Some Background Information on the Current Situation in Ukraine

 Some Brief Background on Russian Political and Social Norms

Russia has always been ruled by absolute monarchies, oligarchies, aristocracies, or dictatorships. The norms of democratic behavior we associate with the free Western nations are alien to Russian culture, although they are growing in some places within Russia. Russians, in their history, have seen (and perpetrated) an unbelievable amount of violence and brutality. They have been at war with virtually every one of their many, many neighbors at some time in their national story. As a consequence many of them highly value strength and stability, and view excessive personal freedom as disruptive to group unity. Russia's expansion from the area immediately surrounding Moscow in the 15th century to significant territories on three different continents (before Russia sold Alaska to the United States) is perhaps the greatest political expansion in world history, rivaling that of the Mongol Empire of which Russia was once a part. (Ukraine was forcibly put under Russian control in 1654.) Many Russians think of the amassing of this empire as a great achievement, one which made their nation a global power. A great many Russians are very proud of their nation's culture as well. An unfortunate element of that culture has been devotion to the idea of a man who "rules with a strong hand". Many Russians (not all) have been conditioned to believe that such a figure is necessary to govern such a sprawling country, and assert Russian influence in world affairs.

Moreover, many Russians have been brought up in deeply religious or socially conservative contexts. Many are disdainful of ethnic or racial minorities, and many find homosexuality and other forms of "deviance" deeply disturbing. Paradoxically, bribery and corruption are so deeply embedded in Russian society as to constitute expected norms of behavior. Alcoholism is a severe problem. There is widespread anti-Semitism as well.

For more than 350 years Russians were governed by figures who called themselves Tsar or Tsarina. And it was the collapse of the Tsarist system that brought about huge consequences, ones which are still being felt a century later.

The Communists in Power

The following information may seem superfluous to you. Trust me, there is a point to it.

The catastrophes of the First World War led to the downfall of Russia's monarchy in February/March 1917. A short-lived democratic government took over, the first true democratic state in Russian history, the Provisional Government. In this turbulent period a small, ruthlessly disciplined group, led by an unwavering, politically brilliant fanatic named Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, emerged as a powerful force. Calling themselves the Bolsheviks, they stood for a Marxist economic vision combined with a willingness to use any tactics, however brutal, to win. The Bolsheviks—the Russian Communists—seized control of St. Petersburg in a coup d'état against the Provisional Government in October/November 1917, and won control of Moscow soon after. This seizure led to a horrifying civil war that swept over much of Russia, a war that saw many sides contending for power. The Communists and their sympathizers were known as the Reds. Their very diverse opposition, the members of which sometimes worked at cross purposes, were known as the Whites. (The United States briefly but ineffectively intervened on behalf of the Whites.) During this struggle the Tsar and his family were captured, and eventually murdered, by the Bolsheviks. The Red-White civil war lasted until 1921, and was marked by hideous atrocities, some of which were unthinkably barbaric, on both sides. After 7,000,000 people had died of war, famine, and disease, the Reds emerged triumphant. They inherited a ruined and prostrate land. Lenin's government ruled by terror to an amazing degree, formally executing in five years' time 40 times the number of people the Tsarist government had executed in the previous 50. The instrument of terror was known as The Cheka, the Soviet Secret Police. The name The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to designate the country was formally adopted in 1922. Lenin died in 1924 and was entombed in a mausoleum off of Red Square in Moscow, where his (alleged) corpse remains to this day.

In the 1920s, a figure who had been a minor player in the revolution and civil war quietly gathered power and influence, and in December 1927 he seized control of the leadership. A Georgian by birth, his adopted name was Joseph Stalin. Stalin rapidly consolidated power, killing, imprisoning, or exiling his principal opponents. Leon Trotsky, who had been Lenin's right-hand man, was exiled and then chased across the world, until the Soviet secret police caught up with him in 1940 and split his head open with an axe. In the USSR itself Stalin instituted astonishingly sweeping changes, carried out with maximum cruelty and coercion. Industry was expanded at break-neck speed, often with the help of American technical experts and finance. Millions of farmers died in the forced collectivization of agriculture, culminating in a horrific famine in 1932-33 that may have starved more than 5,000,000 people to death, particularly in Ukraine. Stalin lashed out against his potential enemies in the Party by initiating a sweeping purge, which eventually cast its net wider and wider, devouring millions of victims. The horrible forced labor camp system, started under Lenin, expanded to monstrous size and deadliness under Stalin. It was known by its notorious acronym: The GULAG. Its deadliest branch, Kolyma, in northeastern Siberia, exterminated over one million people between 1932 and 1954.

Overseeing the purges, the savage persecution of religion, the murder of farmers who resisted having their land stolen, and the forced labor camps was the successor to the Cheka: The NKVD. The NKVD, itself purged on occasion, had unlimited power of arrest and interrogation, often using the most terrible tortures imaginable on its victims. It struck fear in the hearts of most Soviets. Stalin had crushed all real or imagined opposition by the late 1930s, using NKVD savagery on a wide scale.

Stalin struck a deal with Adolf Hitler in 1939 that made Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union allies. It was during this period, 1939-41, that Stalin seized control of the Baltic States and other territories in eastern Europe. Hitler double-crossed Stalin in 1941, invading Russia, a move that shocked Stalin even though he had received immense amounts of intelligence about the impending attack. As the Germans advanced into Soviet territory, the NKVD massacred entire prisons rather than let the prisoners fall into German hands. The USSR was in a desperate war for survival. The land war in Russia dwarfed any other struggle the world had seen. By its end, Russia and its Western allies (chiefly the U.S., the U.K., and Canada) had crushed Nazi Germany. Stalin refused to let the West know what kind of losses the USSR had sustained, for fear of revealing Russia's true weakness. We now believe somewhere between 27,000,000 and 32,000,000 Soviet citizens died in World War II. (By comparison the U.S. lost 400,000. Over twice that many died in one Soviet city, Leningrad, alone.) Somewhere between 5,000,000 and 7,000,000 of these deaths were Ukrainians. The Red Army seized control of Poland, Czechoslovakia, the eastern part of Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania. By 1948 Communist governments were firmly in charge in all of them. (The last two states broke from Soviet control, but remained Communist.)

The USSR was challenged by the United States and its postwar president Harry Truman. Greece and Turkey were saved from Communist seizure. NATO was established. The Marshall Plan helped rebuild Western Europe. An attempted Soviet blockade of Berlin was broken in 1948-49. In Korea, a war of conquest launched by the North's Communist government in June 1950 was stopped, after 3 million dead. The NKVD waged war not just against Stalin's internal enemies but the nation referred to in NKVD documents as "The Main Enemy"—the United States. The U.S. had decided on a program called containment to restrict the growth of Soviet power. There would be no attempt by the U.S. to invade Soviet territory, but the U.S. would resist that territory's expansion. The covert arm of the U.S. effort was called the CIA, an offshoot of the wartime Office of Strategic Services. The CIA and the NKVD (renamed and reorganized after the war, but with the same functions) were mortal enemies, and waged a bitter clandestine war against each other. In the early 1950s, the Soviet Secret Police adopted yet another name: The KGB.

It was into this history and into this background that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg again) in 1952, in the final months of Stalin's terrible reign.

When Stalin died (finally!) in March 1953, a vicious power struggle ensued in which one of Stalin's henchmen, Nikita S. Khrushchev, eventually emerged victorious. The Soviet Union crushed rebellions in Eastern Europe (East Germany 1953, Hungary and Poland 1956) and sought to keep pace with the growing nuclear might of the United States. Khrushchev denounced Stalin, while omitting the crimes he himself had committed. China, which had come under the control of the homicidal Mao Zedong in 1949, split with the USSR in 1960. Khrushchev erected the Berlin Wall in 1961 and helped bring the world to the brink of nuclear disaster in 1962 (The Cuban Missile Crisis). Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, drastically expanded the USSR's military power in an effort the make it the equal of the United States.

