KIEV – Last week, as the news of Paul Manafort’s indictment on 12 counts of money laundering, tax evasion and lobbying violations rocketed through Washington D.C., a small group quietly celebrated in a nondescript Soviet-era building near the Dnieper River in the Ukrainian capital.

“It showed we’re on the right track,” Serhiy Gorbatyuk, head of a special investigations unit in the Ukrainian general prosecutor’s office, told POLITICO. Gorbatyuk and his team are tasked with digging into alleged illegal, under-the-table payments by Ukraine’s pro-Russian former president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was deposed in a pro-Western revolution three years ago. Manafort, whose work as political advisor to Yanukovych for nearly a decade provided the bulk of material for the U.S. indictment, figures in two of their Ukrainian investigations.


The first, referred to locally as the “black ledgers” case, concerns some $2 billion of allegedly off-the-books disbursements by Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. Last year the New York Times revealed that Manafort’s name appeared 22 times among the hundreds of pages of hand-written entries, for alleged payments totaling $12.7 million. (Though Manafort denied receiving the money, the revelations contributed to his resignation as Trump’s campaign manager in August 2016.)

The second investigation is looking into a 2012 report prepared for the Ukrainian government by the New York City law firm Skadden, Arps, Meagher & Flom. Manafort helped arrange the report, which was seen to exonerate Yanukovych for jailing his main political opponent, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. The report, which Ukraine’s Justice Ministry claimed at the time was “independent,” looked into allegations that Tymoshenko’s trial and conviction in 2011 was full of legal violations and politically motivated. Skadden found that though there were discrepancies in her prosecution, the verdict against Tymoshenko was fair.

Officially, Skadden Arps was paid less than $12,000 for the work – a suspiciously low figure, investigators say, since it allowed the government to award the law firm a contract without an open tender. Gorbatyuk and his group suspected that the real figure was much higher, and that Ukrainian government funds were used illegally.

Last Monday they received their first outside confirmation, courtesy of Robert Mueller. “MANAFORT and GATES also lobbied in connection with the roll out of a report concerning the Tymoshenko trial commissioned by the Government of Ukraine. MANAFORT and GATES used one of their offshore accounts to funnel $4 million to pay secretly for the report,” paragraph 22 of the special counsel’s indictment read, referring to Manafort’s associate, Rick Gates, who was also indicted.

“Our assumptions were correct,” Gorbatyuk said.

Manafort, Gates and Skadden representatives have denied any wrongdoing. And Kiev prosecutors have not charged them with any crimes. Still, Gorbatyuk wants to question them in ongoing cases against Ukrainian officials. And if investigators turn up evidence that the Americans were involved in illegally transferring or receiving money from Ukraine, they could be indicted as co-conspirators.

But that is only a possibility, and further down the road, officials say. “It is not our position to talk about someone if they haven’t been charged,” Gorbatyuk told me. “Right now, we want to speak to Manafort and [people from] Skadden as witnesses.”

However, even getting to the point where they could question Manafort has proven more than difficult. Under a mutual legal agreement with the United States, the Ukrainians contacted their American counterparts in December 2014 with a request to help organize an interview with Skadden’s lead lawyer on the report, former White House counsel Gregory Craig, followed by another in early 2015 asking to talk to Manafort. The requests went unanswered, however, prompting the Ukrainians to send a number of follow-up letters.

After James Comey, the FBI head at the time, was questioned over the bureau’s silence on the issue during a congressional hearing, the Ukrainians finally received an answer of sorts: They could interview Manafort and Craig, but they had to decide whether to speak to the two men in person, or let the FBI do it for them. But there was a catch: If they wanted to travel to the U.S. themselves, the process could take up to a year and a half. If not, the FBI could finish the process within three months.

“Because we’d already been waiting more than two years, we chose the second option – and sent them an extra six pages of questions,” said Andriy Radionov, a prosecutor in Gorbatyuk’s unit.

That was in June.

