Documentary "The Oligarchs" : What Ukraine's recent past can teach us about Trump, money laundering and puppet presidents
As you guys know I have a thing for documentaries and recently I came across this excellent documentary about Oligarchs in Ukraine and Russia.
It explains how oligarchs are connected in Ukraine and how they paid for the election of Viktor Yanukovych. Paul Manafort, who is now in prison, was hired by oligarchs to create Yanukovych’s campaign and lead him to win the election, which he did.
Yanukovych was not just elected, but eventually deposed after a popular uprising. Which in some ways, parallels what is happening here now. There is a passage in this documentary that shows footage of Yanukovych leaving Ukraine in the middle of the night, ‘rescued’ as it were by a Russian helicopter. He is now living in Russia.
This is not THAT different from the situation we are living with Trump. His election was managed by Manafort, he was created and propped by an adversary to harm his own country. Just like Yanukovych.
This documentary also does a fantastic job of explaining how money laundering works and how these oligarchs use shadow companies to transfer dirty money, often literally stolen from the Ukranian treasury. It also brings up some new oligarchs I had never heard of, who just happen to be connected to Giuliani and Trump. One of them in fact, was negotiating for Trump Tower Moscow…
Which reminds me of how I first found it. I was looking up "Pavel Fuchs and Giuliani" and documentary came up. Pavel Fuchs is an oligarch I had never heard of who is supposedly being investigated at SDNY in the Lev/Igor/Giuliani case. This WSJ article explains the connection between Giuliani, Fuks and Trump:
In May 2017, Giuliani Security & Safety inked a contract with the city administration of Kharkiv to streamline municipal emergency services, according to the company. A person familiar with the negotiations said Pavel Fuks, a Kharkiv native who had made a fortune in Russian real estate, paid the contract. Mr. Fuks didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Giuliani declined to comment on that arrangement.
About a decade earlier, Mr. Fuks had negotiated with Mr. Trump to license the Trump brand for a tower that Mr. Fuks was building, with other partners, in the Russian capital’s Moscow City, Mr. Fuks said at the time. The deal didn’t come together.