The USSR aided the U.S.'s opponents in Vietnam, propped up the Castro dictatorship in Cuba and supported the Kim family in North Korea. It financed terrorist movements against the West (at least according to some observers) and backed "liberation movements in Africa. The USSR's military growth came at the expense of the civilian population's prosperity, and the USSR was quite accurately described as "a Third World nation with nuclear weapons". Brezhnev brutally cracked down on domestic dissent, using all the terrible methods of the authoritarian state to silence and intimidate critics. Reform in Czechoslovakia was crushed in 1968. In 1979 the USSR intervened in a domestic crisis in Afghanistan, and in the years that followed unleashed a barbaric war on the Afghan people in an effort to forcibly impose a Communist state. In 1982 Yuri Andropov, the KGB chairman, succeeded Brezhnev in power but only lasted briefly. After another elderly leader died soon after, the Communist Party chose a younger, more dynamic man, Mikhail Gorbachev, as leader of the USSR. Gorbachev initiated serious reforms, which Vladimir Putin hated and despised. Among Gorbachev's policies was the withdrawal of Soviet support for East Germany's decaying government. (See below.) Despite Gorbachev's efforts, the rot and corruption and economic idiocy of the USSR could not be corrected. After a failed coup by Communist die-hards in August 1991, Gorbachev's power diminished, and he was ultimately forced to watch the USSR disintegrate. The secession of Ukraine was absolutely key in this process. The Soviet Union formally collapse on 25 December 1991. Boris Yeltsin became the leader of the new Russian Federation. There were many Russians now living in the newly liberated republics of the former USSR.

What was the legacy of the USSR? Lenin, Stalin, and the other Communist leaders may have caused the deaths of 30,000,000 Soviet citizens in famines, forced labor camps, mass shootings, and various methods of secret police terror. Add to this the 30,000,000 or so dead in the Second World War which Stalin helped bring about, and it is likely that SIXTY MILLION people lost their lives on account of the actions of the Soviet government. The environment of Russia was horrendously polluted, perhaps even permanently damaged in many areas. It was estimated that, by Western standards, 85% of the Soviet people lived in poverty. The infant mortality rate was so bad that Russia stopped publishing it. Corruption reached fantastic levels, permeating every corner of Russian life. The infrastructure of the USSR was on the point of collapse in many areas, many Russian cities were little better than mass slums, life expectancy was below that of any nation in the developed world, and much of the Communist party's membership drifted into organized crime of a particularly nasty variety.

And what was Vladimir Putin's judgment about all this? Let me quote him directly, from 2005:

"Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and co-patriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself."

The statement is chilling and clear in its meaning. Its implication is deeply troubling: Putin intends to restore Russia to its former glory. He intends to restore Russian hegemony in the territory of the old USSR while crushing independence movements within Russia itself, and he is ready to use any means he has to in order to do so.

The Life and Mindset of Vladimir Putin

So it is important to understand the world in which Putin grew up, and the ideas that were firmly inculcated in his brain. In my view the following statements reflect Putin's mentality:

A.   By 1991, with the exception of a few months, Russia had always been an autocracy or oligarchy of some sort, and had never had a freely chosen government—and this was the natural order of things. The "democratization" of Russia after December 1991 was both unnatural and undesirable.

B.   Russia was one of the world's great powers, and its status as such had to be maintained.

C.  The chief barrier to Russia becoming even more powerful and influential was the United States of America, a state which had challenged Soviet power everywhere in the world, and had helped push the USSR to collapse.

D.  The Cold War was Putin's reality from the time he was young until December 1991, when the USSR formally disintegrated. His worldview was shaped by the struggle against the U.S. Putin's entire ethos is that of the old Soviet Secret Police.

E.  How did the successful ruler govern? With a strong hand, brooking no opposition. And that ruler had the right to take whatever he saw fit by way of wealth and power.

F. And this point is absolutely key:

Putin sees the West in general, and the United States in particular, as the enemy of Russian power and ambition. He sees it as his job to weaken the power of both.

Putin's Character: The Assessment of a Russian Author

Having said that, let's examine an excerpt from an incisive biography of Putin by author Masha Gessen. This excerpt is from The Telegraph (UK) for 25 February 2012.

Gessen’s book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, provides a compelling and exhaustive portrait of a man who rose without trace from being a minor KGB and St Petersburg bureaucrat to become what Gessen describes as 'the godfather of a mafia clan’, who has amassed a personal fortune that in 2007 was estimated by one Kremlin insider to be $40 billion...

'I remember in 2005 I was asked to write a piece about Putin as a threat to democracy. I said, you’ve missed the story – he’s not a threat, there is no democracy. And then I realised that the real story was to try and explain who this man was. Because really, nobody knew.’

Gessen argues that as the product of a highly secretive institution, the KGB, Putin has been able to control the details of his life, and shape his own mythology, more than almost any other modern politician – certainly any Western one.

Putin, she writes, was 'a faceless man’ promoted by people who wanted to 'invent’ a president. But that plan was subverted by the man himself and the secret-police apparatus that formed him and continues to sustain him. Rather than being the safeholder of a new era of democracy, as his sponsors had hoped, Putin has turned Russia into 'a supersize model of the KGB’, where there can be no room for dissent or even independent action...

'I think a lot of his resentment goes back directly to that period,’[the fall of the Soviet Union] Gessen says. 'Having been in the KGB at a bad time, having been outside the country when everything was changing… He’s a very vengeful man – that’s one of his particular traits of character. And that vengefulness has carried through. He’s pursuing a vendetta against everybody who was ever opposed to the Soviet Union.’... [My emphasis]

In a sense, Gessen says, Putin’s methods are in a long and ignoble tradition of Russian politics: the exercise of fear. 'That’s true of his private way of conducting politics, and it’s true of his public rhetoric. He is the heir to the great Russian tradition of “we are a country under siege” poli­tical rhetoric, which has been used throughout Russian history.

'And I think Putin believes that. It’s an assumption he was born and bred with, and he’s never thought to challenge it. I don’t think he is a very smart man, nor a very educated man. He’s an average Soviet functionary with stronger than average emotions, and higher than average vindictiveness.

'He’s a tiny, mean guy who will bite you if you get too close; and that’s the kind of country he’s tried to build. And that’s been the extent of Russian foreign policy for the last 12 years. What is Russia’s foreign policy agenda? You can’t figure it out from who Russia becomes friends with or sells arms to or negotiates with, because it’s really simple. Russia wants to be feared. That’s it.’

Gessen likens Putin to 'the godfather of a mafia clan’ ruling Russia. And 'like all mafia bosses, he barely distinguishes between his personal property, the property of his clan and the property of those beholden to his clan.’

Corruption has been virtually institutionalised under his regime. Last year the Transparency International 'Corruptions Perception Index’ ranked Russia joint 143rd out of the 182 countries listed, along with Nigeria and Mauritania.

Putin’s own acquisitiveness is typified, Gessen says, in two apparently minor but telling incidents. In 2005, while hosting a group of American businessmen in St Petersburg, Putin pocketed a diamond-encrusted ring belonging to Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots American football team, after asking to try it on, and allegedly saying, 'I could kill someone with this.’ After a flurry of articles in the US press, Kraft announced the ring had been a gift, preventing an uncomfortable situation from spiralling out of control.

Later that year, Putin was a guest at the Guggenheim museum in New York. At one point his hosts brought out a conversation piece – a glass replica of a Kalashnikov automatic weapon filled with vodka (which can be picked up in Russia for about $300). According to Gessen, Putin nodded to his bodyguards, who took the piece away, 'leaving the hosts speechless’. 'I do suspect it’s a compulsion,’ she says...

She pauses. 'There is a theory that is popular among journalists that to Putin there are enemies and there are traitors. And enemies have a right to exist; he might not like them, but they have a right to exist. Traitors don’t have a right to exist. It’s a nice theory. I like it because I’m such a clear-cut enemy that I should be safe.’ [End]

PUTIN'S SWIFT RISE TO POWER

1975: Joins the KGB, the direct successor to the Cheka and NKVD. He spies on foreigners visiting Leningrad for the first few years of his career.

