The Military-centric and very credible website Task and Purpose has published a piece by USN veteran and veteran reporter Adam Weinstein seriously exploring the possibility that Paul Manafort, during his employment with the Pro-Russian former President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, helped to plan 2006 attacks on U.S. Marines in Crimea, where they’d been deployed in a hearts and minds mission to show the flag and promote Ukrainian entry into NATO.
“Feodosia, the Black Sea resort town in Ukraine’s Russian-dominated Crimean Peninsula, is usually a peaceful place — far from the political power in Kiev, and far from worries for the tourists who stroll its promenades and laze under sun tents on its beaches.
For Lt. Colonel Tom Doman, Feodosia was a shitshow from the minute his detachment of 113 reserve Marines and sailors arrived there in the dark on the morning of May 27, 2006.
“We had rocks thrown at us. Rocks hit Marines. Buses were rocked back and forth. We were just trying to get to our base,” Doman, the Marines’ executive officer, told me and my colleagues last year.
The Marines had been sent in as an advance party for an upcoming NATO military exercise, part of a blossoming in relations between Ukraine and the United States. In addition to constructing facilities for the exercise, the Marines were coming prepared to do some civil affairs work for the local population. “Ukraine wanted to come into NATO. We were trying to build our relations,” Doman said. “It was a total surprise we would get that type of [reception].”
Inconveniently for Manafort, there may exist evidence that the unrest was no surprise to him.
“As I reported last year, American officials remain convinced that the attacks on Marines in Feodosia were organized by the mob-connected, Kremlin-friendly Party of Regions, which was then trying to restore its influence in the region with Paul Manafort’s help.
In short: An American citizen who helped elect a conservative president with a strong patriotic, pro-military message was on the payroll of a foreign group that the U.S. government believes directly threatened its military personnel and undermined its foreign policy. Ukrainian officials and some former U.S. diplomats I’ve spoken to are convinced that Manafort knew about, and possibly helped plan, the anti-American protests.”
The Marines eventually had to abscond under cover of darkness to escape unscathed, George W. Bush scrapped further efforts to bring Ukraine into the NATO alliance, and Yanukovych, with the help of Manafort and pro-Russian fervor fueled by the attacks in Crimea, was elected Ukraine’s President... after which Russia annexed the Ukrainian province.
Could this be part of the reason Bobby Three Sticks Mueller, a Marine Veteran, leveled the conspiracy against the U.S. charges against Paulie Numbnuts and remorselessly threw him into jail?
And if such charges are eventually leveled can drumpf possibly pardon him?
Read the article and decide for yourself.
Adam Weinstein has this to say:
“... as Mueller’s investigation ramps up and focuses on Manafort’s financials, new reports lend additional credence to the possibility that Manafort was at least partly culpable in the targeting of U.S. Marines.”
If so Manafort is looking at some really hard time.