REUTERS / Phil NobleJust over a week ago, President Donald Trump urged his two closest allies in British politics—Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage and the Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson—to “come together” and attempt to rescue the calamitous Brexit project. Today, he got his wish.Farage, who committed to standing more than 600 candidates in next month’s general election at his campaign launch last week, has handed Johnson a boost by dramatically scaling back his ambitions. The Brexit Party leader announced he will not stand candidates in the 317 seats which were won by the Conservative Party at the 2017 general election.At a press conference on Monday, Farage said his climbdown came after months of trying to create a pro-Brexit alliance with the Conservatives. He said he’d now decided was time to put the Brexit project before his party’s ambitions and to set up a “unilateral Leave alliance.”The Brexit Party leader said he had concluded that, if his party had stood a candidate in every seat in England, Scotland, and Wales, it would split the Brexit vote and hand dozens of seats to the pro-EU parties, preventing the Conservatives from securing a majority.“The Brexit party will not contest the 317 seats the Conservatives won at the last election,” said Farage. “We will concentrate our total effort into all the seats that are held by the Labour party, who have completely broken their manifesto pledge in 2017 to respect the result of the referendum, and we will also take on the rest of the Remainer parties. We will stand up and fight them all.”While Farage’s rollback is welcome news for Johnson, it’s far from a guarantee that he will win the majority of seats he will need to be able to force through his vision of Brexit. By standing in every seat the Conservatives didn’t win in 2017’s election under Theresa May, Farage will still make it very difficult for Johnson to make any gains. May’s 317 seats fell short of a majority, forcing her to make a deal with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party and severely undermining her power.However, Farage appears to believe that his announcement will help keep the pro-Brexit vote from splitting in Conservative seats and prevent them from being lost to pro-EU parties such as the Liberal Democrats, which has advocated for a second EU referendum or unilaterally cancelling the Brexit process with the agreement of European leaders.Farage has been highly critical of the Brexit deal agreed between Johnson and the EU in Brussels last month, and previously said he would only stand aside if the prime minister pledged to abandon the deal.Explaining his change of heart, Farage said: “I have got no great love for the Conservative party at all, but I can see right now that by giving Boris half a chance … and stopping the fanatics in the Liberal Democrats—they even want to revoke the result of the referendum—I think our action, our announcement today prevents a second referendum from happening.”The other parties seized on Farage’s announcement. Even for many Conservatives, Farage’s brand of populist anti-immigration rhetoric is toxic and the scent of some kind of arrangement between him and Johnson could go down badly among swing voters. That appears to be the hope of the Labour Party, which attacked the announcement Monday.Ian Lavery, the Labour Party Chairman, said: “This is a Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson alliance with Donald Trump to sell out our country and send £500 million per week from our NHS to US drugs companies. We urge voters to reject this Thatcherite 1980s tribute act, which would lead to more savage Tory attacks on working class communities.”Anna Soubry, a former Conservative member of parliament who resigned from the party over Brexit and is now standing as a candidate and leader of the pro-EU Independent Group, echoed that statement. She wrote: “It’s official the Conservative Party just became the Brexit Party. One Nation Conservatives will now lend their votes to the Remain Alliance and other moderate centrists.”Johnson appeared pleased by the announcement, telling Sky News shortly afterwards: “I’m glad that there is a recognition, that there’s only one way to get Brexit done.” However, he refused to say whether or not Farage’s climbdown will help his chances in the election.The move was also welcomed by Conservative Party chairman James Cleverly who said he was glad Farage had belatedly recognized the risk of his candidates “preventing a stable majority government.” But he added there was still a “danger” the party could split the vote in target seats, leading to the election of lawmakers who could “frustrate the Brexit process.”Despite Monday’s goodwill gesture, which will undoubtedly help Johnson’s quest for a majority, Farage and his Brexit Party still have the potential to be an electoral barrier that stands in the way of the very thing they claim to value most.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. 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November 11, 2019Read More
