{"id":11725,"date":"2023-11-17T02:54:02","date_gmt":"2023-11-17T02:54:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/17\/ukraine-implicates-3-giuliani-allies-in-plot-to-help-russia-meddle-in-2020-us-election\/"},"modified":"2023-11-17T02:54:02","modified_gmt":"2023-11-17T02:54:02","slug":"ukraine-implicates-3-giuliani-allies-in-plot-to-help-russia-meddle-in-2020-us-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/17\/ukraine-implicates-3-giuliani-allies-in-plot-to-help-russia-meddle-in-2020-us-election\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine implicates 3 Giuliani allies in plot to help Russia meddle in 2020 US election"},"content":{"rendered":"

A sitting Ukrainian lawmaker who helped Rudy Giuliani\u00a0<\/strong>smear Joe Biden during the 2020 US presidential campaign has been jailed on suspicion of treason, Ukraine\u2019s State Bureau of Investigation announced Tuesday, in a statement accusing him\u00a0of carrying out a Russian disinformation operation. <\/p>\n

The statement did not name the lawmaker, but a source with the Security Service of Ukraine\u00a0(SBU)\u00a0confirmed it was investigating\u00a0Member of Parliament\u00a0Oleksandr Dubinsky on suspicion of treason. The statement said the lawmaker \u201ccarried out information-subversive activities in favor of the Russian Federation\u201d intended to destabilize and discredit Ukraine. <\/p>\n

The SBU has also implicated two former Ukrainian officials in the pro-Russia scheme: ex-lawmaker Andrii Derkach and former prosecutor Kostiantyn Kulyk, who coordinated closely with Giuliani and other allies of former President Donald Trump to peddle false information about Biden and his family\u2019s dealings in Ukraine during the 2020 campaign. <\/p>\n

The US government previously sanctioned Dubinsky, Derkach and Kulyk, accusing them of being affiliated with a \u201cRussia-linked foreign influence network\u201d that tried to interfere in the 2020 election in favor of Trump and to undermine Biden. That\u00a0sanctions announcement\u00a0came during the final weeks of the Trump administration. <\/p>\n

When Giuliani went to Ukraine in 2019 to\u00a0try to\u00a0dig up dirt on then-candidate Biden and his son Hunter Biden, Dubinsky was one of the people he met with. Giuliani has also met with Derkach, who was\u00a0featured prominently\u00a0in a conspiracy-tinged documentary released by the right-wing network OAN about the Biden family\u2019s dealings in Ukraine. <\/p>\n

For his part, Kulyk\u00a0wrote a dossier of disinformation\u00a0about the Bidens, including claims about Hunter Biden\u2019s role on the board of Burisma, a major Ukrainian energy company. Kulyk also gave interviews to pro-Trump journalists and hired former Trump lawyers to help him spread his message to\u00a0US\u00a0officials during Trump\u2019s first impeachment. <\/p>\n

Their activities dovetailed with Trump\u2019s impeachment pushback. Trump embraced their claims, despite concerns that they were working for Moscow. With House Republicans now considering impeaching Biden, some of the\u00a0GOP claims against him\u00a0can be traced back to the smears promoted by the three Ukrainian officials now accused of treason. <\/p>\n

The SBU\u00a0said\u00a0on Telegram that\u00a0Derkach fled Ukraine on the eve of Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion last year, and that Kulyk is in hiding, outside of the country. Neither has been arrested. <\/p>\n

Anti-Biden information operations<\/h2>\n

Taken together, these developments add to existing allegations\u00a0that\u00a0Trump\u2019s inner circle worked with accused Russian operatives to smear Biden, his 2020 opponent. The US and Ukrainian governments have now both said\u00a0these\u00a0three Ukrainian officials participated in the Kremlin\u2019s efforts to interfere with the 2020 US election. <\/p>\n

The SBU on Monday released a video of testimony from Igor Kolesnikov, a former parliamentary aide who has been convicted of treason, saying that he managed a Russian intelligence operation overseen by the GRU (Russian military intelligence) that included Dubinsky and others aimed at undermining Ukraine\u2019s relations with its allies. <\/p>\n

In\u00a0the video, Kolesnikov says he met a top GRU official in Moscow in 2019 and was directed to \u201cimplement a set of information operations as press conferences, six in total, aimed at discrediting the current government, undermining Ukraine\u2019s relations with strategic partners.\u201d <\/p>\n

Dubinsky and Derkach later held a series of\u00a0news\u00a0conferences that amplified false narratives about corruption by the Biden family in Ukraine. They also promoted the untrue conspiracy theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 US presidential election to undermine Trump, contrasting with the reality that Russia meddled to help Trump win. <\/p>\n

In his statement released by the SBU, Kolesnikov said he reported back to his Russian handlers after each\u00a0news\u00a0conference and they \u201cused their resources to maximize the dissemination of the press conference materials in the media and on the Internet.\u201d <\/p>\n

This included translating the\u00a0news\u00a0conferences for foreign audiences. And the efforts to spread the material in the US paid off: In August 2020,\u00a0Trump retweeted a post\u00a0containing\u00a0a propaganda\u00a0audiotape released by Derkach as part of the effort to denigrate Biden. <\/p>\n

In a statement on Telegram, Dubinsky denied the allegations and claimed the charges were politically motivated. Dubinsky accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his chief of staff Andriy Yermak of being responsible for a campaign to silence him. <\/p>\n

\u201cI am convinced that Yermak-Zelensky\u2019s chaotic attempts to put me under arrest and ban me from running social networks are connected not only with my criticism of the president and his entourage, but also with the desire to prevent this information from reaching foreign media,\u201d Dubinsky said. <\/p>\n

Derkach has previously denied working for the Kremlin.\u00a0Kulyk has not commented publicly about the allegations. <\/p>\n\n

This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A sitting Ukrainian lawmaker who helped Rudy Giuliani\u00a0smear Joe Biden during the 2020 US presidential campaign has been jailed on suspicion of treason, Ukraine\u2019s State Bureau of Investigation announced Tuesday, in a statement accusing him\u00a0of carrying out a Russian disinformation operation. The statement did not name the lawmaker, but a source with the Security Service <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11726,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11725","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}