It is a huge irony of U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into alleged collusion between U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 election campaign and the Kremlin, that the biggest fish caught to date is charged with the doing the opposite of colluding with Russia: Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, has pled guilty to charges of (undeclared) lobbying for Ukraine in 2012-2013 to sign a political and trade association agreement with the European Union that would rescue it once and for all from the Kremlin’s grasp.

Not that you would be aware of this from the media coverage around the trials of Manafort (he has already stood trial and been found guilty of tax fraud in Virginia in August). Among the huge amount of noise about Manafort, the basic facts about his activity in Ukraine 2010-2015 have been obscured.

There have been scores of media articles about Manafort – and 90 percent regurgitate the simplistic narrative of Manafort as a Kremlin trojan horse. This narrative was developed by Washington commercial intelligence firm Fusion GPS in 2016, as part of their now famous dossier on Trump, distributed widely among major media outlets.

As a contributor to the Fusion GPS research on Manafort, I share the blame. Because we got Manafort almost completely wrong.

What we got wrong about Manafort – and what Mueller has got partly right in his indictment – is that Manafort was nothing like a pro-Kremlin influence on the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, as the dossier alleged. Instead, Manafort was one of the driving forces pushing Yanukovych towards signing the agreement with the EU. The Kremlin has every reason to hate him.

An army of armchair experts pronounces on Manafort’s ‘pro-Russian’ role in Ukraine – with a copy of the Fusion GPS report close to hand. None of them ask why the supposedly “pro-Russian: Yanukovych had taken Ukraine to the verge of signing a far-reaching agreement with the EU in November 2013 – an association agreement that would see Ukraine removed from the fateful Russian orbit for good?

The road to Vilnius

Largely thanks to Manafort, in November 2013, Ukraine was one step away from signing the historic Association Agreement at the summit of the EU’s Eastern Partnership held in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius.

Manafort’s ally in the pro-EU push was the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff Serhiy Lovochkin. According to Yanukovych confidante Nestor Shufrich, former deputy head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, the pro-EU course had been “Lovochkin’s and Manafort’s game, it was them who foisted the idea on Yanukovych that it was achievable.” Former Poland President Aleksandr Kwasnwiewski has also confirmed that Lovochkin and Manafort together comprised the pro-EU heart of the Yanukovych administration.

Manafort was amazingly successful in bringing Ukraine into the Western fold. After the jailing by Yanukovych of opposition leader and ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko in 2011, it seemed any attempt by Ukraine to pursue closer ties with the West were dead in the water. But only two years later, Kyiv was a step away from signing the association agreement with Brussels that would create a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area between EU and Ukraine.

But any mention that Manafort was a driving force behind Ukraine’s move to sign up with the EU instead of with Russia – a key part of the Mueller indictment – was missing from the Fusion GPS dossier, and as a result, has been missing from most mainstream media coverage.

This does not mean Manafort was a good guy: He had lots of reasons to be pro-EU, and all of them had a dollar sign. He received $42mn payments received for his pro-EU lobbying from Lyovochkin, according to his former employee Rick Gates’s testimony at the first trial in August. This was twice as much as Manafort received from all other Ukrainian sources taken together. Lyovochkin denies the payments.

Manafort’s relationship to Lovochkin explains why he never pushed Yanukovych to do the most obvious thing to clinch the deal with the EU – to release opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko from jail: Lovochkin was not just a government official, but also the junior partner in business of notorious gas oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Firtash and Tymoshenko were sworn enemies. Yanukovych had jailed Tymoshenko in 2011 for having destroyed Firtash’s gas trading business during her time as prime minister.

Manafort’s pitch to the EU was that EU should sign the agreement with Ukraine despite Tymoshenko’s jailing. According to Mueller’s indictment, Manafort retained a raft of EU eminence grises arguing the same, while also paying a U.S. law firm to argue that the Tymoshenko conviction was legitimate.

Largely due to Manafort’s lobbying effort by November 2013, the EU had caved in, giving Ukraine the all-clear to sign the agreement in November. It was only Yanukovych’s cravenness in the face of Kremlin fury that prevented Ukraine signing in 2013.

Manafort for all seasons

Manafort’s pro-EU role 2012-2013 accounts for his Ukrainian career continuing uninterrupted into the post-Yanukovych years – and even his helping set up a new pro-EU government in Kyiv in 2014.

These activities were also omitted by the Fusion GPS dossier.

Manafort’s role in the post-Maidan settlement in 2014 was a key revelation of the Gates testimony in August. The prosecution produced documents showing Manafort to have consulted both boxer-turned-politician Vitali Klitschko and chocolate king Petro Poroshenko in May 2014 as they campaigned for the respective posts of mayor of Kyiv and president of Ukraine. Both men won. (They now deny having hired Manafort for their campaigns).

Manafort may have been more than mere consultant to the new powers in Kyiv. Flight records show that Manafort was in Vienna on March 25, 2014. This was the date of a crucial “kingmaker” meeting in Vienna between Lyovochkin, Firtash, Poroshenko and Klichko, where it was decided that Klichko would not run for president against Poroshenko, effectively crowning Poroshenko.

Indeed far from being persona non-grata following Yanukovych’s ouster, during the post-revolution election campaigns in April and May 2014, Manafort spent a total of 27 days in Kyiv.

And his last engagement in Ukraine were the regional elections of late October 2015, this time working for Lyovochkin’s new puppet opposition party. He stayed in Ukraine four weeks in the run-up to the vote – only months before signing on for Trump.

Manafort’s Euromaidan?

The biggest unanswered question regarding Manafort is not – was he a Kremlin agent, but: just how far did Manafort and Lyovochkin go in trying to push Yanukovych back towards the EU, after he backed out of the EU agreement in late November 2013 under Kremlin pressure? What was their relationship to the pro-EU protests that broke out and the police violence in response?

According to a cryptic messaging exchange between Manafort’s daughters, which was hacked in 2016, it was none other than the arch spin doctor who hatched a plan to “to send those people [protestors] out and get them slaughtered.” “Do you know whose strategy that was to cause that Revolts and what not […] As a tactic to outrage the world and get focus on Ukraine.” Manafort’s millions for Ukraine lobbying were called “blood money”.

According to the daughters, for secrecy Manafort and his co-conspirators wrote the messages in the drafts of a shared email account – and Mueller has not found it.

Those messages seen by Manafort’s family may confirm other high-level allegations that Lyovochkin and his team were behind the wantonly violent – and highly televised – dispersal by riot police of a small picket of pro-EU students protests on the night of November 29. The aim: to “outrage the world” and thus generate political pressure on Yanukovych to stay with the West.

“Lyovochkin was the author of the dispersal of the [students’] Maidan and should be in prison, not in parliament,” Ukraine’s interior minister Arsen Avakov said on its third anniversary in 2016. But Ukrainian prosecutors have ignored the allegations, and Lyovochkin himself fiercely denies any involvement.

This sudden outbreak of police violence triggered Ukraine – and spiraled into the mass demos of the Euromaidan two days later, and ultimately the shooting of scores of demonstrators on February 22, 2014, and the flight of Yanukovych

Was Manafort’s real crime not pushing Yanukovych into the Kremlin’s embrace, but staging violence against demonstrators to achieve the opposite – a ruse that then spiraled out of control? Was this what the Manafort daughters were referring to in their texts? This is one of the secrets that Mueller has not asked about – and nor did the misguided Fusion GPS dossier.