Not long before the Ukrainian president was inaugurated in May, an associate of Rudy Giuliani’s journeyed to Kyiv to deliver a warning to the country’s new leadership, a lawyer for the associate said.The associate, Lev Parnas, told a representative of the incoming government that it had to announce an investigation into Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden, and his son, or else Vice President Mike Pence would not attend the swearing-in of the new president, and the United States would freeze aid, the lawyer said.The claim by Parnas, who is preparing to share his account with impeachment investigators, challenges the narrative of events from Trump and Ukrainian officials that is at the core of the congressional inquiry. It also directly links Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, to threats of repercussions made to the Ukrainians, something he has strenuously denied.But Parnas’ account, while potentially significant, is being contradicted on several fronts. None of the people involved dispute that the meeting occurred, but Parnas stands alone in saying the intention was to present an ultimatum to the Ukrainian leadership.Another participant in the meeting, Parnas’ business partner, Igor Fruman, said Parnas’ claim was false; the men never raised the issues of aid or the vice president’s attendance at the inauguration, lawyers for Fruman said.Giuliani denied Parnas’ contention that he had delivered the warning at the direction of Giuliani. “Categorically, I did not tell him to say that,” Giuliani said.The dispute represents the clearest indication yet that Parnas, who was indicted along with Fruman last month on campaign finance charges, has turned on Trump and Giuliani.Parnas and Fruman, both Soviet-born businessmen from Florida, worked with Giuliani for months in Ukraine outside normal diplomatic channels to further Trump’s interests. The men have been subpoenaed to testify before Congress, and Parnas’ lawyer has said his client will comply to the extent he can without incriminating himself. It is unclear if Parnas will ultimately be called to testify.Parnas’ account of the meeting, if corroborated, would reveal the earliest known instance of U.S. aid being tied to demands for Ukraine to take actions that could benefit Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. It would also represent a more extensive threat — to pull Pence from the inaugural delegation — than was previously known.Trump froze nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine shortly before a July 25 call with the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which Trump personally sought investigations into the Bidens and claims that Ukrainians had meddled in the 2016 election. In the call, Trump did not explicitly link the aid and the investigations.Trump has denied a quid pro quo involving aid, and Zelenskiy has said he never felt pressured to pursue an investigation.The meeting in Kyiv in May occurred after Giuliani, with Parnas’ help, had planned a trip there to urge Zelenskiy to pursue the investigations. Giuliani canceled his trip at the last minute, claiming he was being “set up.”Only three people were present at the meeting: Parnas, Fruman and Serhiy Shefir, a member of the inner circle of Zelenskiy, then the Ukrainian president-elect. The sit-down took place at an outdoor cafe in the days before Zelenskiy’s May 20 inauguration, according to a person familiar with the events. The men sipped coffee and spoke in Russian, which is widely spoken in Ukraine, the person said.Parnas’ lawyer, Joseph A. Bondy, said the message to the Ukrainians was given at the direction of Giuliani, whom Parnas believed was acting under Trump’s instruction. Giuliani said he “never authorized such a conversation.”A lawyer for Fruman, John M. Dowd, said his client told him the men were seeking only a meeting with Zelenskiy, the new president. “There was no mention of any terms, military aid or whatever they are talking about it — it’s false,” said Dowd, who represents Fruman along with the lawyer Todd Blanche.In a statement on Friday, Shefir acknowledged meeting with Parnas and Fruman. But he said they had not raised the issue of military aid. Shefir said he briefed the incoming president on the meeting. Shefir was a business partner and longtime friend whom Zelenskiy appointed as his chief adviser on the first day of his presidency.”We did not treat Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman as official representatives, and therefore we did not consider that they could speak on behalf of the U.S. government,” Shefir said. He added that Parnas and Fruman had requested that Zelenskiy meet with Giuliani.Shefir said in his statement that he had told Parnas and Fruman “that we could consider meeting with Mr. Giuliani, but