MET ONE NATIONALIST...:

Twenty years ago, there was no significant reservoir of opposition to Ukrainian independence and democracy. The burgeoning alliance between Russian nationalists and America Firsters was set in motion when Paul Manafort went to work for the pro-Russian Party of Regions in Ukraine in 2004. Manafort, once one of the most powerful Republican lobbyists in Washington, had begun a globetrotting career selling his services to dictators. His Ukrainian client, Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions, was Putin's main organ for maintaining control of his neighboring country.

Putin nurtured a cadre of pliant Ukrainian oligarchs and functionaries who served a devious double purpose. They would faithfully weaken Ukrainian democracy on his behalf, and then he could turn around to the outside world and hold up Ukraine's corruption as a justification for why it should not be treated like a real country.

He paired this with a slowly escalating campaign of violence. Putin and his allies would violently intimidate their political opposition to prevent them from gaining control of Ukraine. In 2004, Putin's agents poisoned Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-western presidential candidate. (This occurred four years before the United States invited Ukraine to join NATO, a sequence that shows Russia's threats against Ukraine drove its interest in joining the alliance, rather than the reverse, as Putin and his defenders have suggested.) Ten years later, Manafort's client unleashed snipers and thugs to drive away peaceful protesters before a democratic revolution forced him to flee the country. After Russophiles lost control of Ukraine's government, Putin started using militias to seize chunks of territory.

At the tail end of the Obama administration, both Democrats and Republicans supported democratization, westernization, and reform in Ukraine. When the Obama administration pressured Ukraine to fire ineffective prosecutor Viktor Shokin -- a key step forward for advancing the rule of law in Ukraine -- a bipartisan letter commended its efforts and did not draw any significant domestic opposition.

Trump's rise introduced to the Republican Party a figure who shared Putin's perspective toward Ukraine and often echoed his propaganda. When Putin ginned up demonstrations in eastern Ukraine as a pretext to hive off chunks of land in 2014, Trump gushed, "So smart, when you see the riots in a country because they're hurting the Russians, Okay, we'll go and take it over ... You have to give him a lot of credit." After winning the nomination, Trump promised to consider recognizing Putin's land seizure because "the people of Crimea, from what I've heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were."

Trump brought on Manafort to run his campaign, which further linked Ukraine's conflict with Russia to the American domestic struggle. Ukrainians released a "black book" of evidence of secret payments by the previous, pro-Russian regime, which implicated Manafort in an embezzling scandal for which he was eventually convicted. After it hacked Democratic emails and released them to aid Trump's candidacy, Russia claimed it had been framed by Ukraine. Trump subsequently endorsed this theory. ("They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based," he told the Associated Press a few months after taking office. "I heard it's owned by a very rich Ukrainian; that's what I heard.")

Trump, of course, was impeached the first time for pressuring Zelenskyy to smear Biden, and his motive was primarily to gain an advantage over his opponent. But he also had clearly absorbed Putin's idea that Ukraine was corrupt and undeserving of sovereignty. Trump regularly flummoxed his staff by insisting Ukraine was "horrible, corrupt people" and "wasn't a 'real country,' that it had always been a part of Russia, and that it was 'totally corrupt,'" the Washington Post reported. (The element of Russian propaganda here is not the claim that corruption exists in Ukraine, which is true, but the premise that this somehow destroys its claim to sovereignty or justifies subjugation to its far more corrupt neighbor.)

By the end of Trump's presidency, the distinction between his agenda in Ukraine and the Russian agenda in Ukraine was difficult to discern.

Tweet   @brothersjudd