By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981), February 26, 2019

CNN/Lawrence Crook

Also see related article: How Cohen’s and Manafort’s Ukraine Ties Tell the Deeper Story of Trump-Russia and the Mueller Probe

AMMAN — Trump has conspicuously Tweeted and talked about the idea that Michael Cohen’s wife and Ukrainian father-in-law have some sort of shady criminal connections and has sent his eager minion and Russia point-person Rudy Giuliani to publicly discuss the same.  Leaving aside that Giuliani has his own huge shady connection to the Russian mafia and Kremlin operative network linked to Trump and his former Campaign Chairman, Paul Manafort, and that Trump’s actions amount to blatant witness tampering in spirit and probably also in a strict legal sense, Trump may actually be doing more damage to himself in his calls to shed light on the Cohen family’s shady dealings.

That is because many of those shady ties and dealings also involve the same Russian mafia and Kremlin agent network from which Trump is trying so hard to distance himself, a network that envelops everyone from his former Campaign Chairman and now convicted felon Paul Manafort and Donald Jr. to his son-in-law Jared Kushner and many of Trump’s top business partners over the past two decades, among others. And while Cohen’s connections have been barely explored in the media and publicly released investigations’ material, Cohen’s upcoming hearings present a unique opportunity to show the public how this all ties together, both demonstrably and possibly.  It is one of the few chances the main public lens might actually zoom out to show the public the bigger picture instead of the non-stop barrage of details that are overwhelming for most people when they try to understand the Mueller probe and the whole Trump-Russia saga.

To start, we must go back to late 1990s Ukraine.

Kiev Connections for Cohen

In post-Soviet Ukraine, a businessman named Viktor Topolov ran a construction company called Kyiv-Donbas, and as the 1990s drew to a close, he was allegedly employing several members of the Russian mafia through his company.  Among these was Leonid Roytman, officially a vice president of Kyiv-Donbas, which Rotyman said regularly served as a conduit and meeting-hub for organized crime in Ukraine.  According to the FBI, in reality, Roytman was a (now confessed) hitman and Russian mafioso linked to Semion Mogilevich. 

Semion Mogilevich is one of the biggest mafia bosses in the world and was long on the FBI’s most-wanted list, the “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia known mainly for two things: his tight relationship with Putin and his “brainy don” financial schemes of immense complexity that are difficult to expose.  Back in the 1990s, as he was cementing that close relationship with Vladimir Putin, he attended a 1995 mafia summit meeting in Tel Aviv hosted by Boris Birshtein (at some point becoming father-in-law of his one-time employee Alexander Shnaider, later Trump’s primary partner in the scandalous, majorly-Russian-funded Trump Tower Toronto saga), where he and other top Eastern European organized crime figures met to lay out their plans for Ukraine.

At this point, Mogilevich’s tentacles were well into the Ukrainian energy sector, and it would irresponsible not to look at the following in that context and in the above paragraph’s context since money laundering run by Mogilevich and behind most of the nation’s gas deals for the past few decades would dictate the course of politics, war, and peace in Ukraine through the present, all part of a scheme to bend Ukraine to Putin’s and Russia’s will.

Returning to Topolov, he would be a major player in an alleged money laundering and embezzling scandal that involved the Ukrainian state gas company Naftogaz and its Russian counterpart, gas giant Gazprom, in addition to the Ukrainian football team CSKA Kiev.  Topolov ran the team during this scandal until he handed it off in 1999 to Ukrainian Andrii Artemenko.  It would be Artemenko who would take much of the fall for the gas-football scandal.

Topolov seemed to fare better and within a few years had become a powerful Ukrainian politician.  At this stage, he and his “longtime business partner,” Alex Oronov (who was also quite close with Artemenko), entered into a new business arrangement with Oronov’s son-in-law (who had married Oronov’s daughter Oksana) and his son-in-law’s brother.  The husband was one Bryan Cohen, and his brother was also married to a Ukrainian, Laura Shusterman, the daughter of convicted money-launderer and Ukrainian immigrant to the U.S. Fima Shusterman. 

This brother was none other than Michael Cohen, soon to be Donald Trump’s laywer, fixer, and confidante.

