KYIV BLOG: Why Trump-Poroshenko relations are no easy fix

KYIV BLOG: Why Trump-Poroshenko relations are no easy fix
Ukraine's Petro Poroshenko was ebullient at his meeting with Donald Trump – the US president less so. / Photo by Ukrainian presidential press service
By Sergei Kuznetsov in Kyiv June 23, 2017

“We have had some very, very good discussions,” US President Donald Trump told journalists at the end of a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko in Washington on June 20.

Unusually for him, Trump came across as a person of few words in the leaders’ encounter, which immediately triggered sceptical reactions among experts and concerns among longstanding backers of Kyiv.

“Trump did not utter any word of support for Ukraine, and Poroshenko [was] uncharacteristically subdued,” Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, tweeted the same day.

Indeed, Trump avoided elaborating on US-Ukraine relations, just adding that “a lot of progress has been made” as a result of his talks with Poroshenko.

However, it is easy to suppose that Kyiv’s open backing of Hillary Clinton during the US presidential elections, as well as the involvement of Poroshenko’s associates in plotting against Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort, pose significant barriers to congenial relations between the two leaders.

Ghosts of Manafort

Kyiv has spent months trying to reduce the damage inflicted during Trump’s election campaign. According to Ukrainian experts, Poroshenko’s former chief of the staff Boris Lozhkin was one of the key figures in negotiations with the new US administration concerning the meeting with Trump.

The Ukrainian leadership was even forced to hire the lobbying company BGR Group. The one-year contract with the firm is worth a total of $600,000, according to US political website The Hill.

These efforts have yielded positive results. Yet it appears that Trump had his own agenda in holding a meeting with Poroshenko. The US president may be trying to use Poroshenko, whose image is of a politician locked in a bitter dispute with Russia, to gain strategically in his own fight with domestic political opponents, who accuse him of pro-Moscow sentiments.

According to Timothy Ash, a senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, these contacts with Russia’s estranged neighbour may be “aimed at pulling the attack dogs off Trump and his difficulties with Russiagate, Flynngate, Comeygate, et al, by demonstrating the president’s mettle on Russia”.

“So what we saw was an attempt to demonstrate to US Congressional hawks that the Trump administration is sufficiently tough on Russia and supportive of Ukraine, and a plea to cut it some slack by backing down over codification,” Ash wrote in a blog published in the Financial Times on June 21.
 
It is ironic that Trump used for this role a man who was widely believed to have played a crucial role in compromising his former campaign manager.

Many Kyiv-based operatives and politicians believe that in 2016, Poroshenko’s entourage masterminded a leak of documents from the so-called “secret ledger” of Ukraine’s Party of Regions, previously headed by former president Viktor Yanukovych, in which Manafort was implicated.

The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) published copies of 19 pages, according to which a total of more than $12.7mn was allocated to costs associated with Manafort between November 2007 and October 2012. The scandal led to Manafort’s resignation as Trump’s campaign manager. Nonetheless, US media believe that he continued to provide consultations to the US Republican presidential candidate.

In addition, a sabotage campaign against Manafort, featuring accusations of close ties with the Russians, was headed by Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration. According to Politico, Chalupa is the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who maintains strong ties with the Ukrainian-American diaspora and the US embassy in Ukraine.

During his first press conference at the White House in February, Trump described Manafort as “a good man”, underlining the president’s close relations with his former campaign chief.

Perhaps more significantly, Manafort is apparently still involved in business deals with international figures and companies, partly by claiming continued access to Trump. “He [Manafort] is going around telling people that he’s still talking to the president and – even more than that – that he is helping to shape Trump’s foreign policy,” Politico quoted a lawyer involved in the discussions as saying in June.

Trump’s Russian “balancing act”

The Ukrainian leader’s visit to Washington took place against a background of moves to expand US sanctions against Russia. US authorities on June 20 added to the sanctions list 38 new individuals, officials and companies allegedly involved with the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and in fuelling the ongoing conflict in the Donbas region.

Meanwhile, Ash added in his blog that while some – including the Ukrainians – will welcome the new sanctions, the reality is that they “hardly represent a tightening of sanctions but were more maintenance, trying to ensure the effectiveness of sanctions already in place”.

“A few individuals and corporations were added, but the impact of these on the Russian economy will be peripheral,” Ash wrote. “No new sectors or asset classes were added, so this was not really a deepening, tightening or extension of sanctions. I think the administration was eager to signal all this to Moscow. It was a balancing act, of doing something, or enough, to encourage Congress to back away from codification, but not enough to cause further tensions in relations with Russia.”

It looks like Poroshenko was aware of these intentions of Trump, and his briefing for Ukrainian journalists beyond the White House fence with Trump’s office seen in the background was mainly staged exclusively for the Ukrainian audience with the aim to demonstrate that Kyiv-Washington relations are improving.

“We received strong support ... of sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of our state, as well as support in the continuation of reforms in Ukraine,” Poroshenko’s media office quoted him as saying. “The agenda [of the talks] was really broad. I am fully satisfied with the results of the negotiations and grateful to President Trump, Vice President [Mike] Pence and the secretaries I met for their very strong support of our state.”

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