12/7/19
KYIV, Ukraine—The witnesses stand, with their right hands raised, as if being sworn in for, well, an impeachment hearing. Only this is not in Congress. The cast of obscure Ukrainians—a group seen at home as odious and discredited—are appearing in a television show with President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, in what he casts as an investigation that parallels the process in Congress. It would only be credible in a parallel world. Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat, has been helping Giuliani produce the show for OAN, the One America News Network, a conservative channel now favored by Trump. OAN is publicizing the two-part broadcast this weekend, promising “witnesses who destroy [House Intelligence Committee Chairman] Adam Schiff’s baseless impeachment case against President Trump.” “Watch top Ukrainian officials testify under oath the side of the story Schiff doesn’t want you to hear,” proclaims the YouTube promo for the broadcast. But “top officials” they definitely are not. Indeed, Giuliani’s choice of guest stars in his would-be reality show, and his wider cast of sources, caused shock among many in Kyiv’s establishment who know their questionable backgrounds in considerable detail. What Giuliani’s collaborators have in common is their willingness to testify in his parallel proceedings—or possibly the impeachment trial in the Senate, in the improbable event they are called—or contribute in other ways to Trump’s cause. Some of them have been doing so for years in Ukraine.
On the way to Kyiv, Giuliani met with Ukraine’s ex-prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, in Budapest, but so far as we can tell from the promotional video, Lutsenko does not appear on the panel in the OAN show. “Of all the people Giuliani met with in Kyiv, ex-prosecutor-general Shokin would most probably take the risk and testify at the upcoming hearing in the Senate,” Ukrainian politician Borislav Bereza told The Daily Beast. Shokin was removed from his position in 2016 partly as a result of pressure from the United States government, including Biden, who was the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine. Extensive testimony in Congress by U.S. diplomats supports the conclusion that Shokin’s dismissal was the result of the prosecutor’s own alleged corruption. It seems that everybody in Giuliani’s Ukrainian camp has his own agenda. Take MPs Oleksandr Dubinsky, a member of the ruling Servant of the People party, and Andrii Derkach, who was educated at the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB intelligence service in Moscow. In January 2014, shortly before the Euromaidan “Revolution of Dignity” ousted pro-Russian President Victor Yanukovych from Ukraine, Derkach as a member of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions voted for so-called “dictatorship laws” targeting social freedoms. One more character in Giuliani’s TV team made many Ukrainians' jaws drop: former parliamentarian Andrii Artemenko. Ukraine stripped Artemenko of his citizenship in 2017 and officially expelled him from the State Rada for proposing to rent Crimea to Russia. (Moscow seized and annexed the strategic peninsula in 2014 and Ukraine wants it back.)