Bankova St.’s new American stake

With US President-Elect Donald Trump’s inauguration just weeks away, the Presidential Administration of Ukraine has hired BGR Group, an American PR firm, to lobby the interests of our country in the US. This was reported on January 6 by The Hill, a portal that is read in the White House and is very popular among lawmakers. The publication notes that the predominantly Republican lobbying firm – run by GOP operatives, including former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, Lanny Griffith, and Ed Rogers – inked the contract with Ukraine on December 23, according to forms recently filed with the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) Unit of the Justice Department. “BGR Group submitted the relevant information to the FARA unit on January 1, 2017. The client’s listed address is ‘11 Bankova St., Kyiv, Ukraine.’ The company’s goal is to strengthen US-Ukraine relations and to encourage American entrepreneurs to invest in Ukraine,” Deutsche Welle reports.

Besides, Barbour and BGR Group will be working for Ukraine “to design and implement a comprehensive government affairs and business development strategy to support the ... goals of strengthening US-Ukrainian relations and increasing US business investment in Ukraine,” The Hill says. This includes, among other things, the organization of meetings with US officials. The FARA Unit claims that the one-year contract is worth 600,000 dollars.

Barbour, who co-founded BGR in 1991, headed the Republican Party’s National Committee in 1993-97. He intensified lobbying after his gubernatorial tenure in 2004 to 2012.

Barbour and BGR have also worked for other foreign governments, including those of India, South Korea, and Bangladesh. Among Barbour’s corporate clients are Airbus, Caterpillar, Chevron, Huntington Ingalls, and Toyota Motor Corp.

The Hill also reports that, in addition to powerbrokers Barbour and Rogers, Lester Munson, the vice president of the firm’s international practice, and Maya Seiden, a senior State Department aide during the tenure of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, will also take part in lobbying Ukraine’s interests in the US.

Prior to joining BGR Group in November 2015, Munson served as staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.).

The Hill claims that APCO Worldwide was hired in 2015 to help with media relations for then-Prime Minister Arsenii Yatseniuk, but the contract was terminated when a new prime minister, Volodymyr Hroisman, was appointed last April.

As is known, US media reported earlier that Viktor Pinchuk had taken part in funding Hillary Clinton’s election campaign. Moreover, the Ukrainian oligarch displayed in every possible way his favor for this very candidate, inviting the Clintons to his YES forums. Unfortunately, the West has often regarded this “handiwork” of Pinchuk, ex-president Leonid Kuchma’s son-in-law, as not a personal position but as the state’s foreign policy vector. After all, even President Petro Poroshenko failed to meet Donald Trump, who later won the elections, during a visit to the US, but he met Hillary Clinton with the help of Pinchuk, as some media claimed. As the Ukrainian leadership obviously miscalculated in the US elections, in fact entrusting this matter to the Kuchma-Pinchuk clan only and expecting Hillary Clinton to be the next president, this raises the question if the hired PR firm will really help Kyiv to have its interests lobbied at the Trump administration and what Ukraine itself should do to make the new White House occupier support it in its confrontation with Russia.

 COMMENTARIES

John HERBST, Director, Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center, Atlantic Council, Washington, D.C.:

“Senior Ukrainian politicians have often fired lobbyists to advance their interests in Washington. In the past it has done little good. This time might be different, given the unusual circumstances of the Trump Administration. But it is not clear that BGR has good ties with the incoming Administration.

“The most important thing that Ukraine can do is to demonstrate a clear commitment to reform, which will disarm apologists for the Kremlin who say that corruption in Ukraine makes it a dubious asset. The government in Kyiv should also show the necessary flexibility on autonomy and local elections to make clear that Moscow is the reason why the Minsk process is not working well. Ukraine can show such flexibility without making concessions that would strengthen Moscow’s hold on the occupied territories.”

Mykola KAPITONENKO, expert, Institute of Socioeconomic Studies, Kyiv:

“I think a budget lobbying company is not what can profoundly influence the defense of Ukraine’s interests in the US. We have lost almost three years, indulging in meaningless rhetoric and building castles in the air. As a result, we turned out to be totally unprepared for a new reality in the person of Donald Trump in the White House. If this kind of miscalculations could be repaired for 50,000 dollars a month, there would be no need of foreign policy at all. The only way to get support from the new US president is pragmatism in promoting our interests, as deep knowledge of the partner’s interests as possible, and a clear understanding of the achievable limit – in other words, what Ukrainian foreign policy traditionally lacks. America needs a viable and efficient Ukraine that pursues a consistent and predictable policy. After all, we also need a Ukraine like this. Nobody else will do our work, and a weak, corrupt, and poor Ukraine is an ‘asset’ that is very easy to drop.

“We have achieved nothing, calling on the Obama administration for justice and sympathy, and the result will not be better when Trump assumes office. There are fewer and fewer options that we can offer to Washington, and it is increasingly difficult to ‘trade’ in them, especially compared to nuclear weapons or enriched uranium. Still, we have some.

“US strategic interests lie in promoting nuclear nonproliferation and stemming the tide of international terrorism. Moscow will offer them all this in exchange for Ukraine. We can offer a different look at the situation – the collapse of non-nuclear Ukraine’s security will mean a crisis of nonproliferation. Should the Kremlin’s policy succeed in the final analysis, the value of brute force and, moreover, nuclear weapons will grow. A horizontal proliferation will become a matter of time, while the US is interested in the long-term restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. It is also possible to broaden the interpretation of terrorism which results after all from the weakness of present-day states. Ukraine’s transformation into a European Somalia is unlikely to contribute to global stability. We should offer Washington a viable, concrete, and inexpensive plan of strengthening Ukrainian security and statehood. Otherwise, the US will be given a plan of destroying this country.”