broke, the former New York City mayor found himself facing a barrage of criticism from Democrats that the trip was politically motivated and that he was, effectively, seeking a Ukrainian intervention into U.S. politics.
Giuliani has denied that. “We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” he told the New York Times. But that has hardly stopped the criticism.
“Today, Giuliani admitted to seeking political help from a foreign power. Again,” Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat and vociferous critic of Trump, wrote on Twitter.
In a tweet, Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier suggested that Giuliani’s trip would violate the Logan Act, which makes it a crime for private citizens to negotiate with foreign governments.
“Now the president’s new fixer, Rudy Giuliani, has launched on a trip to Ukraine to engage in a process of foreign intervention regarding (former Vice President Joe) Biden…,” Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, wrote on Twitter.
Lee was referring to claims that Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to sack Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in order to halt an investigation into the Burisma Holdings energy company, where his son Hunter sat on the board of directors. Prosecutor General Lutsenko had implied as much during his interview with Hill.TV.
The problem is that the narrative — while popular in the right-wing press — does not hold up to close scrutiny.
Biden indeed called for Shokin’s removal, a demand supported by Ukrainian pro-reform activists and the country’s Western partners. Shokin was ultimately sacked in March 2016 and replaced by Yuriy Lutsenko.
However, the investigation into Burisma had long lay dormant before Shokin’s removal, and the former Prosecutor General was hardly an active investigator.
The probe into Burisma’s owner Zlochevsky “was opened because of a request from Ukrainian legislators, not because of prosecutorial initiative,” Oliver Bullough, an expert on corruption, money laundering, and the former Soviet Union, wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post.
“There is, in short, no there there,” Bullough wrote, describing this claims that Biden was trying to help his son.
The investigation was also closed under Shokin’s successor, Yuriy Lutsenko.
Lawmaker Leshchenko told the Kyiv Post that Lutsenko closed the investigation. However, Larysa Sargan, a spokesperson for Lutsenko, published on Facebook what she said was a fragment from the prosecutor general’s interview with the New York Times. According to that text, the investigation into Burisma was actually made up of three separate cases with three separate outcomes.
Zlochevsky won the first case, which dealt with tax evasion, in a London court.
The second case — which dealt with Zlochevsky allegedly using his position as minister to issue subsoil exploration licenses to his own companies — was illegally passed to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and closed, Lutsenko stated. By law, Lutsenko does not have the right to any information about the Bureau or the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s investigations and, thus, can only go off public statements by officials from those agencies, he said in the statement. Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Kholodnytsky previously stated that the National Anti-Corruption Bureau did not carry out any investigations, forcing him to close the case, Lutsenko added.
However, in early 2018, Kholodnytsky said his office closed the case after not finding enough evidence for charges.
The third case dealt with tax avoidance. According to Lutsenko, Burisma payed Hr 180 million ($6.86 million) in taxes plus fines to avoid criminal liability, an outcome he termed a success. The Prosecutor General’s office is currently attempting to reanimate the case in the London court, he said in the statement.
None of that appears to be evidence that Biden somehow exerted influence on the Burisma investigation. Furthermore, anti-corruption activists say that Shokin was fired for not doing enough to fight corruption.
“Shokin was fired because he failed to do investigations of corruption and economic crimes of President Yanukovych and his close associates, including Zlochevsky, and basically it was the big demand within society in Ukraine, including our organization and many other organizations, to get rid of this guy,” Daria Kaleniuk, director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, told the Intercept. She also said that Shokin attacked reformers within the Prosecutor General’s Office.
But if U.S. critics blamed Giuliani for trying to politicize the Burisma case, lawmaker Leshchenko placed the blame on Lutsenko, suggesting that he was using the case in a last-ditch attempt to keep his job. Zelenskiy has suggested he will replace the prosecutor general.
“I think Giuliani understood that Lutsenko systematically misled him and abandoned his trip,” Leshchenko told the Kyiv Post. “Now we Ukrainians must morally and politically evaluate the actions of Lutsenko, who dragged Ukraine into a conflict between two political parties in America for the sake of saving his job.”
Asked for comment, Lutsenko spokesperson Sargan referred the Kyiv Post to the prosecutor general’s previous interviews and her post on Facebook.
Previous visits
Had Giuliani gone ahead with his trip, it would not have been his first visit to Ukraine or to a post-Soviet country.
In November 2017, the former New York City mayor visited Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, where he was greeted by Mayor Gennadiy Kernes and met with Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, also a Kharkiv native.
Giuliani took part in a conference called “Kharkiv — Security and Rule of Law,” where he and Kernes signed a memorandum on the creation of an “information-situational” center unifying the city’s emergency services. The former New York City mayor also recommended Ukraine open a DNA laboratory for investigating crimes.
According to local media, Giuliani’s consulting firm, called Giuliani Security & Safety, was doing work for the city of Kharkiv, which is located just under 500 kilometers to the east of Kyiv and a short drive from the Russian border. However, it was unclear who ways paying for his company’s services.
Today, more information is available. Giuliani had been hired by Pavlo Fuks, a Kharkiv-born Ukrainian businessman who worked for many years in Moscow. Fuks has attracted the most attention in the United States for his involvement in the Donald Trump’s failed Trump Tower project in Moscow.
In bringing Giuliani to Kharkiv, Fuks was answering the call of Mayor Kernes, who asked the business community for help make contact with “authoritative international companies” who could assist in making Kharkiv safer, Fuks told the Kyiv Post through a spokesperson. He offered to help the city find companies that could consult on safety.
During several visits to Kharkiv, consultants from Giuliani Security & Safety met with representatives of the city’s emergency services and other agencies charged with safety in the city.
During the November 2017 visit, Giuliani presented his company’s report on improving the work of law enforcement and the emergency services in Kharkiv. Its main recommendation was to create a “unified situational center” for the city that could predict possible threats and quickly respond to them, Fuks’ spokesperson said, adding that the city of Kharkiv is currently working on implementing these recommendations.
The details of Fuks’ contract with Giuliani remain largely unknown. However, Fuks has also said that he hired Giuliani to help attract investment to Kharkiv and Ukraine, the New York Times reported. However, Fuks’ spokesperson denied that the oligarch had any role in attracting American investment to Kharkiv.
She also denied any connection to Giuliani’s cancelled trip to Ukraine.
Giuliani has also made other trips to post-Soviet countries. In October 2018, the former mayor visited Yerevan, Armenia to attend the Eurasian Week conference at the invitation of Russian-Armenian multimillionaire Ara Abrahamyan, a figure closely aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In particular, Giuliani raised eyebrows for speaking alongside Sergei Glazyev, a Russian economist and advisor to Putin sanctioned by the United States, on a panel about technology in the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union.
Previously, in 2008, Giuliani visited Ukraine to support boxer Vitali Klitschko, currently the mayor of Kyiv. The trip was organized by a little known company called TriGlobal Strategic Ventures. It also organized a meeting between Giuliani and Klitschko in New York in 2015, the ProPublic news site reported. Abrahamyan, who invited the former mayor to Yerevan, is on TriGlobal’s advisory board.
Even earlier, in 2004, Giuliani traveled to Moscow, where he met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov before traveling to the provincial industrial city of Magnitogorsk, Propublica reported.
Beyond this, most of the details of these trips — including how much Giuliani was paid for them — remain unclear.
