Section: POLITICO – Europe Edition (EU)
Mueller probes Ukrainian who pitched peace plan to White House
KIEV — Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has been meeting over the last year with a Ukrainian lawmaker at the center of a controversial plan to end his country’s conflict with Russia, pressing him for details about interactions with Trump administration officials. Andrii Artemenko told POLITICO that FBI agents had peppered him...
Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline should not be built
WARSAW — The Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a bad deal for the European Union and a bad deal for Ukraine, and it should not go ahead. The EU’s focus should be on the desirability of the project, but the recent debate is much more about accommodating the controversial pipeline running from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Talk is now...
Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline should not be built
WARSAW — The Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a bad deal for the European Union and a bad deal for Ukraine, and it should not go ahead. The EU’s focus should be on the desirability of the project, but the recent debate is much more about accommodating the controversial pipeline running from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Talk is now...
David Davis open to ‘association agreement’ with EU after Brexit
LONDON — British Brexit Secretary David Davis said he has “no intrinsic objection” to the U.K. entering into a so-called association agreement with the EU after Brexit. Speaking to the House of Lords’ European Union committee on Tuesday, Davis said a proposal from the European Parliament for such a post-Brexit arrangement may have merit...
Ukraine’s invisible scars
DRUZHKIVKA, Ukraine — Volodymyr Semistyaga was wading through documents in the archives of Luhansk University when the stomp of boots interrupted his reading. A group of pro-Russian separatists knocked him down, pulled a sack over his head and dragged him from the building. It was June 2014 and fighting between Ukrainian government forces and...
Mueller prosecutors defend money laundering charge against Manafort
Prosecutors for special counsel Robert Mueller are urging a federal judge to turn down former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s argument that a money laundering charge he faces is flawed because the activity that generated the funds — lobbying for a foreign government — is not illegal. Manafort is accused of laundering more than $30...
Inside the lobbying campaign that caught Mueller’s attention
The lobbyists hired by Paul Manafort launched a lobbying blitz barely a week after the Senate began weighing a resolution to publicly condemn the man who was effectively their client, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, for throwing a political opponent in jail. A lobbyist for one prominent Washington firm, the Podesta Group, emailed the staff...
London and Brussels warm to Brexit ‘Israel option’
If Canada doesn’t work out, there’s always Israel. So far, debate on the model for the U.K.’s future relationship with the EU post Brexit has focussed on two options — remaining close to the bloc and within the single market like Norway or agreeing a free trade deal, like a souped-up version of the one the EU has with Canada....
How Ukraine became the Wild East of cryptocurrencies
KIEV — Welcome to Europe’s Wild East. Forty-year-old Pavel Lerner, the CEO of Exmo Finance, a popular bitcoin exchange, was leaving his office on the day after Christmas when he was accosted and dragged into a black Mercedes-Benz by armed men in balaclavas. The leading Russian blockchain expert was released 48 hours later after paying a...
New charges filed in Manafort-Gates case
New charges have been filed in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s criminal case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and aide Rick Gates, but the charges were put under seal by the court, obscuring the nature and import of the development. The new charging document filed in federal court in Washington could be a superseding...
