BuzzFeed reports:

If you were wondering how Vladimir Putin’s “mafia state” was involved in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, look no further than the Ukrainian oligarch wanted by the US.

Dmytro Firtash is usually described as a Ukrainian oligarch with admitted ties to organized crime, but he is much more than that. He has direct ties to Russia, and to President Vladimir Putin in particular, and those have only grown since he was arrested five years ago, awaiting extradition to the United States.

Now Firtash is at the nexus of Trump and Rudy Giuliani’s effort to undermine the president’s enemies — and behind Firtash is a whole lot of Russian money and cover.

The events that spawned the impeachment inquiry have shown how Trump uses his perch in the White House to serve personal goals (in this case pressuring the new Ukrainian president to investigate the 2016 election and events related to the upcoming one in 2020). Giuliani’s shadow investigation to serve those goals intersected perfectly with the interests of people with personal grievances in Ukraine, and with Ukrainian Americans in the US long used to hustling to make a quick buck.

Firtash understands those dynamics as well as anyone. He had long been in the sights of US investigators when he was indicted in 2013, charged with leading an international scheme to bribe Indian officials to win the rights to a mining project there and then sell the goods to a US company, reportedly Boeing. But those details, for the purposes of the impeachment inquiry and for understanding Firtash’s role in the world, don’t actually matter. It’s like getting Al Capone on charges of tax evasion. [Continue reading…]