The Fall Of Paul Manafort

FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, PAUL MANAFORT RODE HIGH. He bought homes and furnished them with pricey antiques and carpets. He paid for much of it using millions of dollars in undeclared overseas bank accounts, money he had made advising Ukrainian allies of Vladimir Putin, according to charges filed against him by special counsel Robert Mueller.

- Simon Shuster/Kiev And Philip Elliott

Manafort had earned it, in a way. When he went to work in Ukraine in 2005, his primary task was to burnish the image of a presidential hopeful named Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych had the backing of the Kremlin but was oafish and inarticulate, and had served jail time in his youth for theft and battery in his gritty home region of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine. Manafort’s job, in the words of a U.S. embassy cable sent from Kiev to Washington in 2006, was to give an “extreme makeover” to Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, which the cable referred to as “a haven for Donetsk-based mobsters.”

Yanukovych and Putin were determined to stop Ukraine’s accelerating move away from Russia toward alliances with the West. With guidance from Manafort and backing from Moscow, the Party of Regions made astonishing progress over the next five years, culminating in Yanukovych’s successful bid for the presidency in 2010. Among his first official acts was to legally bar Ukraine from seeking NATO membership. Among his unofficial ones were to amass an enormous fortune and launch a crackdown against political opponents. “It’s normal practice,” Yanukovych told TIME in June 2012, in reference to his jailing of an opposition leader. “Today the President of Ukraine has the highest ratings of any politician,” he added.