Former head of the campaign headquarters of President Donald Trump, political consultant Paul Manafort, who is now being tried in the United States for hiding information on offshore accounts, banking fraud and tax evasion , has long worked with the translator Konstantin Kilimnik, a native of Krivoy Rog in the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine.
According to the Financial Times and investigators from Special Prosecutor Muller’s group, Kilimnik studied at the Military University of the Russian Ministry of Defense, where they train translators for military intelligence, and at least at the beginning of his career had to do with the Russian GRU.
Later he joined the team of Manafort, who was a political consultant for the Party of Regions and worked for the ex-president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych. He also has connections with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
Both the FT and the investigative project “Project” and the group of Special Prosecutor Muller consider Kilimnik the link that connects Manafort with the Russian authorities and special services. It is these ties with Russia that the Muller group is trying to prove in the course of the investigation of the “collusion with Russia”, which has been conducted since the end of 2016. It is through Kilimnik that the Kremlin, according to their version, turns out to be connected with Trump and his election campaign.
Konstantin Kilimnik (left in blue shirt) in the team of Polan-Manafort in 2006
Kilimnik in February 2017 gave an interview to the Radio Liberty project in English . During him, he banned himself from photographing and denied his ties with the Russian special services, but confirmed that he had two citizenships: the Russian Federation and Ukraine. He also confirmed that he talked with Paul Manafort “every couple months”, including at the time when he worked at Trump’s headquarters in 2016. But, according to Kilimnik, he has not given any consultations to the Manafort in the 2016 American elections of 2016 and has not cooperated with him professionally since 2014.
In addition to relations with the GRU, Kilimnik is linked to Russia indirectly through the structures of billionaire Oleg Deripaska, according to Project’s investigators (in April 2018, Deripaska came under personal sanctions by the United States as an oligarch close to Vladimir Putin ).
From 1995 until the end of 2004 – beginning of 2005, Kilimnik officially worked for the American NGO “International Republican Institute” in Moscow (IRI). Now MRI in Russia is on the list of undesirable organizations, its site is blocked. In 2005, Kilimnik, who at that time was the acting director of the Russian branch of IRI, was dismissed from there with a scandal. His former colleagues told Project, that this was due to the fact that Kilimnik started secretly at first, and then openly working in Ukraine for Viktor Yanukovych.
One of the people who worked at Kilimnika claims that the work of the political consultant in Ukraine was coordinated with the participation of Deripaska’s structures. In particular, Kilimnik sent at least 20 times the MRI staff to the Basel office on Rochdelskaya Street in Moscow, where they were given envelopes with cash and air tickets for political consultants attracted by Kilimnik. The representative of Deripaska at the same time stated that neither the oligarch himself, nor Basel had ever financed Kilimnik. According to her, Deripaska and Manafort have “private investment relations, the existence of which is not disputed,” but they “were never aimed at achieving political goals.”
The “project” claims that Deripaska financed at least one more joint trip of Manafort and Kilimnik: to Kyrgyzstan in 2005. Then in the former Soviet republic began mass protests of the Tulip Revolution, which ended with the flight of President Askar Akayev and the fact that Kurmanbek Bakiyev took his place . Political technologists went there to advance the interests of Russia related to the use of the Manas airfield as a US military base. The representative of Deripaska denies funding the trip, but one of the political consultants who traveled to Bishkek, confirmed that he worked there with Kilimnik, while Manafort was in Kyrgyzstan.
However, Kilimnik claimed in an interview with Radio Liberty that Manafort had not spoken to anyone except him “in Russia” since Deripaska’s time, and that the American political consultant “does not have ties with the Russian Federation.”
Currently, Kilimnik and his wife live in Russia in an elite guarded settlement in the north-west of the Moscow region, right behind the Moscow Ring Road, and still avoid publicity. Two of his rare snapshots are in the evidence base in the case of Paul Manafort: these are footage of the meetings of Kilimnik and Yanukovych, but in both of them Kilimnik turns his back to the camera.
The authors of the investigation believe that this behavior of Kilimnik is not accidental and may indirectly indicate that he worked in intelligence. His only photo is at the AP agency (above): Kilimnik is photographed with members of the Manafort team.
In the opinion of Alena Getmanchuk, director of the New Europe Center, it may not be beneficial for Kiev to investigate Paul Manafort’s activities in Ukraine.
source: #currenttime #kompromat
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