Before he got in deep with Topolov and Trump, Michael Cohen was involved in shady business deals with suspicious and “connected” Russian/former Soviet state partners.  But given where he was raised, that is not terribly surprising.  The Cohen brothers grew up in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn, an area notorious for Russian mafia activity, and their uncle even ran a catering business that was for a time a hot-spot for Russian mobsters. 

As a boy, Michael even became friends with a neighborhood boy, Felix Sater, who as an adult would end up having a long history of alleged and proven Russian mafia and money laundering activity, with even one uncorroborated U.S. Supreme Court petition alleging that his father was a captain in the Mogilevich mafia outfit.  Sater was himself convicted of Russian-mafia-involved money laundering run from a Trump property at the same time Mogilevich was running similar schemes in the U.S. and Canada, but much of Sater’s file was sealed when he began cooperating with the U.S. government on numerous issues, including cases that involved stinger missiles and even al-Qaeda.  Mysteriously, Sater ended up working with, and later for, Trump, on a serious huge yet disastrous real-estate deals that all ended in some combination of lawsuits, bankruptcies, scandal, failure, and heavy suspicion of money laundering.  These deals involved major financing from shadowy Russian and former Soviet-state figures linked to the Russian mafia and/or the Russian/Soviet government and were going down around the same time that the Cohens were setting up shop with Topolov and Oronov.  Since Cohen quickly rose to top Trump confidante at the time the Sater-brokered deals were blowing up and falling apart, and given that Cohen was childhood friends with Sater (it was they who coordinated the now infamous Trump Tower Moscow feelers), it is far more likely than not that Cohen was aware of a lot of the drama involving the Sater deals. 

The Cohens-Topolov-Oronov project took the form of a Ukrainian ethanol business venture.  In 2006 (the same year Michael Cohen rose rapidly into Trump’s inner orbit), the brothers Cohen solicited investment from Americans to build a factory for the ethanol project, meeting Topolov in person during in the process; they failed in their pitch, but others funded the investment to the tune of millions.  Considering no ethanol was ever produced by the venture, this entire setup is extremely suspect and the few explanations that have been given fall short and leave unanswered many questions that would be highly relevant to a number of investigations related to Trump-Russia issues, includin Special Counsel Mueller’s probe.

This need for greater scrutiny is only increased when one realizes that this all happened at the same time one of the largest money laundering scams in history was underway in Ukraine.  The previously alluded to gas deals were part of a massive plot designed to hand Ukraine over to Russian President Vladimir Putin, at first indirectly, but later even involving a push to formally hand over Crimea, the Ukrainian region illegally occupied and annexed by Russia in 2014, to Russia. 

While Mogilevich had set up the laundering mechanisms to launder billions behind the scenes, It was none other than later-to-be convicted felon and former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates—now at the center the Mueller probe—who were running the political side of the gas scheme for Putin’s chosen candidate in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and his pro-Russian party, the Party of Regions.  They also engaged in related work to further Russian interests, sometimes with Oleg Deripaska, who has been in several Trump-Russia related scandals of late.  That work is central to major Mueller lines of inquiry and was often related to shady gas deals for Gazprom gas worth many billions that were being used by Putin allies to siphon money to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine over many years, eventually allowing Yanukovych and his Party to take over the government and precipitating the (Euro)Maidan revolution, the Ukrainian civil war, and Russia’s snatching of Crimea. 

This massive money laundering operation involved a huge chunk of the organized crime activity in Ukraine at the time, and it would be hardly surprising to find Topolov—who was previously tied to money laundering, Gazprom, the Russian mafia, and Mogilevich specifically—may have used his business venture with the Cohens to play a part in this massive laundering scheme consuming Ukraine at the time.  That so little is known or offered about that ethanol business only further demands answers in the context of the overall situation, as Manafort’s and Gate’s work at this time is important to Mueller’s probe and since significant parts of Putin’s machinery that was trying to control Ukraine would also be mobilized to engage Trump and his inner circle.