only publicly and officially and only after the inauguration of the newly elected president.”The statement from Shefir, issued in response to an inquiry from The New York Times, did not directly address Parnas’ claims that he had delivered an ultimatum about U.S. aid in general and Pence’s attendance at the inauguration. A representative for Zelenskiy did not respond to a request for further comment.Bondy, Parnas’ lawyer, challenged Shefir’s characterization. “It would simply defy reason,” he said, “for Mr. Shefir to have attended a meeting with Mr. Parnas if he did not believe Mr. Parnas spoke for the president, and also for Mr. Parnas not to have conveyed the president’s message at this meeting.”Pence did not attend the inauguration. His office said in response to questions from The Times that it had told Ukrainian officials on May 13, a week before the swearing-in, that the vice president would not be there.Giuliani is under investigation by Manhattan prosecutors and the FBI over whether he illegally engaged in lobbying for foreign interests in connection with the Ukraine efforts. He has denied any wrongdoing, saying he was working for his client, Trump.That investigation grew out of one into Parnas and Fruman. An indictment unsealed on Oct. 10 accused the men of illegally routing a $325,000 contribution to a political action committee supporting Trump through a shell company and linked them to an effort to recall the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch, who was the subject of criticism from many of Trump’s allies. The men were also charged with funneling campaign contributions from a Russian businessman to other U.S. politicians to influence them in support of a marijuana venture. The two men, and two co-defendants, have pleaded not guilty.The impeachment inquiry was started after a whistleblower complained about the July phone call in which Trump asked Zelenskiy to look into Burisma, a Ukrainian company that gave Biden’s son Hunter a seat on its board and paid him as much as $50,000 a month. Trump suggested to Zelenskiy that Ukraine should contact Giuliani and the United States attorney general, William P. Barr, about the Bidens.With Trump by his side at the United Nations General Assembly in September, Zelenskiy told reporters that his July call with the president had been “normal” and that “nobody pushed me,” adding that he did not want to become entangled in U.S. elections.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
November 11, 2019Read More
ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar — The Russians were hard to miss. They appeared suddenly last year in Madagascar’s traffic-snarled capital, carrying backpacks stuffed with cash and campaign swag decorated with the name of Madagascar’s president.It was one of Russia’s most overt attempts at election interference to date. Working from their headquarters in a resort hotel, the Russians published their own newspaper in the local language and hired students to write fawning articles about the president to help him win another term. Skirting electoral laws, they bought airtime on television stations and blanketed the country with billboards.They paid young people to attend rallies and journalists to cover them. They showed up with armed bodyguards at campaign offices to bribe challengers to drop out of the race to clear their candidate’s path.At Madagascar’s election commission, officials were alarmed.”We all recall what the Russians did in the United States during the election,” said Thierry Rakotonarivo, the commission’s vice president. “We were truly afraid.”Of all the places for Russia to try to swing a presidential election, Madagascar is perhaps one of the least expected. The island nation off the coast of southeastern Africa is thousands of miles from Moscow and has little obvious strategic value for the Kremlin or the global balance of power.But two years after the Russians’ aggressive interference in the United States, here they were, determined to expand their clout and apply their special brand of election meddling to a distant political battleground.The operation was approved by President Vladimir Putin and coordinated by some of the same figures who oversaw the disinformation around the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to dozens of interviews with officials in Madagascar, local operatives hired to take part in the Russian campaign and hundreds of pages of internal documents produced by Russian operatives.The meddling in Madagascar began just a few weeks after Putin sat down with the nation’s president, Hery Rajaonarimampianina, in Moscow last year. The meeting, which has never been reported, also included Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close confidant of Putin who was indicted in the United States for helping to orchestrate Russia’s effort to manipulate the 2016 U.S. election, according to Rajaonarimampianina and another government