1984: Putin is assigned to the KGB station in Dresden, East Germany. He becomes fluent in German. Putin's outpost works extensively with the East German secret police, the Stasi. It is said that Putin became involved with industrial espionage during this time.

1989:  Soon after the Berlin Wall is opened up, Germans begin demonstrating against the KGB in Dresden. Putin is said to be enraged and humiliated by the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev's government does nothing to defend the station.

1990:  Putin is literally the last KGB agent out the door of the Dresden headquarters. He is a Lt. Colonel by this time. Putin bitterly resents leaving under the circumstances of Soviet collapse.

1990: Putin becomes a senior advisor to St. Petersburg mayor  Anatoly Sobchak, who had once been his mentor.

1991: Putin formally resigns from the KGB.

1994: Putin becomes deputy mayor of St. Petersburg.

1996: Putin is transferred to Moscow to work as President Boris Yeltsin's first deputy manager.

1998: Putin is named presidential first deputy chief of staff in charge of Russian regions.

July 1998 to August 1999: Putin serves as director of the Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the KGB. 

August 1999: Boris Yeltsin appoints Putin prime minister. Yeltsin's regime is noted both for its disarray and its amazing levels of corruption.

4, 9, and 13 September 1999: A horrific string of apartment bombings in three different Russian cities kills 272 people. Prime Minister Putin is quick to blame Chechen separatists for the terror. On 18 September a truck bomb kills 17 more. Evidence will later emerge that shows the FSB was actually behind the operation. Several people investigating the matter are killed under suspicious circumstances in subsequent years. Putin's popularity soars in the wake of the bombings. Putin authorizes a renewed campaign against Chechnya. In the years to follow, tens of thousands of Chechen civilians will be wiped out.

March 2000: Putin is elected President of the Russian Federation.

Yes, in ten years, Putin went from a minor official to the Russian presidency, a meteoric rise.

PUTIN IN POWER

Control of the Media

Putin has relentlessly moved to put Russia's independent media under government control. If you're interested in pursuing this in detail, let me suggest the following links to you:

"How the Media Became One of Putin’s Most Powerful Weapons"

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/how-the-media-became-putins-most-powerful-weapon/391062/

"The Bloodless Murder of Russia’s Independent Media"

https://freedomhouse.org/blog/bloodless-murder-russia-s-independent-media

"List of journalists killed in Russia"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia

The International Federation of Journalists, the world's largest organization of journalists, has also kept close track of the shocking destruction of press freedom in Russia under Putin.

And here is a quote about this situation:

“In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that. I don’t know that he has. Have you been able to prove that? Do you know the names of the reporters that he’s killed? Because I’ve been – you know, you’ve been hearing this, but I haven’t seen the names."--Donald Trump, December 2015

Treatment of Opposition Figures

Putin has been brutal toward his political opponents, crushing all efforts to mount an effective political resistance to his program. If you are interested in the details, there are many places you can find them. I've included a list from an Australian news site:

(Here: http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/heres-a-list-of-all-the-putin-critics-who-wound-up-murdered/news-story/4e2952b107b0c7159887e303062c9694)

Here’s a list of all the Putin critics who wound up murdered

NOBODY knows if or when Russian activist and writer Vladmir Kara-Murza will emerge from the coma he slipped into last week following his suspected poisoning with an “unknown substance”.

But Mr Kara-Murza’s wife Evgenia is certain he was targeted for his role in convincing the US to impose sanctions on Russian officials over the 2009 death of another vocal opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin — Sergei Magnitsky.

The 35-year-old remains on life support in a Moscow hospital after suddenly falling ill on February 2 as he prepared to fly home to the US for his daughter's birthday. He survived similar suspected poisoning two years ago.

Mr Kara-Murza had been travelling around Russia in recent weeks to promote his documentary about his friend Boris Nemtsov, a liberal opposition politician who was assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015.

Hours before he fell ill, Mr Kara-Murza had paid tribute to Mr Nemtsov on Facebook, posting a photograph of roses and a portrait of his dead friend with the caption: “We’re here. We remember”.

Like Evgenia Kara-Murza, Russian opposition MP Ilya Ponomarev believes Mr Putin’s cronies are responsible for Mr Kara-Murza’s current condition, just as they were allegedly behind the murders of Mr Magnitsky and Mr Nemtsov.

“For me, there is no doubt that authorisation for such a thing and for the (attempted) assassination of such a public figure like Vladimir (Kara-Murza) could have only come from higher circles of the current authorities,” Mr Ponomarev told the ABC on Wednesday.

“I am not saying it was ordered directly by (Russian President) Vladimir Putin, but it has to be ordered by somebody very close to him.”

Here is a list of the 10 most prominent Putin critics who wound up dead. We can only hope Mr Kara-Murza does not join them.

THE PUTIN CRITICS WHO ENDED UP MURDERED

Boris Nemtsov 2015

Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov was a Russian physicist, statesman and liberal politician opposed to the Putin Government.

He was shot four times in the back by an unknown assailant metres from the Kremlin, just hours after urging the public to support a march against Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Despite Mr Putin taking “personal control” of the investigation into Mr Nemtsov’s murder, the killer remains at large.

Boris Berezovsky 2013

Boris Berezovsky was a Russian billionaire who fled to Britain after falling out with Mr Putin. While in exile he threatened to bring down the Russian president by force.

He was found dead inside a locked bathroom at his Berkshire home, with a ligature around his neck, in an apparent suicide.

However, a coronial inquest into his death recorded an open verdict after his cause of death could not be established.

The British police had investigated several previous alleged assassination attempts against him.

Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova 2009

Human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov represented journalists (including murdered reporter Anna Politkovskaya) who found themselves in hot water after writing articles critical of Mr Putin. He was shot by a masked gunman near the Kremlin.

Journalist Anastasia Baburova, who was walking with him, was gunned down as she tried to help him.

Sergei Magnitsky 2009

Lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in police custody after he was allegedly subject to a brutal beating and then denied medical treatment.

Just before his death he had been hired by British-American businessman William Browder to investigate a multi-million tax fraud against the Russian state which Mr Browder’s businesses had become unwittingly involved in.

Mr Magnitsky was allegedly arrested after uncovering evidence suggesting that police officials were behind the fraud.

In July 2012 he was posthumously convicted of tax evasion. Mr Browder successfully lobbied the US government to impose sanctions on those linked to Magnitsky’s death, sanctions which have been linked to the suspected poisoning of Vladimir Kara-Murza.

Natalia Estemirova 2009

Natalia Estemirova was a journalist who sometimes worked with Anna Politkovskaya (who was also assassinated). She specialised in uncovering human rights abuses carried out by the Russian state in Chechnya. Ms Estemirova was kidnapped outside her home before being shot in the head and dumped in nearby woodland. Nobody has been convicted of her murder.

Anna Politkovskaya 2006

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist who was critical of Putin, accusing him of turning his country into a police state in her book Putin's Russia. She was murdered by contract killers who shot her at point blank range in an elevator in her building.

Five men were convicted of her murder, but the judge found that it was a contract killing, with $150,000 paid by “a person unknown.

Alexander Litvinenko 2006

Alexander Litvinenko was a former KGB agent who died three weeks after drinking a cup of tea at a London hotel that had been laced with deadly polonium-210. A British inquiry found that Mr Litvinenko was poisoned by Russian agents Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, who were acting on orders that had “probably been approved by President Putin.”

Mr Litvinenko was a vocal opponent of Mr Putin, accusing him of blowing up an apartment block and ordering the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Paul Klebnikov — 2004

An American investigative journalist of Russian descent, Paul Klebnikov was killed outside his office in a drive-by shooting in Moscow. He was editor in chief of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine. He had written about corruption and the personal lives of wealthy Russians, publishing a list of the country’s richest people.

