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The Betrayal of Volodymyr Zelensky | The Atlantic - Dec 3, 2019 |

Zelensky realized that he needed an American understanding of the situation confronting him, so he sought the advice of a former Obama-administration official named Amos Hochstein, who served on the board of supervisors for Naftogaz, Ukraine's state gas company. During a nearly three-hour session, Zelensky asked pointed questions; he found the mayor's relationship with the president maddeningly unclear. Was Giuliani an official representative of the Trump administration or a freelance operator? Did Zelensky have a diplomatic obligation to meet with him? And why did Giuliani want to cause so much trouble for a presidency that hadn't even begun?

Representative Adam Schiff's impeachment hearings made it so. For two weeks in November, American members of Congress talked about Zelensky with casual intimacy: They offered insights into his thinking; they expressed outrage on his behalf; and they bandied about his past statements, as if they could be sure of exactly what he'd meant.

If Zelensky was paying close attention to the hearings, he likely despised how the committee routinely described his nation as hopelessly corrupt. The corrupt part was fair enough--Zelensky won the presidency on a promise to dismantle the kleptocracy--but the hopeless part was not. Indeed, his victory embodied his nation's faith that it might succeed where the rest of the formerly Soviet world has failed.

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Four days before Zelensky's inauguration, the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky boarded a private jet. The fourth-richest man in Ukraine--a figure both accused of ordering contract killings (which he denies) and hailed for fending off Vladimir Putin--was returning home from self-imposed exile in Israel to the city of Dnipro. The plane descended toward a skyline dominated by Kolomoisky's monumental construction, the Menorah Center, seven marble-and-glass buildings in the shape of a candelabra: the largest Jewish community center in the world.

Before returning to his native city, he told reporters that he "will not be the shadow leader of the country and the gray cardinal." It was the sort of denial that suggestively implies everything it ostensibly refutes.

Kolomoisky's return was triumphant, but his exit had been ignominious. The government had nationalized the bank he'd founded after discovering a $5.6 billion hole in its ledgers. Investigators reported that the bank had fraudulently loaned Kolomoisky and his business partner massive sums (both men deny this). A court in London froze $2 billion of their assets. When Kolomoisky departed Ukraine, he said he feared that the government would "invent" a criminal case against him.



'Sapere aude'
by Oui (Oui) on Mon Apr 18th, 2022 at 10:17:13 AM EST

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