Considering that Oronov, a “partner, mentor, teacher and friend” to Artemenko, helped organize negotiations shortly after Trump was inaugurated between Cohen and Sater on one hand and Artemenko on the other—negotiations designed to produce U.S. legitimization of the illegal Crimea annexation, legitimization that ran counter to U.S. policy and U.S. interests—and considering Manafort right up until he joined Trump’s campaign was doing political consulting for the pro-Russian successor to the Party of Regions, the Opposition Bloc, of which Artemenko was a member (Manafort even flew at least once while doing this business on a private jet owned by a company co-founded by Artemenko’s father), the focus should be clear: the relationships between Topolov, Oronov, Artemenko, Sater, and Cohen raise many unanswered questions, are at least partly-related to the Manafort-Gates work, and now is the time to have answers.

A Chance for Answers Now

In other words, if Cohen engaged in business that doesn’t add up with a Russian mafia and Mogilevich-linked Ukrainian politician (Topolov), whose old (seemingly criminal) partner (Artemenko) is close with that Ukrainian politician’s-then partner, Cohen’s brother’s father-in-law (Oronov), and that partner ends up sitting opposite Cohen years later discussing a deal on Crimea when Cohen represents the president of the United States (Trump), and if for most of the time in between, Putin’s best friend in the Russian mafia (Mogilevich) had been working on a massive scheme to hand over Ukraine to Putin with the man who would become that U.S. president’s Campaign Chairman (Manafort), and that same man tied to Cohen’s old business partner, brother’s father-in-law, and presidential diplomacy involving Cohen (Artemeko) had been a member of the pro-Russian party employing that future Campaign Chairman until shortly before he became said Campaign Chairman and whose father co-founded a company flying that future Campaign Chairman around to do this business, and that Campaign Chairman runs a campaign for a candidate and president who is the most pro-Kremlin since the American-Soviet alliance of WWII, Congress and the media might want to ask some questions about all this.

While Wednesday’s public House Oversight Committee will be quite restricted to avoid interfering with Mueller’s probe, the closed Senate and House Intelligence Committees’ hearings (today and Thursday, respectively) will be less so.  However possible, the questions raised from the above must be asked.

Despite all his proven past wrongdoing in support of Trump and allegedly in other situations, Cohen should still be applauded for attempting to assist the cause of justice and the law today.  However, it should still be remembered that for years, he was one of Trump’s most loyal soldiers, one with multiple organized crime connections.  Through that lens, the questions of what exactly he was doing in Ukraine in and around 2006—when so many other nefarious things were going on related to the Special Counsel’s investigation and other Trump-centered investigations involving people in the orbits of Cohen’s business partners and in the orbit of Cohen himself—still demand answers, and the upcoming hearings are an excellent chance to demand them.

The story of Cohen’s Ukrainian father-in-law and wife has yet to be really fleshed out, but if they are indeed connected to Russian organized crime, a focus on that may haunt Trump, especially if they are connected to the same Mogilevich network that worked for so long with Manafort and has long sought to engage Trump himself.

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

Also see related article: How Cohen’s and Manafort’s Ukraine Ties Tell the Deeper Story of Trump-Russia and the Mueller Probe

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer and consultant from the New York City area who has been based in Amman, Jordan, since early 2014. He holds an M.S. in Peace Operations and specializes in a wide range of interrelated topics, including international and U.S. policy/politics, security/conflict/(counter)terrorism, humanitarianism, development, social justice, and history. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse September 22, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981), September 11th-13th, 2018, and republished by Tuck Magazine September 24th; See my related Trumpism and Tribalism Run Amok in the Middle East for Small Wars Journal

Danielle Parhizkaran/USA Today Sports

AMMAN — As I write this while watching the memorial service at Ground Zero with mourners reading the names of those they and others lost seventeen years ago today, as we remember the horrors of September 11th, 2001, and their aftermath, more and more, it looks like 9/11 can be seen as a turning point, one in which the world went from becoming less tribal to becoming more tribal, and not at all in a good way.

Hell, even tennis has just exploded into tribalism. TENNIS!! A spat between a (THE) tennis superstar and a stickler-of-an umpire became just like everything else: tribes gearing up for war, trying to gain ground in their culture wars consumed by vitriol and hate. TENNIS is now Trump vs. his many enemies, the left vs. the right, Sunni vs. Shiite, black vs. white, Hillary supporters vs. Bernie supporters, men vs. women, Israel vs. Palestine…

How did it get to this?