minister present on the trip to Moscow.Putin has repeatedly denied any official effort to tamper with foreign elections. But his sit-down with Madagascar’s president — Prigozhin by his side — points to his involvement in Russia’s electoral interference in even the smallest, most remote countries.In some vital ways, the Madagascar operation mimicked the one in the United States. There was a disinformation campaign on social media and an attempt to bolster so-called spoiler candidates. The Russians even recruited an apocalyptic cult leader in a strategy to split the opposition vote and sink its chances.”What surprised me is that it was the Russians who came over to my house without me contacting them,” said the cult leader, known as Pastor Mailhol. “They said, ‘If you ever need money, we are going to pay all the expenses.'”But while Russia’s efforts in the United States fit Moscow’s campaign to upend Western democracy and rattle Putin’s geopolitical rivals, the undertaking in Madagascar often seemed to have a much simpler objective: profit.Before the election, a Russian company that local officials and foreign diplomats said is controlled by Prigozhin acquired a major stake in a government-run company that mines chromium, a mineral valued for its use in stainless steel. The acquisition set off protests by workers complaining of unpaid wages, canceled benefits and foreign intrusion into a sector that had been a source of national pride for Madagascar.It repeated a pattern in which Russia has swooped into African nations, hoping to reshape their politics for material gain. In the Central African Republic, a former Russian intelligence officer is the top security adviser to the country’s president, while companies linked to Prigozhin have spread across the nation, snapping up diamonds in both legal and illegal ways, according to government officials, warlords in the diamond trade and registration documents showing Prigozhin’s growing military and commercial footprint.Last year, three Russian journalists were gunned down while investigating his activities there.”Prigozhin had tremendous success in 2016, and he is now the guy everyone is watching,” said Paul Stronski, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He’s got some boots on the ground, people peddling stuff in different countries in Africa. These are countries with authoritarian-style leaders who need a little extra help to win. And in return, he gets access to some of the goodies.”But Russia’s forays abroad have been far from flawless. For all its efforts, the operation in Madagascar missed its mark at first, plagued by a startling incompetence and corruption that undercuts Russia’s image as a master political manipulator.Campaign materials were riddled with grammatical mistakes. Ballpoint pens meant as election giveaways misspelled Rajaonarimampianina’s name. Some operatives appeared to undermine the campaign for their own personal gain, demanding fake receipts with double the actual price of publishing the newspaper so they could pocket the difference.”They paid well, but they were messing around,” said the printing house owner, Lola Rasoamaharo.One person working for the campaign described packets of gold and precious stones piled on the bed in the room of a Russian operative, another sign that the people entrusted with the mission were often more interested in profit than politics.They also chose the wrong candidate. As it became clear that Rajaonarimampianina had little hope of winning, even with their help, Russian operatives pivoted quickly, dumping the incumbent, whom they referred to as “the piano,” and shifting their support to the eventual winner, Andry Rajoelina.”The piano is very weak,” Yaroslav Ignatovsky, a manager of the operation, wrote to a colleague in a text exchange obtained by the Dossier Center, a London-based research organization. “He’ll never make it. But we have to make it somehow.”The maneuver worked. After the Russians pirouetted to help Rajoelina — their former opponent — win the election, Prigozhin’s company was able to negotiate with the new government to keep control of the chromium mining operation, despite the worker protests, and Prigozhin’s political operatives remain stationed in the capital to this day.’Everything Is Possible in Politics’It all started with a secret meeting.News reports described Rajaonarimampianina’s three-day trip to Moscow in March 2018 as mundane: He attended an investment forum, met a foreign ministry official and received an honorary degree from a local university.But at some point, his plans veered from the published itinerary.Slipping away from the press pool, he made his way to the Kremlin. There, in the private office of the Russian president, he met for no more than 30 minutes with Putin and Prigozhin.In an interview, Rajaonarimampianina explained that Prigozhin had set up the meeting and even met him at the airport in Moscow. But he insisted that the