Dan Friedman
In March 2018, Rudy Giuliani met in Manhattan with a delegation of lawmakers from Kharkiv, a city of 1.4 million in eastern Ukraine. Giuliani, who joined President Donald Trump’s legal team a few weeks later, was at this gathering because, Giuliani says, his security firm agreed in 2017 to help the city improve its emergency services and seek foreign investment.
But the deal had a murkier element. Giuliani later conceded that he wasn’t just working for Kharkiv and that for at least some of the work he was paid by Pavel Fuks, a Kharkiv-born business executive who became a prominent real estate developer in Moscow in the 2000s and who has said that he negotiated directly with Trump between 2004 and 2010 about building a Trump-branded tower in Moscow. Fuks was one of several Ukrainians with Russian ties whose attendance at Trump’s presidential inauguration was investigated by former special counsel Robert Mueller. So at the start of Trump’s presidency, Giuliani was hobnobbing with at least one Ukrainian player who would be tainted by scandal.
Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine exploded into public view this month, with the revelation that Trump pressured the country’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to work with Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and information to discredit Mueller’s probe. A complaint filed by an intelligence community whistleblower that triggered this new Trump scandal depicted Giuliani as a Trump henchman prowling Ukraine for negative material Trump could use against Biden. But the former New York mayor’s involvement in Ukraine and other former Soviet bloc countries has been more extensive and even more sketchy than these disclosures indicate.
The New York meeting and an earlier trip Giuliani trip took to Kharkiv in November 2017 were arranged by TriGlobal Strategic Ventures, the firm says on its website. TriGlobal, which claims to have offices in New York, Moscow, and Kiev, sells itself as an international business consultancy that does public relations work for clients in Russia and Ukraine. The firm also brags that it has worked with Giuliani since 2004, arranging trips for him to former Soviet states. Last October, Giuliani took a break from his work representing Trump to speak about cybersecurity at a conference TriGlobal organized in Armenia to promote a Russia-led economic bloc, the Eurasian Economic Union. Giuliani appeared at the event alongside a Russian official, Sergey Glazyev, who was sanctioned in March 2014 for his role in the annexation of Crimea and who has been accused of advancing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Ukraine, an accusation he’s denied. Giuliani was reportedly invited to a conference by Russian Armenian multimillionaire Ara Abramyan, a member of TriGlobal’s board, who reportedly suggested at the time that he expected Giuliani to deliver a message for him to Trump ...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/09/rudy-giuliani-has-a-long-shady-history-with-ukraine/
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