“Since then, we haven’t heard hide or hair [about answers to the questions],” said Gorbatyuk.

Still, the U.S. indictment has provided a window of opportunity: Gorbatyuk said that his unit would make another request to interview Manafort in the upcoming days. “We hope our remarks will ultimately benefit our investigations into former government figures,” Gorbatyuk said.

Ukrainian officials say that Mueller’s team of investigators has not contacted them with requests for assistance. If and when they do, Kiev says it’s prepared to lend a hand. And the Ukrainians presumably would have a lot to share that’s of potential interest: According to the indictment, around $75 million passed through Manafort and Gates’ offshore accounts in various tax havens, for work between 2006 and 2015 with the Yanukovych government and Ukrainian political parties. Of this, Manafort laundered around $18 million “to enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States without paying taxes on that income,” the indictment reads.

On the face of it, the Ukrainians would seem to have little reason to deny help to the Americans, since the alleged crimes were largely committed under the previous administration. “My government and our term in office have absolutely no relations to this scandal,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

But that might not be how President Donald Trump sees it. Trump has already accused Kiev of having attempted to “sabotage” his presidential campaign – a perception based in part on Ukrainian officials’ disclosures of Manfort’s alleged link to the black ledgers. Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko appears to have surmounted this distrust: The two leaders have met, and Trump voiced his support for Ukraine in its continuing undeclared war with neighboring Russia. But Trump could interpret any further revelations about Manafort as an attack on his presidency.

“It seems to me that Poroshenko would be happy to forget the name ‘Manafort,’” said Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian MP who exposed a possible scheme by which the former Trump campaign chairman received illegal payments. “Now he wants to create a good relationship with Trump and neutralize these investigations.”

The investigations are also facing resistance from entrenched interests within Ukraine. Post-revolution, anti-corruption cases as a whole have ground to a standstill. To date, not one high-level official from the Yanukovych regime has been convicted. Manafort’s name is not the only one in the black ledgers; the list of people would like to see the case disappear is long.

Gorbatyuk and his team say they are feeling pressure to abandon their efforts. They assert that due to a recent change in the criminal procedure code, on November 20 more than 1,000 cases -- including Skadden Arps and black ledgers -- should be transferred from the prosecutor’s office to the newly created National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which lacks the resources to investigate this number of cases. Gorbatyuk believes this is an attempt by the government to “bury” anti-corruption investigations into the previous government.

“Taking everything into consideration, it seems to me that this was an agreement between the previous and present governments,” said the investigator Radionov.

Government officials deny they are trying to deep-six any criminal proceedings. In a statement, the press office of general prosecutor Yury Lutsenko, who is a close ally of President Poroshenko, said: “The General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine is guided exclusively by legal norms in its activities. Therefore, it is absolutely incorrect to raise the question that the transfer of criminal proceedings... has been made on a political basis.”

The days then may be numbered for the Skadden and black ledger cases. But if these were to be shelved, it would be nearly impossible to say what ultimately was the main cause: Both fear of damaging relations with the Trump administration and domestic pressures seem to be equally strong factors within Ukraine.

At the same time, the Mueller investigation could instead give a new impetus to the investigations. Most Ukrainian news outlets devoted substantial airtime and column inches to the announcement of Manafort’s indictment, and public interest seems to high to see what the coming weeks will bring for the American spin doctor, whom many hold responsible for bringing the kleptocratic Yanukovych to power. In some quarters of the political elite, the reaction was jubilant. “Even if the justice system doesn’t work in Ukraine, in the United States at least it does,” said Sevgil Musaieva-Borovyk, chief editor of the Ukrainska Pravda website.

All speculation aside, however, the Mueller investigation will follow its own path, and Ukrainian authorities will have to finesse any negative reactions emanating from Washington. “Manafort previously worked for a man who looted Ukraine,” said one Ukrainian politician closely following developments in D.C. and Kiev, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Trump, as a serious person, should have recognized this risk when he hired him.”