The green light for the "Ukrainian mission" in exchange for "help" during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Protagonists of the sensational do ut des, Russian President Vladimir Putin and former US President Donald Trump . This was revealed by an investigation by the New York Times , according to which "Russian interference in the politics of the Trump era was more directly connected to the current war than was understood before".

A reconstruction, that of the NYT, based on the revision of hundreds of pages of documents from the investigation into Russiagate by super-prosecutor Robert Mueller , the Senate intelligence commission, the Trump impeachment hearings, as well as interviews with almost 50 people in the US and Ukraine .

It all started on the night of July 28, 2016, when Hillary Clinton was accepting the nomination dem for the White House in Philadelphia: in those hours Paul Manafort , president of the Trump campaign, received an email from his friend and Russian partner Konstantin Kilimnik , who asked and got an urgent meeting with him. The two met at the Grand Havana Room, a Trump-related hangout of the world, atop the tower in Manhattan owned by Jared Kushner, the tycoon's son-in-law.

Here Kilimnik illustrated the "Mariupol Plan" , which provided for the creation of an autonomous republic in eastern Ukraine led by deposed President Viktor Ianukovich in exchange for peace. Trump had already hinted that he would overturn the diplomatic status quo and Kilimnik believed that he would help realize that plan, but first he had to win, which is why Manafort shared with him the internal polls that charted the way to success in the battleground states.

Too bad he was also a Russian agent, as American investigators later ascertained. In the following weeks, the Russian hacks against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party began, a real assault on American democracy, which ended with Trump's victory.

It seemed a closed chapter, but according to the NYT it is linked to the war in Ukraine: in the end Vladimir Putin did not get from the tycoon what he thought he had paid for and democracy held, both in the US and in Ukraine. But this did not stop the Tsar, who on February 25th, with Joe Biden already in power, decided to start the special military operation ”, still in progress.

(Unioneonline / lf)

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