Will Trump Rescue the Oligarch in the Gilded Cage?
Dmitry Firtash’s extradition case will test the administration’s intentions toward Russia. Flynn’s ouster just complicated it.
Will Trump Rescue the Oligarch in the Gilded Cage?
Outside of a John le Carré novel, there may be no more perfectly embroiled middleman than Firtash. Russia and the former Soviet republics have more than a few embattled oligarchs, but only one stands accused of being the missing link between Vladimir Putin and the Trump administration. Last summer, in the thick of the U.S. presidential campaign, a host of news reports noted that Firtash, a Ukrainian natural gas magnate, was the onetime business partner of Donald Trump adviser Paul Manafort, the Washington political operative who’d worked in Ukraine for Viktor Yanukovych, the country’s Russia-friendly kleptocratic president. (Yanukovych, for his part, appeared in the explosive, unverified opposition research dossier on Trump that went public just before the inauguration: He was the Ukrainian politician who was said to have assured Putin that no one would ever trace alleged cash payments to Manafort back to the Russian president.)
But the connection to Manafort, and
Manafort’s connection to Trump, represent just the latest alleged entanglement for Firtash.