New York Times: Donald Trump's current consultant was the “gray eminence” of Ukraine under Yanukovych
One of the main events in world politics is the election campaign in the United States. Recently, the American media found out that the new head of his election campaign for Republican candidate Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, spent more than a decade in Ukraine, invited by Viktor Yanukovych, who was disillusioned with Moscow political strategists after the Orange Revolution. New York Times says to its readers, what kind of advice was given to Yanukovych by the American in order to understand what to expect from Donald Trump in the event of his hypothetical election.
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Manafort spent five years leading up to Yanukovych’s victory in 2010, and during that time he studied the situation perfectly. The main strategy of the campaign was to stir up dissatisfaction with the policies of the “orange” government among all social and ethnic groups; in particular, it fueled discontent in the east of Ukraine with the oppression of the rights of the Russian-speaking population by the Kyiv authorities.
Also, with Manafort's help, the Party of Regions "began working to change its image from a 'haven for bandits' to that of a respectable political party," wrote Herbst, who was at that time the American ambassador in Kyiv. And Manafort managed to start these processes.
Yanukovych, however, turned out to be a very obstinate client, and did not want to follow the urgent advice of his American technologist without signing the Association Agreement with the EU. But the coup did not drive Manafort out of Ukraine. The American’s new employer was the “gray eminence” of the Opposition Bloc party, people’s deputy and former head of Yanukovych’s administration Sergei Levochkin.
The new strategy of the American political strategist was a continuation of the old one. He tried to summarize as much as possible the slogans and names of the new political force, which consisted of the remnants of the Party of Regions, so that it would enter parliament. That’s why he insisted on the name “Opposition Bloc”. And here he was lucky.
Yevgeny Kopatko, the sociologist who worked closely with Manafort in Ukraine for the longest time, always considered him an effective and pragmatic strategist. In his campaigns, he relied not on speculative conclusions, but on facts.
And the first thing that should be assumed is that Paul Manafort in the Donald Trump campaign is trying to shift the conversation to the topic that he knows best.
“But where is the guarantee that if he wins the election, Trump will not turn out to be as stubborn and obstinate as Yanukovych turned out to be, and will not act in his own way?” the publication says.
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