Sergei Yushenkov 2003

Sergei Yushenkov was a Russian politician shot dead as he tried to gather evidence proving the Putin government was behind the bombing of a residential apartment block. He was killed with a single bullet to the chest just hours after his organisation Liberal Russia had been recognised by the Justice Ministry as a political party. [End article]

And then there is this interesting tidbit from USA Today from 2 May 2017, which I am including verbatim:

A former member of the Russian parliament is gunned down in broad daylight in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. A longtime Russian ambassador to the United Nations drops dead at work. A Russian-backed commander in the breakaway Ukrainian province of Donetsk is blown up in an elevator. A Russian media executive is found dead in his Washington, D.C., hotel room.

What do they have in common? They are among 38 prominent Russians who are victims of unsolved murders or suspicious deaths since the beginning of 2014, according to a list compiled by USA TODAY and British journalist Sarah Hurst, who has done research in Russia.

The list contains 10 high-profile critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin, seven diplomats, six associates of Kremlin power brokers who had a falling out — often over corruption — and 13 military or political leaders involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, including commanders of Russian-backed separatist forces. Two are possibly connected to a dossier alleging connections between President Trump's campaign staff and Kremlin officials that was produced by a former British spy and shared with the FBI. [Emphasis added]

Twelve were shot, stabbed or beaten to death. Six were blown up. Ten died allegedly of natural causes. One died of mysterious head injuries, one reportedly slipped and hit his head in a public bath, one was hanged in his jail cell, and one died after drinking coffee. The cause of six deaths was reported as unknown. [End]

In short, Putin has been willing to resort to the most brutal methods, and has unhesitatingly had his opponents and critics silenced permanently.

And here is yet another pertinent quote about all this:

[In response to a statement that Putin is a killer]:

 “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”--Donald Trump, February 2017

THE GEOPOLITICAL AND ECONOMIC STATUS OF RUSSIA TODAY

Russia's economy underwent a near-total collapse following the disintegration of the USSR. It has recovered strongly, but a striking fact remains: The United States dwarfs Russia economically. Further, Russia's economy has stalled, and has actually contracted in recent years Here are the figures, direct from the CIA World Factbook:

GDP (purchasing power parity):

$3.862 trillion (2016 est.)

$3.822 trillion (2015 est.)

$3.891 trillion (2014 est.)  This ranked Russia 194th among the world's economies for growth.

GDP (official exchange rate):

$1.283 trillion (2016 est.)

Per capita GDP: $26,900, 72nd in the world.

By way of comparison, the U.S. GDP in 2016 was $18.62 trillion, with a per capita GDP of $57,600.

Russia has been plagued by serious inflation in recent years as well. Its largest exports are petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas. (This is important.) Financial experts consider Russia far too reliant on oil for revenue, and therefore highly vulnerable to declines in the price of oil.

The Factbook's assessment:

A combination of falling oil prices, international sanctions, [my emphasis] and structural limitations pushed Russia into a deep recession in 2015, with the GDP falling by close to 4%. The downturn continued through 2016, with GDP contracting by 0.6%. Government support for import substitution has increased recently in an effort to diversify the economy away from extractive industries. Russia is heavily dependent on the movement of world commodity prices and the Central Bank of Russia estimates that if oil prices remain below $40 per barrel in 2017, the resulting shock would cause GDP to fall by up to 5%.

Geopolitically, Russia has felt threatened by the expansion of NATO eastward since the fall of the USSR. All of the former Soviet-controlled states of East Europe are in it now, as well as the Baltic states. Political observers agree that weakening or destroying NATO is a key Russian objective.

Russia has acted to undermine the European Union as well, which I will detail later. It has supported political movements aimed at breaking up the EU, especially in support of the Brexit Referendum in the UK in 2016.

Putin's Russia has acted aggressively not only in Chechnya, where it waged a brutal war between 1999 and 2009 (the Second Chechen War), which may have caused anywhere from 25,000 to 80,000 deaths, but it also waged a very brief, ugly conflict with Georgia in August 2008. Most alarmingly, perhaps, has been the clash with Ukraine. Ukraine gained independence in 1991. In 2004 an election now widely viewed as rigged installed a pro-Russian president named Viktor Yanukovych. The disputed election triggered massive demonstrations, and soon Yanukovych stepped down. However, in 2010, he was elected president in a non-controversial election. In 2013 his government began to move away from the EU and toward closer relations with Russia. Demonstrations erupted in Kiev. Vladimir Putin gave Yanukovych significant economic help. In early 2014 protests became deadly. Yanukovych was driven out. Violence seemed to be along ethnic lines, with ethnic Russians supporting Yanukovych and ethnic Ukrainians opposing him. The president was deposed. To quote the BBC on what happened next, "27-28 February [2014]: Pro-Russian gunmen seize key buildings in the Crimean capital, Simferopol. Unidentified gunmen in combat uniforms appear outside Crimea's main airports. 1 March: Russia's parliament approves President Vladimir Putin's request to use force in Ukraine to protect Russian interests. 16 March: Crimea's secession referendum on joining Russia is backed by 97% of voters, organisers say, but vote condemned by West as a sham. 17 March: The EU and US impose travel bans and asset freezes on several officials from Russia and Ukraine over the Crimea referendum. 18 March: President Putin signs a bill to absorb Crimea into the Russian Federation."

Pro-Russian separatists have been active in Ukraine, and despite Putin's denials, Russian military forces appear to have invaded areas of eastern Ukraine, aiding the rebels. The U.S. pledged aid for Ukraine in 2014. Both the U.S. and the EU imposed significant economic sanctions. You'll see later why all this matters so much. Oh, one note: a key figure in getting Viktor Yanukovych elected was a man named Paul Manafort. We'll come across him later, in much greater detail. But just a brief quote from a Time magazine article:

 A U.S. embassy cable sent from Kiev to Washington in 2006 described Manafort’s job as giving an “extreme makeover” to a presidential hopeful named Viktor Yanukovych, who had the backing of the Kremlin and most of Ukraine’s wealthiest tycoons. His Party of Regions, the cable said, was “a haven” for “mobsters and oligarchs.”

Much more to come later.

In sum:

--Vladimir Putin is an iron-fisted ruler in the long and tragic Russian tradition. He does not hesitate to kill or imprison those who oppose him.

--He sees the fall of the USSR, one of the worst polities in human history, as a catastrophe.

--Putin views the West, especially the United States, with hostility. He is an enemy of the U.S.

--Russia's economic situation is precarious.

--Putin's foreign policy has been aggressive, as he answers what he sees as threats to Russian hegemony in East Europe and to Russia's internal stability.

Paul Manafort, Kremlin Agent, Enemy of Free Ukraine

As we saw above Paul Manafort was instrumental in putting the corrupt Viktor Yanukovych in power in Ukraine. This fit a pattern in Manafort's career: serving the interests of despots and enemies of human rights. Although Manafort served many dictators, gaining the nickname, "The Torturers' Lobbyist", his biggest successes came in Ukraine. 

In the spring of 2004, Manafort's international consulting business was in trouble. The Washington Post for August 18, 2016, has the story:

[Manafort] signed on as an adviser to a Ukrainian steel magnate, who, according to people who worked there with Manafort, connected him with one of the country’s most powerful politicians, Viktor Yanukovych. Back home, corporations linked to Manafort purchased a unit in Trump Tower for $3.7 million and then two other high-priced apartments in New York, while Manafort and his wife bought a new house in Florida.

Donald Trump brought Manafort in as convention manager on 29 March 2016. In a statement at the time, Trump said:

"Paul is a great asset and an important addition as we consolidate the tremendous support we have received in the primaries and caucuses, garnering millions more votes than any other candidate," then-candidate Donald Trump said, as quoted in the statement.

"Paul Manafort, and the team I am building, bring the needed skill sets to ensure that the will of the Republican voters, not the Washington political establishment, determines who will be the nominee for the Republican Party," Trump said in the statement. [via ABC News]

Later, when Manafort's glaring conflicts of interest were revealed, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer said that Manafort played "a very limited role for a very limited time". [!] This is a pattern that Trump has established: denying he knew people he knew very well, if those people were suddenly in trouble.