*****

As the millennium celebrations approached, the world could celebrate an era of increasing international peace, cooperation, and prosperity not seen since the Pax Romana some roughly two thousand years earlier.

Flikr/Paul Mannix

The Cold War had finally ended, and the two most powerful countries in the world had engaged in a massive reduction of their military forces, including their nuclear arsenals, as the great rivalry between Cold War superpowers the United State and the Soviet Union had melted away to a new if rocky friendship between the U.S. and Russia even as the U.S. extended friendship and alliances to many of Russia’s former Soviet republics and satellite states.

Europe was becoming more and more united politically, economically, militarily, as well as more democratic. Longtime enemies Jordan and Israel had finally signed a peace treaty, and a difficult but important peace process between Israelis and Palestinians had begun under the Oslo Accords. Even the U.S. and Vietnam were beginning a new chapter of friendship. Bitter rivalries in Asia had given way to increasing regional economic cooperation, and after a century of hatred, Japan and South Korea had agreed to host the 2002 FIFA World Cup together. Democracy and freedom were spreading in Latin America and Africa too, where apartheid had finally ended in South Africa and other nations were making important strides away from dictatorship.

This era of optimistic globalization would come to a screeching halt as planes slammed into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001. 

*****

It took a tremendous amount of `both hatred and willpower to plot to plan and fly those planes into their targets on September 11th, 2001. I’d love to say that, overall, we Americans responded with love to overcome the hate. We did, if ever so briefly, but that quickly gave way even more intense partisan rancor, two grossly mismanaged wars, and profligate spending along with a resurgence of all the awful trends that continued and spiraled out of control into what we have now. 

America became incredibly divided well before the 2004 presidential election; while the numbers were not dramatically different from 2000, the level of rancor and acrimony was. And America had just invaded Iraq in 2003, under deceptive and misguided if at least partially well-intention pretenses, and mismanaged the occupation in such an incompetent way that it ripped open the ethnic and sectarian divides in Iraq in a way that would, over time, raise tensions between Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Kurds, and Sunnis and other minorities like Christians, and this throughout the Middle East.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq exacerbated, but by no means created, these divisions, and the damage would be considerable. For a brief window, the U.S. seemed like it would be able to shape events as it desired, but that dream faded away to reality as soon as an al-Qaeda truck bomb killed dozens and wounded far more at the UN headquarters in Baghdad, including its all-star chief diplomat, the incomparable Sergio Vieira de Mello, that August; the UN pulled out soon after and Iraq, under hapless U.S. misleadership, descended in hell.

Yet the damage was hardly America acting by itself: particularly Syria and Iran—nervous about what American success in Iraq would mean for their regimes—were happy to let terrorists, insurgents, militiamen, other people and/or weapons enter Iraq by the thousands, caring little for the death and violence these actors and equipment would inflict upon the Iraqi people as long as they were undermining American interests there. This only further exacerbated tensions and problems already festering due to American incompetence to such a degree that Iraqi Shiites settled on an Iraqi Shiite strongman—Nuri Kamal al-Maliki—to feel safe, whose oppression of Sunnis was the largest single factor in the degree to which ISIS would experience success in Iraq. 

In a true case of chickens coming home to roost, ISIS—an offshoot of the breakaway former al-Qaeda group in Iraq that killed de Mello—added to the brutality of the Syrian Civil War, both directly in its own barbaric acts of mass murder and mass destruction but also indirectly in dragging less extreme factions closer to its brutality level and giving the regime of Bashar al-Assad and later its Russian allies all the excuse they would need to employ their own barbaric tactics against any and all resistance, pointing to ISIS and making little-to-no distinction between ISIS and Syrians simply fighting for their freedom.  The Syrian Civil War was itself one of a number of failures of the Arab Spring that have turned people against each other rather than uniting them, was already a horror-show of bloody sectarianism bringing out the worst in people all-around by the time ISIS had marched to the outskirts of Baghdad in mid-2014. 

Israel’s right-wing leaders, from the late Ariel Sharon to Benjamin Netanyahu, likened their conflicts with the Palestinians and with Hezbollah incorrectly to George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” just as Putin did with the Chechens, and prosecuted these conflicts with a ferocity that only empowered extremists in Hamas and Hezbollah (who do their part to empower extremity in Israeli politics) and has helped make the prospect for peace all but impossible for now, destroying Oslo and the peace process. 