presidential election, scheduled for that fall, was not discussed.Others remembered things differently. Harison Randriarimanana, a former agriculture minister who accompanied the president to Moscow, said that after the meeting his boss proudly announced that Putin had agreed to assist with his reelection campaign.”Putin said he wanted to help him,” Randriarimanana recalled the president saying. “He was going to help us with the election.”Just weeks later, local residents were startled by the sudden appearance of Russian operatives in Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital.The operation happened alongside an aggressive push by the Kremlin to revive relations with a number of African countries. For Moscow, Africa had been an important ideological battlefield during the Cold War, and Putin, who makes no secret of his nostalgia for the Soviet Union, views the continent as an important front for combating the West’s global influence.Last month, Putin played host to more than 40 African heads of state, including Madagascar’s, at a summit meeting in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi to showcase Russia’s growing stature as a player in the region and present his country as a partner preferable to the West.”We see how a number of Western governments have resorted to pressuring, bullying and blackmailing the governments of sovereign African countries,” Putin said before the meeting. By contrast, he added, “Our African agenda has a positive, aspirational character.”In recent years, many African leaders have paid visits to the Kremlin seeking lucrative deals with Russia’s giant state-run companies, including for weapons.In dollar terms, Russia is no match for China or the United States, which have tens of billions of dollars worth of economic investment in the continent. But for some leaders in search of a political edge, Russia has developed a handy tool kit, which is where Prigozhin comes in.After being indicted on charges of intervening in the 2016 U.S. election, he has traveled the world, proffering his services. In Africa, he has found a highly receptive market. He and his operatives have been active in nearly a dozen African countries, including Libya, Sudan and Zimbabwe, analysts said.In the interview, Rajaonarimampianina described his meeting with Putin as run-of-the-mill for someone of his stature. During his tenure, he had met with the leaders of China and India and twice visited the White House.But unlike those encounters, the meeting with Putin and Prigozhin was kept secret.Rajaonarimampianina insisted that he took “not one penny from the Russians” for his campaign, although he did not rule out that the Kremlin worked to assist him without his knowledge. “Everything is possible in politics,” he said.He stumbled a bit when shown a letter with his signature written to a Russian political operative named Oleg Vasilyevich Zakhariyash. In the letter, written in French and stamped “Projet Confidentiel,” the president requests the Russian’s help “to resist attempts by international institutions to interfere” in Madagascar’s election. Western diplomats had, in fact, been concerned that the president was trying to delay the vote.”I am convinced,” the president’s letter said, “that certain forces will attempt to call into doubt” the election.Rajaonarimampianina confirmed that the signature on the letter was his and acknowledged meeting Zakhariyash in Madagascar, but he said he did not recall writing the letter.Zakhariyash, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, was later quoted by RIAFAN, a Russian news outlet connected to companies owned by Prigozhin, blaming the United States, Britain and France for interfering in the Madagascar elections.Local residents hired by the Russian operation in Madagascar described Zakhariyash as “the boss.” Likewise, one of the Russian unit’s internal spreadsheets identified him as the “head of department.” He is also one of two authors of a confidential report detailing plans for the Madagascar campaign, including the creation of a “troll factory” to focus on social media, echoing the tactics Prigozhin is accused of unleashing on the United States.The documents — along with text exchanges and emails between Russian operatives — were obtained and analyzed by the Dossier Center, a London-based investigative organization founded by Putin’s longtime nemesis, former oil billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Through interviews with officials, candidates and local operatives in Madagascar, The New York Times independently confirmed much of the information in the documents, which the Dossier Center said were provided by moles working within Prigozhin’s organization.The spreadsheets name more than 30 Russians working in the country before the election, calling them media managers, lawyers, translators and a “counterpropaganda technologist.” People in Madagascar hired by the Russians to work on the campaign