Manafort played a decisive role in getting Mike Pence selected as Trump's Vice President. Trump's first choice was Chris Christie. But Christie had prosecuted Jared Kushner's father, and he had also shown no sympathy for those trying to interfere in the U.S. election. Manafort pulled a ruse to get Trump to choose Pence. Pence was meant to appeal to evangelical Christian voters. As we will see later, there are deep and disturbing ties between Putin's Russia and certain prominent evangelical leaders. 

We go once again to the Washington Post to see the real reason Manafort was let go:

The campaign shake-up followed reports this week that Manafort’s name had surfaced in an inquiry by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine.

The agency has been investigating claims that Yanukovych, who won the presidency with Manafort’s help in 2010, and others aligned with his Party of Regions stole up to $100 billion in assets before Yanukovych fled to Russia in 2014.

Investigators said this week that they discovered a “black ledger” showing that $12.7 million had been designated for Manafort between 2007 and 2012 by Yanukovych’s party. The anti-corruption agency published a list Thursday on its Facebook page of the alleged payments, showing 22 installments assigned to Manafort.

The accusation that $12.7 million was paid to Manafort in secret has been disputed by some Ukrainian authorities on the curious grounds that there are no actual Manafort signatures in the ledger payments. But is not disputed that Manafort made $17 million working for the fantastically corrupt Ukrainian Party of Regions. And this paragraph in Bloomberg caught my eye:

In the disclosures, Manafort’s firm, DMP International LLC, listed three meetings in the U.S. as political activities on behalf of his client. They included one meeting in March 2013 with Representative Dana Rohrabacher, [my emphasis] a Republican from California who has advocated better relations with Russia, according to a copy of Manafort’s filing to the Justice Department, which was provided to Bloomberg News. Manafort made a $1,000 contribution to Rohrabacher’s campaign three days after the meeting, according to the disclosures. 

Interesting connection there.

Manafort has gotten himself involved with a number of other shady characters. In The Atlantic for October 2, 2017, that publication revealed that it had examined emails from 2016 sent by Manafort in his efforts to ingratiate himself with Russian oligarch and Putin ally Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska. This was in the period when Manafort was Trump's campaign manager.

The emails were provided to The Atlantic on condition of anonymity. They are part of a trove of documents turned over by lawyers for Trump’s presidential campaign to investigators looking into the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election. A source close to Manafort confirmed their authenticity. Excerpts from these emails were first reported by The Washington Post, but the full text of these exchanges, provided to The Atlantic, shows that Manafort attempted to leverage his leadership role in the Trump campaign to curry favor with a Russian oligarch close to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Manafort was deeply in debt, and did not earn a salary from the Trump campaign.

On November 22, 2017,  the McClatchy Washington Bureau examined Manafort's business dealings. Their findings were disturbing:

Manafort's flight records in and out of Ukraine, which McClatchy obtained from a government source in Kiev, and interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with his activities, including current and former government officials, suggest the links between Trump's former campaign manager and Russia sympathizers run deeper than previously thought.

What's now known leads some Russia experts to suspect that the Kremlin's emissaries at times turned Manafort into an asset acting on Russia's behalf. "You can make a case that all along he ... was either working principally for Moscow, or he was trying to play both sides against each other just to maximize his profits," said Daniel Fried, a former assistant secretary of state who communicated with Manafort during Yanukovych's reign in President George W. Bush's second term.

"He's at best got a conflict of interest and at worst is really doing Putin's bidding," said Fried, now a fellow with the Atlantic Council. [My emphasis]

It is interesting, by the way, that the wording of the 2016 Republican Platform plank on Ukraine was changed from an aggressive, anti-Russian stance to language that reflected Russian interests and preferences, an issue we will look at in more detail in another chapter.

Manafort has also had a working relationship with Konstantin Kilimnik, who has a background with the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency. Kilimnik worked with Manafort to rehabilitate Viktor Yanukovych's reputation in Ukraine. [Politico, August 18, 2016] Manafort used Kilimnik to make Oleg Deripaska a startling offer. From Business Insider September 21, 2017:

Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a top ally of President Vladimir Putin, reportedly stopped trying to recover money he said had been taken from him in 2014 by Paul Manafort after President Donald Trump won the GOP nomination last year.

The detail, first reported by The Associated Press in March, may shed light on an email Manafort — then Trump's campaign chairman — sent last July from his campaign email address. In the email, he asked his longtime employee Konstantin Kilimnik to offer Deripaska "private briefings" about the campaign.

“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote.

Another interesting associate of Manafort is Dmytro Firtash, a Yanukovych ally and mobster, involved with a number of rackets. Firtash is a high ranking Russia mafia member. In 2008 Manafort tried to arrange an $850 million real estate deal with Firtash, in New York City. The deal fell through, however. And it is striking that during the early 2000s Manafort was able to buy some of the most expensive real estate in the nation with cash, working through shell companies. Where did the money come from?

The FBI raided Manafort's home on 26 July 2017, scooping up a treasure trove of records. It is these records that the Special Prosecutor's office is using to help push the investigation forward.

Manafort was indicted by Robert Mueller in October 2017. The Washington Post summarizes the indictment:

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III on Monday revealed charges against three former Trump campaign officials — including onetime campaign chairman Paul Manafort — marking the first criminal allegations to come from probes into possible Russian influence in U.S. political affairs.

The charges are striking for their breadth, touching all levels of the Trump campaign and exploring possible personal financial wrongdoing by those involved, as well as what appeared to be a concerted effort by one campaign official to arrange a meeting with Russian officials.

One of the three charged, former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, admitted to making a false statement to FBI investigators who asked about his contacts with foreigners claiming to have high-level Russian connections.

Manafort and longtime business partner Rick Gates, meanwhile, were charged in a 12-count indictment with conspiracy to launder money, making false statements and other charges in connection with their work advising a Russia-friendly political party in Ukraine.

You can read the original indictment here:

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000015f-6d73-d751-af7f-7f735cc70000

And if you want to sample the full range of Manafort's shockingly corrupt activities in Ukraine, you should go here:

https://en.hromadske.ua/posts/what-does-paul-manaforts-indictment-mean-for-ukraine

There is one more thing I would like to add. In the Times of London, 17 August, 2016, there is the following item in an article about Manafort's illicit payments from Russian interests:

The senior Ukrainian prosecutor alleges that in 2006 Mr Manafort orchestrated a series of anti-Nato, anti-Kiev protests in Crimea led by Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian Party of Regions — now designated a criminal organisation. The protests forced planned Nato exercises there to be cancelled. No charges were pursued because of a lack of evidence after Crimea was annexed. Mr Manafort did not respond to a request for comment.

Fusion magazine noted in its article of August 18, 2016, that U.S. Marines were the targets of the 2006 protests:

Lt. Colonel Tom Doman’s introduction to Ukraine, at 4 a.m. on May 27, 2006, was not a warm one.

“We had rocks thrown at us. Rocks hit Marines. Buses were rocked back and forth. We were just trying to get to our base.”

Doman and his 112 reserve Marines and sailors were boarding the buses after dark, with backup from Ukrainian special forces, to get to a compound where they would lay the groundwork for Sea Breeze 2006, a larger international training exercise set to involve 3,500 troops from the U.S., Ukraine, and 12 NATO partner countries. But hundreds of protesters seemed to have come out of nowhere to confront them.

The Marines ended up hemmed in by angry locals in Feodosia, a Ukrainian resort city on the Black Sea. “We had people jeering us and protesting against us until we basically left the country,” Doman says. The Americans couldn’t go outside; they couldn’t reach their supply ship in the town’s port. Some protesters wielded what Col. Bill Black, the Marines’ commanding officer, jokingly called “Ukrainian cocktails” — plastic bottles filled with diesel fuel.

Manafort, therefore, may have helped coordinate a demonstration that threatened the lives of U.S. Marines.

Ten years later, he was Trump's campaign manager.

A MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL PARTNERSHIP: TRUMP AND THE RUSSIANS

Donald Trump has always looked for new avenues for real estate investment. He has long been interested in Russia as a venue for his shady deals and ethically-bankrupt business practices. He began doing business (or seeking to do business) with Russians even before the Soviet Union collapsed. And happily for him, the fall of the USSR—an event which was a catastrophe in the eyes of Vladimir Putin—allowed an already deeply corrupt Russia to become a full-blown kleptocracy. The chief gangster in this kleptocracy is the Russian president himself, thought by many observers to be the richest person in the world.²⁹

Trump's associations with Russians began in the 1980s. Even before the USSR collapsed, Russian organized crime figures were involved in large-scale money laundering schemes, which we will examine in great detail in another installment. The easiest way to hide ill-gotten money is, naturally, real estate. The first instance of this involving Trump occurred in 1984. A Russian émigré named David Bogatin bought five luxury condos in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, at a cost of $6 million. Interestingly, Bogatin had come to America in 1977 with only $3 on him. Trump was so impressed he personally attended the closing on the property. Three years later Bogatin pleaded guilty to a gasoline-bootlegging scheme. Bogatin fled the country and the Federal government seized the condos. As it turns out Bogatin was a New York Russian mob figure. And he was connected to no less than Semion Mogilevich, the top boss of the Russian mafia. Mogilevich was feared by other mob figures, and was expanding his criminal organization in the United States.³⁰

Soon after mob figure Bogatin bought condos in Trump Tower, Trump began looking to Russia itself:

Donald Trump’s attempts to bring his business to Russia date back to at least 1986, when he was seated next to Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin at a luncheon. “One thing led to another,” Trump wrote in his [sic] 1987 book The Art of the Deal, “and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel across the street from the Kremlin in partnership with the Soviet government.”

Trump and then-wife Ivana, who speaks Russian, traveled to Moscow to scout out potential sites and “met with a lot of the economic and financial advisers in the Politburo,” according to Trump’s spokesman.³¹

Trump's interest in a hotel in Moscow had waned near the end of 1988. His attention was being taken by the accelerating disaster he was undergoing in Atlantic City. But there was much, much more to come from the Russians. 

In the late 1990s, as Trump was struggling to rebuild his fortune, events in Russia began to send serious money in Donald Trump's direction. For example, in 1997, Aleksandr Ivanovich Lebed, a retired Russian general and a significant figure in Russian politics, came to New York to solicit Trump's investment in Russia. Observers of their meeting have left us with this record of part of their exchange:

Trump introduced Lebed to Howard Lorber, who had accompanied him a few months earlier on his journey to Moscow, where they looked at properties to which the Trump moniker might be appended. “Howard has major investments in Russia,” he told Lebed, but when Lorber itemized various ventures none seemed to ring a bell.

“See, they don’t know you,” Trump told Lorber. “With all that investment, they don’t know you. Trump they know.”

Some “poisonous people” at the Times, Lebed informed Trump, were “spreading some funny rumors that you are going to cram Moscow with casinos.”

Laughing, Trump said, “Is that right?”

“I told them that I know you build skyscrapers in New York. High-quality skyscrapers.”

“We are actually looking at something in Moscow right now, and it would be skyscrapers and hotels, not casinos. Only quality stuff. But thank you for defending me. I’ll soon be going again to Moscow. We’re looking at the Moskva Hotel. We’re also looking at the Rossiya. That’s a very big project; I think it’s the largest hotel in the world. And we’re working with the local government, the mayor of Moscow and the mayor’s people. So far, they’ve been very responsive.”

Lebed: “You must be a very confident person. You are building straight into the center.”

Trump: “I always go into the center.”

Lebed: “I hope I’m not offending by saying this, but I think you are a litmus testing paper. You are at the end of the edge. If Trump goes to Moscow, I think America will follow. So I consider these projects of yours to be very important. And I’d like to help you as best I can in putting your projects into life. I want to create a canal or riverbed for capital flow. I want to minimize the risks and get rid of situations where the entrepreneur has to try to hide his head between his shoulders. I told the New York Times I was talking to you because you are a professional—a high-level professional—and if you invest, you invest in real stuff. Serious, high-quality projects. And you deal with serious people. And I deem you to be a very serious person. That’s why I’m meeting you.”³²

Although the Trump hotels in Moscow never materialized, it is obvious that Trump's name was well-known among Russia's political and economic elite. This name recognition was to pay big dividends to Trump when the Russian stock market collapsed in 1998.³³ Wealthy Russians began to seek safe haven in real estate investments. And a generous amount of that investment went toward Donald Trump's properties.

An impressive number of Russian oligarchs ended up living in Trump World Tower, near the United Nations building, which opened in 2001. As Bloomberg Business describes it:

When Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza began construction two decades ago as the tallest residential building in the country (90 stories), its most expensive floors attracted wealthy people getting their money out of what had been the Soviet Union. Trump needed the big spenders. He was renegotiating $1.8 billion in junk bonds for his Atlantic City resorts, and the tower was built on a mountain of debt owed to German banks. As Trump wrote in The Art of the Comeback, “It crushed my ego, my pride, to go hat in hand to the bankers.”

Trump’s soft spot for Russia is an ongoing mystery, and the large number of condominium sales he made to people with ties to former Soviet republics may offer clues. “We had big buyers from Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” says Debra Stotts, a sales agent who filled up the tower. The very top floors went unsold for years, but a third of units sold on floors 76 through 83 by 2004 involved people or limited liability companies connected to Russia and neighboring states, a Bloomberg investigation shows. The reporting involved more than two dozen interviews and a review of hundreds of public records filed in New York...

Eduard Nektalov, an Uzbekistan-born diamond dealer, purchased a 79th-floor unit directly below Conway’s for $1.6 million in July 2003. He was being investigated by federal agents for a money-laundering scheme, which involved smelting gold to make it appear like everyday objects that were then hauled to drug cartels in Colombia. Nektalov sold his unit a month after he bought it for a $500,000 profit. Less than a year later, Nektalov, rumored to have been cooperating with authorities, was gunned down on Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue.

Simultaneous with when the tower was going up, developer Gil Dezer and his father, Michael, were building a Trump-backed condo project in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla. “Russians love the Trump brand,” he says, adding that Russians and Russian Americans bought some 200 of 2,000 units in Trump buildings he built. They flooded into Trump projects from 2001 to 2007, helping Trump weather the real estate collapse, he says.³⁴

If we look more carefully at the clientele that was attracted to Trump's real estate, certain facts stand out. Let's look more carefully at some of the more prominent investors:

Vadim Trincher, Russian mafia big shot, specialist in illegal gambling operations, who lived in a $5 million apartment in Trump Tower directly below Donald Trump's own residence.³⁵

Anatoly Golubchik, Trincher's partner. The two of them were operating an illegal gambling operation out of Trump Tower itself. Both Trincher and Golubchik were eventually charged, convicted, and sentenced. To quote the New York DA's office:

Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that ANATOLY GOLUBCHIK was sentenced yesterday in Manhattan federal court to five years in prison, and VADIM TRINCHER was also sentenced today to five years in prison for participating in a racketeering conspiracy in connection with their roles as members of a Russian-American organized crime enterprise. GOLUBCHIK and TRINCHER were also each ordered to forfeit more than $20 million in cash, investments, and real property. They were charged in April 2013 along with 32 other alleged members and associates of two Russian-American organized crime enterprises in an indictment that included racketeering, money laundering, extortion, and various gambling offenses. [Emphasis added] GOLUBCHIK and TRINCHER were sentenced by U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman.³⁶

(Interestingly, Preet Bharara was fired by Donald Trump three months after Trump became president.)

