Dmytro Firtash - you'll be hearing more about him

If you were wondering how Vladimir Putin’s “mafia state” was involved in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, look no further than the Ukrainian oligarch wanted by the US.

Dmytro Firtash is usually described as a Ukrainian oligarch with admitted ties to organized crime, but he is much more than that. He has direct ties to Russia, and to President Vladimir Putin in particular, and those have only grown since he was arrested five years ago, awaiting extradition to the United States.

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He had long been in the sights of US investigators when he was indicted in 2013, charged with leading an international scheme to bribe Indian officials to win the rights to a mining project there and then sell the goods to a US company, reportedly Boeing. But those details, for the purposes of the impeachment inquiry and for understanding Firtash’s role in the world, don’t actually matter.

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Firtash was arrested in Austria in 2014, and has been fighting extradition to the US ever since. He swiftly posted 125 million euros ($140 million) in bail and promised not to leave the country. The bail was the highest ever paid in Austria — and he got the funds to cover it via a loan from Russian billionaire Vasily Anisimov.

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Why the interest from Russia? As one former US official who closely followed Firtash’s case put it: “He knows where all the bodies are buried.”

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In a State Department cable written in 2008 and publicized in a dump by WikiLeaks, then-ambassador Bill Taylor — who would go on to give explosive testimony in the impeachment inquiry this week — wrote up a meeting with Firtash and said, “he acknowledged ties to Russian organized crime figure Seymon Mogilevich, stating he needed Mogilevich’s approval to get into business in the first place.” Mogilevich, one of Russia’s most powerful organized crime figures and listed as most wanted by the FBI, lives freely in Moscow, under cover of the Kremlin.

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“He’s a power broker with close links to the Kremlin, who used to be the proxy to one of the most dangerous criminals in the world, who is interested to keep Ukraine closer to Russia,” said Daria Kaleniuk, the head of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, a leading NGO in Kyiv. “The people whom he represents — those people in the Kremlin — are very much trying to block his extradition to the US, as he’s still needed as a proxy to manage some important assets.”

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[Firtash] fired his longtime lawyer Lanny Davis, because he represented Trump’s (now remorseful) former lawyer Michael Cohen, and replaced him with two lawyers close to the president and Giuliani, Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing. That hire, according to the Washington Post, was suggested by Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, who has pleaded not guilty to four counts of campaign finance violations.

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To cap it all off, Firtash this summer also hired Mark Corallo, who acted as spokesperson for Trump’s private defense team during the Mueller investigation.

Meanwhile, Parnas and Fruman were pushing for leadership changes at the Ukrainian gas company Naftogaz, to which Firtash still owes a massive debt. Outgoing Energy Secretary Rick Perry was pushing for a leadership shake-up there as well.

These connections make sense when you consider Firtash’s, and the Kremlin’s, ultimate goal — to prevent his extradition to the US, and some retention of his wealth and power.

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“What the Ukrainians are better than the American at is connecting the dots, because Americans say, look, for me to connect the dots, I need a call from that guy to that guy. It doesn't work that way,” a second former US official said. “It's all very behind the scenes, very few written communications, a lot of phone calls, a lot of get on a plane and fly out for a 20 minute meeting and fly back home. Come to Vienna, we'll have dinner, things like that,” the former official said. “You have to think like they do and not like we do.”

  Buzzfeed

And Rudy was planning on meeting Parnas and Fruman in Vienna when the latter two were arrested at the airport.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.