verified many of the operatives’ identities.Many of them appear to be from St. Petersburg, where Prigozhin’s so-called troll factory is based. But not all. Several worked for the Russian-backed separatist government in eastern Ukraine. One attracted attention this year when his wife posted a photo of her battered and bruised face on Facebook, accusing her husband of beating her.Few appeared to have much expertise on Madagascar or on Africa at all — and it showed, locals said. They often used a translation application on their phones to communicate and had little understanding of local politics.”They’re always going around with money, they’re always going around with women,” said one Malagasy man who worked with the Russians and feared reprisals. “They just thought it was all very simple in Madagascar. They arrived and that’s it, let’s go. That’s why it all fell apart.”‘A Powerful Country Came to My House’Nearly two decades ago, Andre Christian Dieudonne Mailhol, founder and pastor of the Church of the Apocalypse, said he received a message from God that he would be president of Madagascar one day.He did not predict, however, that three Russians would turn up like Magi on his doorstep 18 years later with an offer to help fulfill that prophecy.”They said that they came here to help me with the presidential election,” he said.The three gathered in his brightly painted living room in 2018, peppering him with questions: “How old are you? Why do you want to run for the presidency?”Mailhol explained God’s plan for him, and they offered him cash, promising to fully fund his campaign.They never fully explained who they were, he said, beyond giving their first names — Andrei, Vladimir and Roman — and never said what they wanted in return. Mailhol didn’t ask.”I just thought, a powerful country came to my house and suggested helping me. Why would I bother them with questions like, ‘Who are you? What are you here for?'” the pastor, 59, recalled. “No other foreign countries came to help me. They were the only ones, so I did not want to ask much. I was OK with that.”The strategy of supporting so-called spoiler candidates is another echo of the 2016 plot to subvert the U.S. election, in which Russian social media bots encouraged support for figures like Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate — as a way, officials said, to draw votes away from Hillary Clinton.Mailhol said his Russian team wrote some of his speeches and paid for campaign posters and television advertising. On one internal spreadsheet, the “Pastor Group” is identified as Andrei Kramar, Vladimir Boyarishchev and Roman Pozdnyakov. Shown photos of the men from Facebook, Mailhol and his assistants confirmed they were the men who worked with his campaign.They made for a curious team. A photo of Boyarishchev posted to a Russian social media site in 2012 shows him shirtless, flexing his biceps and wearing the blue beret of a U.N. peacekeeper. Other social media posts suggest he served in a U.N. mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mailhol said he spoke excellent French, which many educated Malagasy know well.The other two have equally colorful histories. In a Facebook post from a decade ago, Kramar describes himself as a member of Putin’s political party, United Russia, but later he popped up in eastern Ukraine as a functionary in a Kremlin-backed separatist enclave that has been fighting a war against Ukraine since 2014.Ukrainian authorities said the third operative, Pozdnyakov, is also involved with the pro-Kremlin rebels. His wife, once a United Russia member of Parliament, is the head of the separatist government’s election commission.Other presidential candidates in Madagascar gave similar accounts of Russians turning up out of the blue, some with bags of cash.Onja Rasamimanana, who worked for a history professor-turned-candidate named Jean Omer Beriziky, said she coordinated with a Maksim, an Anastasia and a Margo, who was the interpreter. “And then a Grigori showed up,” she said.”They were looking for fresh faces,” she said. “They didn’t explain anything. They didn’t mention anything regarding their motivations.”She said that her candidate, Beriziky, later told her the Russians offered $2 million in campaign funding but ultimately provided less than $500,000.Two Russians also approached a pop megastar running for president, Rasolofondraosolo Zafimahaleo, also known as Dama. Over four meetings, Zafimahaleo said, the Russians tried to pressure him to support a delay in the election so that the incumbent had more time to campaign.”They made big promises,” Zafimahaleo said. “‘If you do what we want you to do, we’ll help your campaign,'” he said they told him. He refused, he said, suspecting that the Russians had come to exploit Madagascar’s natural resources.Only three of the Russian operatives identified by local hires of the campaign responded to requests for comment. All acknowledged visiting