According to an 84 (!) page Federal indictment, the gambling operation run by Trincher and Golubchik was protected by Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a Ukrainian-born Mafia Don who was a VIP guest at the 2013 Miss Universe pageant Trump hosted in Moscow.³⁷

Hillel (Helly) Nahmad, paid more than $21 million for the 51st floor of Trump Tower, where he ran a high stakes poker game that catered to millionaire and billionaire clients. Later sentenced to a year in prison.³⁸

Vyacheslav Kirillovich Ivankov:  top Russian mob boss in New York beginning in 1992. Owner of a luxury apartment in Trump Tower, where the FBI tracked him down. "Ivankov disappeared and then turned up again in Trump’s New Jersey casino, the Taj Mahal. Ivankov’s phone book included a working number for the Trump Organization’s Trump Tower residence, and a Trump Organization fax machine...Ivankov was arrested in 1995 and sent to prison  for conspiring to extort $3.5 million from two Russian emigres who ran an investment advice company in lower Manhattan. After his release he returned to Russia where he was assassinated." ³⁹

Felix Henry Sater, occupant of the 24th floor of Trump Tower beginning in 2002. Fortune magazine did a profile of him in October 2016:

Felix Sater is not a name that has come up much during the presidential campaign. That he has a colorful past is an understatement: The Russian-born Sater served a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass during a bar fight, pleaded guilty to racketeering as part of a mafia-driven "pump-and-dump" stock fraud and then escaped jail time by becoming a highly valued government informant.

He was also an important figure at Bayrock, a development company and key Trump real estate partner during the 2000s, notably with the Trump SoHo hotel-condominium in New York City, and has said under oath that he represented Trump in Russia and subsequently billed himself as a senior Trump advisor, with an office in Trump Tower...

Sater has been profiled in the Washington Post, on ABC News and in several other outlets. But few have taken much note of him, presumably because Trump has said, under oath, [my emphasis]  that he barely knew him. "If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn't know what he looked like," he said in a deposition in November 2013. Asked how many times he had ever conversed with Sater, he said, "Not many." And asked about a previous BBC interview, in which he was questioned about Sater's mafia connections, Trump said he didn't recall the interview.

This past December Trump went further: "Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it," Trump told AP, referring questions about Sater to his staff. "I'm not that familiar with him."

End of story? Not quite. Looking into Trump's deals, FORBES has uncovered numerous e-mails and sworn statements that indicate Sater was closer to Trump, his organization and his children than previously revealed. Additionally, FORBES has connected three billionaire oligarchs from Kazakhstan to potential deals involving Trump and Sater.

Why does this matter? The story of Sater and the one involving billionaires quietly backing the Trump-Bayrock deals speaks to a key virtue of any good businessman--due diligence--that seems especially relevant for a candidate running on private-sector acumen and the need to do "extreme vetting" of those seeking to get into the country.⁴⁰

The Fortune profile goes on to directly contradict Trump's assertion that he hardly knew Sater. Sater and Trump worked together extremely closely. Trump's statements about Sater are among his more breath-taking lies.

An important point: All of the above listed figures have ties to the top Russian mob boss Semion Mogilevich. All. Some more detail about Mogilevich:

The FBI has credited the “brainy don,” who holds a degree in economics from Lviv University, with a staggering range of crimes. He ran drug trafficking and prostitution rings on an international scale; in one characteristic deal, he bought a bankrupt airline to ship heroin from Southeast Asia into Europe. He used a jewelry business in Moscow and Budapest as a front for art that Russian gangsters stole from museums, churches, and synagogues all over Europe. He has also been accused of selling some $20 million in stolen weapons, including ground-to-air missiles and armored troop carriers, to Iran. “He uses this wealth and power to not only further his criminal enterprises,” the FBI says, “but to influence governments and their economies.”

In Russia, Mogilevich’s influence reportedly reaches all the way to the top. In 2005, Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian intelligence agent who defected to London, recorded an interview with investigators detailing his inside knowledge of the Kremlin’s ties to organized crime. “Mogilevich,” he said in broken English, “have good relationship with Putin since 1994 or 1993.” A year later Litvinenko was dead, apparently poisoned by agents of the Kremlin.⁴¹

Trump's Florida properties have also proven to be magnets for Russian investors. An investigation by Reuters turned up 63 Russians who had purchased luxury housing in Trump property, at a value of $98.4 million. To be fair, Reuters said it did not see evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on Trump's part. Still, the number is rather striking. Reuters also found: "The tally of investors from Russia may be conservative. The analysis found that at least 703 – or about one-third – of the owners of the 2044 units in the seven Trump buildings are limited liability companies, or LLCs, which have the ability to hide the identity of a property’s true owner. And the nationality of many buyers could not be determined. Russian-Americans who did not use a Russian address or passport in their purchases were not included in the tally."⁴²

Intriguingly, one of the residents of Trump's Florida properties, Pavel Uglanov, is close friends with a notorious figure,  Alexander Zaldostanov. To quote Reuters: (He is) leader of the “Night Wolves” biker gang. The Wolves, and Zaldostanov personally, were made subject to U.S. financial and travel restrictions. The U.S. government said gang members stormed a Ukrainian government naval base and a gas facility during Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

An aide to Zaldostanov did not respond to questions from Reuters. The group, in interviews in Russian media, has denied storming the base and the gas facility.

Zaldostanov has had multiple meetings with Putin, according to the Kremlin’s website. The Russian president awarded Zaldostanov the country’s “medal of honor” in 2013."⁴³

And back in New York, Trump's sales to Russians were going swimmingly. USA Today did a survey of court cases, legal documents, and government documents and found the following:

The president and his companies have been linked to at least 10 wealthy former Soviet businessmen with alleged ties to criminal organizations or money laundering.

Among them:

• A member of the firm that developed the Trump SoHo Hotel in New York is a twice-convicted felon who spent a year in prison for stabbing a man and later scouted for Trump investments in Russia.[Sater, see above]

•  An investor in the SoHo project was accused by Belgian authorities in 2011 in a $55 million money-laundering scheme.

• Three owners of Trump condos in Florida and Manhattan were accused in federal indictments of belonging to a Russian-American organized crime group and working for a major international crime boss based in Russia.

•  A former mayor from Kazakhstan was accused in a federal lawsuit filed in Los Angeles in 2014 of hiding millions of dollars looted from his city, some of which was spent on three Trump SoHo units.

•  A Ukrainian owner of two Trump condos in Florida was indicted in a money-laundering scheme involving a former prime minister of Ukraine.

Trump's Russian connections are of heightened interest because of an FBI investigation into possible collusion between Trump's presidential campaign and Russian operatives to interfere in last fall's election. What’s more, Trump and his companies have had business dealings with Russians that go back decades, raising questions about whether his policies would be influenced by business considerations.

Trump told reporters in February: "I have no dealings with Russia. I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away. And I have no loans with Russia. I have no loans with Russia at all."

Yet in 2013, after Trump addressed potential investors in Moscow, he bragged to Real Estate Weekly about his access to Russia's rich and powerful. “I have a great relationship with many Russians, and almost all of the oligarchs were in the room,” Trump said, referring to Russians who made fortunes when former Soviet state enterprises were sold to private investors. [My emphasis] ⁴⁴

And I want to make a special note of this: Paul Manafort, Putin ally,  has a residence on the 43rd floor of Trump Tower. 

And lest we forget: Trump sold his gaudy Palm Beach, Florida residence, acquired for $41.3 million, to a Russian businessman named Dmitry Rybolovlev. Rybolovlev paid $95 million in 2008, giving Trump a handsome profit on a property he had owned just a few years.⁴⁵ And who is this Russian? One of the richest people in Russia, one with a past that is largely shrouded in mystery. The timing of his purchase was interesting, 2008 being the year the world economy hit a huge setback. Astonishingly, Rybolovlev had his new house torn down. And in 2013, Business Insider reported that Rybolovlev was the biggest shareholder in the Bank of Cyprus, owning 9.9% of the company. The Bank had an...interesting relationship with Russia.⁴⁶ We will come across this bank several times in the coming segments.

We have already encountered the name of a company associated with Trump and Russia: The Bayrock Group. This organization also has a very interesting history, to say the least. The Bayrock Group operated two floors beneath Trump's office in Trump Tower. As Bloomberg reports,

Bayrock partnered with the future president and his two eldest children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, on a series of real-estate deals between 2002 and about 2011, the most prominent being the troubled Trump Soho hotel and condominium in Manhattan.