The same increasing sectarianism and tribalism has led to a cruel callousness with which the Saudi-led coalition has prosecuted the war in Yemen and has created one of the worst humanitarian disasters in a half-century.

Just to look at a few other major locations: India is increasingly a hotbed of religious violence, China is engaged in the mass-cultural and religious destruction of its Uighur Muslim minority in its worst oppression since Mao, a genocide against the Muslim-minority Rohingya is happening in Burma, the South China Sea is becoming an increasingly nationalistically confrontational arena, and ethnic and/or religious tensions are driving forces reigniting wars in central Africa, from the Central African Republic to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to South Sudan.

While Americans were focused on the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, including two wars overseas, the Bush Administration and Republicans rammed through a disastrous series of regulatory and economic moves that more than helped set the stage for the 2008 global financial crises. The hardships caused, intensified, and/or perpetuated by the near-collapse of the global financial system created and/or facilitated a state where masses of citizens globally were experiencing regression in their well-being, fostering much of the instability, political division, violent conflict, and rage at the status quo mentioned above.

As people looked for easy targets to blame, economic setbacks gave way to even greater racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious resentment; too many non-whites blamed white people in general for their ills in an unproductive way, painting with a broad brush and alienating possible white allies while energizing angry whites, while, even more importantly, whites laughably and ignorantly looked at racial, ethnic, and religious minorities as the roots of all their frustrations. Racial unrest exploded across America over the past few years, and white identity politics, more so than the economy, have brought us Brexit and Trump, though obviously there are relationships between the two. At this point, tribal secessionism in Europe is rising, in Spain with Catalonia and in the UK with Scotland (both having enthusiastic Russian support).

In hindsight, Brexit in 2014 was an obvious herald of Trump’s triumph in 2016 (both dramatically and in determining ways aided materially and abetted by the Russians). By 2016, poor whites in Appalachia and elsewhere were told to check their privilege, while nonwhites moving into the suburbs and in other communities were told to go back to where they came from. The resulting election (with the help of a massive, concerted state-sponsored Russian effort), was the most racially polarizing since the Civil Rights era a half-century earlier, a “whitelash” (to quote Van Jones from election night) of white nationalism that revealed the depths of American tribalism and made American politics in many ways as banal as those of the former the Soviet Republic of Georgia and many other places consumed by ethnic division.

Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

*****

Since Trump’s win, the world has only plunger deeper into tribal division. The U.S. presidency—the single largest public media organ in global politics—has gone virtually silent on human rights, tolerance, respect for other cultures, and appreciation of diversity, with the consequences far transcending the verbal arena. This is a dramatic swing considering that human rights have been a major theme of U.S. foreign policy (even with all its shortcomings) for most of America’s modern history regardless of which party was in the White House. Concurrently, the forces on the other side of those stances have only too eagerly filled the void, and often with the help of Putin’s Kremlin.

As I noted not long ago, small-minded tribalism was a major factor in the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and it is a major factor in the current unraveling of the West.

Regrettably, a tennis match is now—like everything else in the current cultural landscape—a frontline battle in a vicious global war of tribalism. This tremendous tribal tidal shift can be traced to 9/11, a tombstone not just for thousands of Americans and those who died in the ensuing misguided wars, but also for an era of humanity transcending petty differences. 9/11 is not just a time to mourn the dead, but what is to come, the petty creatures we have become, and the alternate world of lost opportunities: the what-might-have-beens if that glorious march forward—even with all its inconsistencies, bumps, and steps backwards—had continued without the slamming of planes into buildings and without the sad, counterproductive responses launched from what can be called, in hindsight, the ashes of hope.

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer and consultant from the New York City area who has been based in Amman, Jordan, since early 2014. He holds an M.S. in Peace Operations and specializes in a wide range of interrelated topics, including international and U.S. policy/politics, security/conflict/(counter)terrorism, humanitarianism, development, social justice, and history. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

See my related Trumpism and Tribalism Run Amok in the Middle East for Small Wars Journal

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg, all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!