Madagascar last year, but only one admitted working as a pollster on behalf of the president.The others said they were simply tourists. Pyotr Korolyov, described as a sociologist on one spreadsheet, spent much of the summer of 2018 and fall hunched over a computer, deep in polling data at La Residence Ankerana, a hotel the Russians used as their headquarters, until he was hospitalized with measles, according to one person who worked with him.In an email exchange, Korolyov confirmed that he had come down with measles but rejected playing a role in a Russian operation. He did defend the idea of one, though.”Russia should influence elections around the world, the same way the United States influences elections,” he wrote. “Sooner or later Russia will return to global politics as a global player,” he added. “And the American establishment will just have to accept that.”‘We Were So Dumb’As the election approached, the Russians grew nervous and frustrated. In one text message, Ignatovsky, who helped oversee the operation, describes Madagascar as a “black hole.” One of his colleagues complains that “everything is ass-backward” and that the “unhappy locals” were impeding the team’s work.But the Russians were setting off alarms, too.An op-ed in a local newspaper warned that after meddling in the United States, Russia had set its sights on Madagascar.”Russia badly wants to make good use of its impressive experience in destabilization” by intervening in Madagascar, the article said. “Vodka will flow like water if they achieve their goal.”Relations with the various candidates Russians were backing began to sour. By September, they had dumped the incumbent, Rajaonarimampianina, deciding he was too unpopular to win, according to internal communications.In the interview in Paris, Rajaonarimampianina said he was aware the Russians were supporting other candidates and became indignant when told of the Russians’ conclusion that he was a losing bet. “How could they know that I will lose the election?” he said.In the first round, he received less than 9% of the vote, finishing a distant third.The Russians shifted their support to Rajoelina, a young former mayor who had been Madagascar’s transitional president after a coup in 2009.In the campaign’s final weeks, Mailhol said, the team of Russians made a request: Drop out of the race and support Rajoelina. He refused.The Russians made the same proposal to the history professor running for president, saying, “‘If you accept this deal, you will have money,'” according to Rasamimanana, the professor’s campaign manager.When the professor refused, she said, the Russians created a fake Facebook page that mimicked his official page and posted an announcement on it that he was supporting Rajoelina.The members of the so-called Pastor Group — Kramar, Pozdnyakov and Boyarishchev — were arrested and deported last year after organizing a protest in front of the French Embassy. They left without fully paying what they owed their local operatives, said Niaina Rakotonjanahary, the pastor’s campaign spokeswoman.”It happened to all of us who worked there,” she said. “We were so dumb.”As in the U.S. election, it is not clear whether the Russians directly colluded with the eventual winner, Rajoelina, or simply operated a parallel campaign to support him. Before switching sides, the Russians had local hires write articles disparaging Rajoelina, according to one of the people who worked for them.”They asked me to write bad things about Andry Rajoelina — that he sold our lands to the Chinese,” said the person, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisals. “During the second round of the presidential election, though, they asked me to write good things about Andry Rajoelina.”Rajoelina declined to comment, but an official from his campaign said that his team was aware of Russian payments to other candidates.In the end, the Russians retained their prize — control over the chromium operation. They now maintain a staff of 30 in the country, including engineers and geologists. The contract gives them a 70% stake in the venture, said Nirina Rakotomanantsoa, managing director of the Malagasy company that owns the remaining share.”The contract is already signed,” he said. “I am thankful the Russians are here.”Not all the Russian operatives appeared satisfied. In a moment of doubt, Yevgeny Kopot, a Prigozhin functionary who appears to play a coordinating role for operations in different African countries, sent a text message to a colleague in Madagascar in January.”Do you think that we’re disgracing our country?” he asked, according to texts obtained by the Dossier Center. “Or devaluing her name?”The colleague told him not to worry. “If you think about it,” she replied, “the whole planet is disgraced. Not the planet, precisely, but humanity.”This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
November 11, 2019Read More
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