Back in 2019, Rudy Giuliani made a series of trips to Ukraine on orders from Donald Trump. During these trips, he hired a pair of Russian mobsters, who were arrested and convicted of funneling money into U.S. elections from Russian oligarchs, made blunt attempts to extort Ukrainian officials, openly admitted that he was meddling in investigations, and successfully convinced Trump to remove a beloved and highly effective ambassador for the benefit of his criminal pals. Giuliani also concocted a conspiracy theory about then-candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter that was so ludicrous that Fox refused to run it. However, The New York Times did, gifting Giulini with pages in which to make his unhinged claims—claims that were instantly debunked by Bloomberg, but which have since become core beliefs among Republicans.
Giuliani didn’t stop when that initial story fell apart. He has returned to Ukraine again and again, making overt gestures to anyone who is willing to lie about Joe Biden for money. Those efforts directly impacted Ukraine’s national security, and they’ve continued right up to today, with Giuliani claiming that 92-year-old George Soros showed up at a Ukrainian airport to murder him.
In the process of his multiple trips, Giuliani has found plenty of people willing to cooperate with his efforts. Those people all fit the same general profile: Russian agents. Now, as a think tank connected to the British government reports, many of the same Russian agents who Giuliani eagerly cited as his contacts and supporters of his conspiracy theory, were also involved in a broader effort—helping to undercut Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia.
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That report details how Russian special services “managed to recruit a large agent network in Ukraine prior to the invasion and that much of the support apparatus has remained viable after the invasion, providing a steady stream of human intelligence to Russian forces.”
Those agents provided Russian intelligence with positions and equipment before the initial invasion, and they’ve continued to do so over the last year. In areas where Ukrainian forces are battling with Russian invaders, agents have provided information on locations of supply depots and troop concentrations. In areas occupied by Russia, agents have helped to infiltrate resistance movements and turn over Ukrainians who spoke out against Russian occupation.
Many of these agents were recruited, not directly by Russia, but by other agents who already had some power over them—as owners of companies or officials in the bureaucracy. These “agent-gruppovod” convince others that what they are doing isn’t really helping the Russians, but is being done because their company, their local government, or even the Ukrainian government needs the information. Some agents scribbling down locations of troops and weapons are convinced they’re doing it to assist the Ukrainian military … then they hand that information to the senior agent, who then provides it to Russia.
But who are those senior agents? Well, as Talking Points Memo details, some of them are the same people who befriended Giuliani and helped him out on his quest to generate false testimony against Joe Biden.
Take Andrii Derkach, a former Ukrainian member of parliament who squired Rudy Giuliani around Kyiv in 2019. Derkach spent the run-up to the 2020 election spreading bizarre calumnies about alleged corruption involving President Biden in Ukraine, and also released supposed recordings of Biden speaking with Ukrainian officials while he was vice president.
The British report shows that Dekach was already a Russian asset in place at least by 2016, years before he started working with Giuliani. Dekach ran a network of Russian spies so large Russia was feeding him $3 million to $4 million per month to keep his operation funded. That included putting agents in place who were positioned to guide Russian forces around potential obstacles, such as the corrupt official in Kherson who kept the bridges open to allow Russian forces to invade that city, or another Russian agent who guided them to a river crossing, allowing the city of Izyum to be surrounded.
And the report makes it clear that there was a reason these agents assisted efforts like Guiliani’s.
A group included Dekach was working directly with members of the Trump White House to establish what they called an “anti-corruption group” within the Ukrainian parliament. Under the cover of stamping out corruption, this group was actually out to “stop or at least reduce international aid to Ukraine.”
Given Ukraine’s critical dependence on military-technical assistance from foreign partners, and above all assistance from the US, Russian special influence operations to worsen Ukraine’s relations with partner countries, and especially with the US, are a constant priority of the Russian special services.
There’s little doubt that the effort to smear Joe Biden was seen as a direct part of that effort to weaken relations between Ukraine and the United States. So was the firing of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, which Giuliani eagerly pushed using false information provided to him by these Russian senior agents.
Naturally, the connections between Trump and these Russian agents don’t end with Giuliani. Looping back to 2016, one of the employees of former Trump campaign chair, Paul Manafort, was also directly connected to Russia’s intelligence operation in Ukraine. That man, Vladimir Sivkovych, was tasked with stirring up hate toward NATO and created faux protests. That included arranging a “riot” in which rocks were thrown at visiting U.S. Marines.
Both Giuliani and Manafort were neck-deep in Russia’s intelligence operations in Ukraine. With Manafort, it was obvious that he knew this—he was working directly for Moscow himself. With Giuliani, who knows? It’s unclear if he really understands anything. Other than that he can lie to The New York Times and get it printed without a challenge.