18 May 2017 9:56 pm
One of the contacts was a guy named Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch and politician.Misty » 18 May 2017 6:48 pm » wrote:
Medvedchuck is a close personal friend of Putin.
So close that Putin is godfather to Medvedchuk’s daughter.
He also acts Putin's personal representative in Ukraine.
Why would anyone from 45's campaign be talking to this guy?
Mr. Medvedchuk, who was the longtime chief of staff to former President Leonid D. Kuchma, is a polarizing figure in Ukraine, known for his ruthlessness in politics and for his checkered past as a young lawyer in the Soviet Union.
His role in a Soviet crackdown on dissidents ahead of the 1980 Olympics is widely believed to have contributed to the death of a Ukrainian poet and human rights activist, Vasyl Stus.
Mr. Stus, exercising one of his few rights as a dissident defendant, tried to refuse representation by Mr. Medvedchuk, his state-appointed lawyer.
Mr. Medvedchuk, however, insisted on speaking at the trial anyway, declaring his client guilty and saying he deserved to be punished.
Five years later, Mr. Stus, who had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, died at the age of 47 in a forced labor camp in Russia.
“He acted more like a prosecutor than a defense lawyer,” Yevhen Sverstiuk, an essayist and author who knew Mr. Stus, said in an interview last year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/worl ... .html?_r=0