How ‘Seinfeld’ Predicted Ukraine-Gate
Plus, Big Man in Kyiv: Zelensky’s New Best Friend Has Russia, Trumpland Ties
My favorite popular culture reference to Ukraine is a great bit of physical comedy uncannily foreshadowing current events, and I’m a little surprised it’s not getting more love right now.
This is, of course, from Seinfeld, specifically ‘The Label Maker’ episode, which first aired in January 1995.
The prior month, Ukraine (along with Belarus and Kazakhstan) agreed to turn over its stockpile of Soviet nuclear weapons, which Russia continued to control and it had no means to secure. In exchange, Ukraine got restated assurances on its security and sovereignty within existing borders, sought at the time in part because Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea and the Russian naval base in Sevastopol was already under threat.
So Ukraine was weak in real life then too, and you can see why that might have been a touchy subject for the Ukrainian man on the subway.
But there was no way a viewer 25 years ago could have understood how perfectly Cosmo Kramer encapsulates Donald Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine in 2019, his glee at the opportunity to profit from its weakness.
And just as Kramer fails to anticipate the fallout from his gloating…well, you see where this is going.
Or, maybe, that Risk board on the subway in 1995 is all of America’s cherished assumptions about its role in the world, upended by our failure to pay sufficient attention to our surroundings. While we were watching Seinfeld, post-Soviet corruption was already putting down U.S. roots by way of sketchy real-estate ventures and cash condo purchases.
With so many Trump associates either from the region or, as in the case of Paul Manafort and Rudy Giuliani, making good coin there from dubious clients, it would be easy to dismiss Ukraine-gate and, as many have done, the Trump presidency itself as a foreign production. American bigots have often attacked immigrants as inherently corrupt. But it turns out corruption isn’t coded in DNA but rather in state failure, social mistrust and the co-option of respected institutions.
The dominant Ukraine narratives that have emerged from the Trump impeachment suggest we’ve failed to learn this. I’ll discuss the most dubious of these in the next issue.
In the Headlines
Mike Pompeo’s Eurasian tour for the muzzling of free press reached a new low in authoritarian Kazakhstan on the heels of this gem during his meeting with Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenka.
Despite public assurances to the contrary, the secretary of state disappointed his Ukrainian hosts, the New York Times reported: “Mr. Pompeo did not give Mr. Zelensky one thing he has sought since his election in April: an invitation to meet President Trump at the White House, which would be an important signal to Russia of American support for Ukraine. Mr. Pompeo’s message that Mr. Trump was not ready to receive Mr. Zelensky at the White House was a blow to the Ukrainian president’s national security efforts… Ukrainian officials are angry that the Americans have granted Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, two visits with Mr. Trump in White House, most recently in December.”
“In renewing his request for a meeting Friday, Mr. Zelensky said, ‘If we have an important subject for this conversation other than strategy and tactics, but important things we can negotiate over, something to sign and that I can bring back, then I am ready to go tomorrow,’” the Times reported.
Washington Post’s coverage noted that Pompeo “could not offer a date when the two countries would arrange an Oval Office sit-down between Trump and Zelensky.”
“While the lack of a specific date is likely to disappoint Zelensky, the young leader won a long-sought and high-profile show of support from the top U.S. diplomat.”
The Post story concludes with a juicy tidbit on Ukrainian palace politics: “A top aide to Zelensky who is angling to become his new chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, has urged his boss to embrace a pro-Trump line for the sake of his embattled country, according to diplomats familiar with the deliberations. Yermak sat in the front row of the news conference Friday as Zelensky underscored the strength of the bilateral relationship.”
As Zelensky’s top foreign affairs fixer, Yermak (above) was the Ukrainian official most often on the receiving end of Trump Administration demands for probes targeting Trump opponents.
In an October interview with the Los Angeles Times, Yermak blamed the pressure campaign on misinformation. “Clearly, over the years, President Trump had developed a negative impression of Ukraine,” he said. The next month, he was spotted dining in Kyiv with a former Trump adviser.
A former entertainment lawyer, Yermak has close business ties to Russia’s political elite as well as eastern Ukrainian oligarchs. (English-language summary here.)
Yermak has been Zelensky’s top envoy in negotiations with Russia over Donbas, including two recent prisoner exchanges, and with Iran following the downing of the Ukrainian airliner there.
His apparent rise as Zelensky’s closest confidant over presidential chief of staff Andriy Bohdan dovetails with other recent indications of a Ukrainian pivot toward a settlement with Russia, as noted here last week.
In an hourlong interview with a Ukrainian journalist Saturday, Yermak made news by saying he would like to see local elections across Ukraine by the end of October, including in the Donbas territories occupied by Russia and its proxies. He said Ukraine hopes to present a plan for holding the balloting in the occupied territories by the next “Normandy format” meeting between the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France in three months’ time.
Yermak stuck to Ukraine’s long held position that legitimate elections in the occupied territories cannot take place until “foreign” armed groups there disband and Ukraine regains control of the entirety of its border with Russia. Still, the ambitious timeline has critics of Yermak’s peace push arguing that it will end up legitimizing continued rule by Russian mercenaries.
The rivalry between the steady, affable Yermak and his main rival inside Zelensky’s administration, the mercurial current chief of staff Bohdan, appears based partly on personalities and partly on regional allegiances. Yermak is said to have the backing of the oligarchs and politicians from eastern Ukraine who would be the biggest beneficiaries of a settlement ending the Donbas conflict on any terms. Bohdan, as the former lawyer of the Dnipro oligarch Igor Kolomoisky presumably represents the interests of Kolomoisky’s base in the southeast.
The political and business clans from Dnipro and Donbas have long competed for dominance over Ukraine. Donbas has been sidelined since the 2014 revolution ousted the last iteration of its machine, led by deposed president Viktor Yanukovich. The ensuing Russian occupation of parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces further sapped the region’s clout in Kyiv.
In Dnipro, Kolomoisky follows in the footsteps of his onetime patron, former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. The region also produced Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Andrei Chernenko, giving rise to the term “Dnepropetrovsk Mafia.”
A pivot toward Russia makes limited tactical sense for Ukraine, if only to assert its freedom of maneuver to an increasingly unreliable U.S. ally. Similarly, by cultivating Yermak and the Donbas interests he represents, Zelensky may hope to reduce his own perceived dependence on his longtime business partner Kolomoisky.