During the years that Bayrock and Trump did deals together, the company was also a bridge between murky European funding and a number of projects in the U.S. to which the president once lent his name in exchange for handsome fees. Icelandic banks that dealt with Bayrock, for example, were easy marks for money launderers and foreign influence, according to interviews with government investigators, legislators, and others in Reykjavik, Brussels, Paris and London. Trump testified under oath in a 2007 deposition that Bayrock brought Russian investors to his Trump Tower office to discuss deals in Moscow, and said he was pondering investing there.⁴⁷

Bayrock was founded by Tevfik Arif, a Soviet-born Turkish businessman. According to multiple sources, Arif spent 17 years working for the USSR's Ministry of Commerce and Trade. Felix Sater was Arif's right-hand man. (There are pictures, by the way, of Trump, Sater, and Arif together, celebrating a business deal in 2007.) The Financial Times had this to say about Trump's relationship to Arif:

The Republican presidential nominee and Bayrock were both based in Trump Tower and they joined forces to pursue deals around the world — from New York, Florida, Arizona and Colorado in the US to Turkey, Poland, Russia and Ukraine. Their best-known collaboration — Trump SoHo, a 46-storey hotel-condominium completed in 2010 — was featured in Mr Trump’s NBC television show The Apprentice.

Yet when Mr Trump testified under oath in 2011 about his relationship with Mr Arif’s company, he confessed that he found his partners puzzling. Mr Trump said he knew what they did. But he said he was unsure of exactly who they were.

 “I don’t know who owns Bayrock,” Mr Trump said. “I never really understood who owned Bayrock. I know they’re a developer that’s done quite a bit of work. But I don’t know how they have their ownership broken down.”

Mr Trump’s Bayrock blind spot gains significance in the context of this year’s presidential race. Mr Trump has taken a stance on Russia that is at odds with US political orthodoxy — praising President Vladimir Putin’s leadership skills and saying he would consider lifting sanctions imposed on Russia after its 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine. Critics have asked whether Mr Trump’s business interests might be colouring his policies.

Mr Trump has responded by saying he has “zero investments in Russia”. But that is not the whole story. In recent years, Mr Trump has worked diligently to forge alliances with Russia-connected businessmen that would position him to profit from capital pouring out of the former states of the Soviet Union, and to seek opportunities in those locales. If no deals followed, as was often the case, it was not for a lack of trying.

Mr Trump’s Bayrock connection reveals the risks he took along the way. By his own admission, he agreed to serve as the public face of a murky business. Court records in cases involving Bayrock only underscore the company’s complexity. When Winston Churchill called Russia “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” he might as well have been talking about Mr Arif’s operation.

Bayrock’s founder boasts a résumé reflecting the topsy-turvy business world that took shape following the fall of communism. Born in Kazakhstan, Mr Arif, 63, worked in the food and hospitality unit of the Soviet commerce and trade ministry before operating an export-import business, building hotels in Turkey and heading to New York as the century began to develop property in the borough of Brooklyn.

There were bumps along the way. In 2010, Mr Arif was arrested in Turkey on charges he helped arrange an orgy on a yacht that had once belonged to the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In 2012, the charges were dropped, a company spokeswoman says. Today, Mr Arif is believed to be living in Turkey. His spokeswoman said he was the “sole owner” of Bayrock during the time it did business with Mr Trump. She declined to provide details, citing litigation and confidentiality agreements.⁴⁸

Should we mention Donald Trump Jr's six visits to Russia in the span of 18 months in 2007 and 2008, hoping to secure properties in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Sochi? Should we mention Trump bringing the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow, with partial financing from a Russian billionaire? Trump's statement to David Letterman that, "“I’ve done a lot of business with the Russians.” ?⁴⁹ Or Trump's relationship to Aras Agalarov, Russian billionaire who may have given direct aid to Trump's campaign (an issue we will pursue elsewhere)?⁵⁰ Or Trump's tax lawyers, who are strongly tied to Russian business interests?⁵¹ Or the Trump business partner who got hundreds of millions of dollars in financing from a state-run Russian bank?⁵²

Finally, let's look at Trump's statements regarding his personal relationship with Vladimir Putin. Politifact gathered up a number of direct Trump quotes about this relationship:

• When Thomas Roberts of MSNBC asked Trump, "Do you have a relationship with Vladimir Putin? A conversational relationship or anything that you feel you have sway or influence over his government?" Trump responded, "I do have a relationship, and I can tell you that he's very interested in what we're doing here today. He's probably very interested in what you and I am saying today, and I'm sure he's going to be seeing it in some form." -- interview, November, 2013

• "You know, I was in Moscow a couple of months ago. I own the Miss Universe Pageant and they treated me so great. Putin even sent me a present, a beautiful present." -- address at the CPAC conference, March 2014

• "Russia does not respect our country any longer. They see we've been greatly weakened, both militarily and otherwise, and he certainly does not respect President Obama. So what I would do—as an example, I own Miss Universe, I was in Russia, I was in Moscow recently and I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer, and we had a tremendous success. The show was live from Moscow, and we had tremendous success there and it was amazing, but to do well, you have to get the other side to respect you, and he does not respect our president, which is very sad." -- address at the National Press Club, May 2014

• "As far as the Ukraine is concerned … if Putin wants to go in -- and I got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes. We were stablemates, and we did very well that night." -- portion of an answer at the Fox Business News debate, Nov. 2015. (The notion that the two men appeared together on 60 Minutes has been debunked. As Time magazine put it succinctly, "In fact, they weren’t even on the same continent.")

The Stephanopoulos interview

Recently, though, Trump has changed his tune.

Here are excerpts from the Trump-Stephanopoulos interview, which aired on ABC’s This Week on July 31 [2016]

Stephanopoulos: "Let's talk about Russia. You made a lot of headlines with Russia this week. What exactly is your relationship with Vladimir Putin?"

Trump: "I have no relationship to -- with him. I have no relationship with him."

Stephanopoulos: "But if you have no relationship with Putin, then why did you say in 2013, I do have a relationship. In 2014, I spoke…"

Trump: "Because he has said nice things about me over the years. I remember years ago, he said something -- many years ago, he said something very nice about me. I said something good about him when Larry King was on. This was a long time ago. And I said he is a tough cookie or something to that effect. He said something nice about me. This has been going on. We did 60 Minutes together. By the way, not together-together, meaning he was probably shot in Moscow…."

Stephanopoulos: "Well, he was in Moscow…."

Trump: "And I was shot in New York."

Stephanopoulos: "You were in New York. But that's the thing."

Trump: "No, just so you understand, he said very nice things about me, but I have no relationship with him. I don't -- I've never met him. … I have no relationship with Putin. I don't think I've ever met him. I never met him. … I mean if he's in the same room or something. But I don't think so. ..."

Stephanopoulos: "You've never spoken to him on the phone?"

Trump: "I have never spoken to him on the phone, no. … Well, I don't know what it means by having a relationship. I mean he was saying very good things about me, but I don't have a relationship with him. I didn't meet him. I haven't spent time with him. I didn't have dinner with him. I didn't go hiking with him. I don't know -- and I wouldn't know him from Adam except I see his picture and I would know what he looks like."

Also, on July 27, Trump said at a press conference in Florida, "I never met Putin -- I don't know who Putin is. He said one nice thing about me. He said I'm a genius. I said thank you very much to the newspaper and that was the end of it. I never met Putin."⁵³

SUMMARY

Donald Trump's assertions that he has (or has had) very little to do with Russia are flat out lies. Trump's properties have been a magnet for Russian, Ukrainian, and other Eastern European organized crime figures. More critically, Russian money, flooding into Trump's properties, was crucial to his financial recovery. Just as Trump has had close relationships to American mob figures, so he has been linked to Russian Mafia members as well. Trump has also lied about his relationship with Vladimir Putin, directly contradicting his own statements.