(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The Mariupol Plan [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2022-11-03 The Mariupol Plan could as easily have been a Robert Ludlum thriller — and appears likely to be fast tracked by Aaron Sorkin, Oliver Stone or David Fincher into a motion picture or better still, a limited TV series. A richly detailed script outline compiled and written by Jim Rutenberg appeared yesterday (11/02/22) in the NY Times www.nytimes.com/... in a piece he titled ‘The Untold Story of ‘Russiagate’ and the Road to War in Ukraine’. Sadly, based on the number of comments, the long story didn’t get the attention from readers it deserved. The Mariupol Plan is a gripping tale of political intrigue, blind ambition, greed, conspiracy, social engineering and corruption leading eventually to Putin’s war of territorial aggression in Ukraine. A story ripped from the headlines that features a crowded cast of complex and compelling characters, some familiar and others less well known including — a defeated presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the feckless power broker and political fixer Paul Manafort, dirty trickster Roger Stone, the inscrutable oligarch Vladimir Putin, the Russian spy Konstantin Kilimnik, the loose lipped George Papadopoulos, the drunken fool Rudy Giuliani, and of course the oh so vain useful idiot, Donald Trump. The film or TV adaptation of this story should be straightforward. As a film or TV series The Mariupol Plan would surely garner more attention than Rutenberg’s piece did in yesterday’s NYT. You could wait for the movie, which is sure to be made because it promises to be both entertaining and informative, but I recommend investing 30 minutes in reading the article www.nytimes.com/… Fair warning, due to the length and complexity of the story, this is not an easy read - but if you make the effort I believe you will find it worthwhile. The movie should open with a TV broadcast from July 28th 2016 showing a smiling and ebullient Hillary Clinton on stage in Philadelphia accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. Ninety-five years after American women were granted the right to vote in presidential elections, Clinton is dressed in a smart white suit paying homage to suffragists who struggled to make her candidacy possible. She is poised perhaps to become the 45th president of the United States and as she thanks Chelsea and Bill and her many supporters, the camera pulls back. The historic scene in Philadelphia is being watched on TV in a darkened room 7 time zones away. All we can see is that the TV is being watched in a dark room by a man with a close cropped graying balding head. The viewer remains unsure who that might be. Shortly into Clinton’s acceptance speech, he mutes the TV and picks up a phone. Thumbs through the contacts and and initiates a call. A groggy Konstantin Kilminik, woken in the pre-dawn picks up in Kyiv. The conversation in Russian is short and one sided. The Mariupol Plan is threatened should Hillary Clinton be elected president. In the ensuing scene, Kliminik immediately calls his putative boss Paul Manafort in New York and lets him know that a client has a new project for them. A meeting is set and five days later, in the Grand Havana Room, the cigar lounge atop the Kushner family’s office tower at 666 Fifth Ave., Manafort and Kliminik met to discuss strategy for keeping Putin’s Mariupol Plan in play. If I were making the film, that’s how it would begin, but I’ll leave the rest to the screenwriters, storyboard artists and filmmakers. Here is how Jim Rutenberg tells part of the story of Vladimir Putin’s ambition for territorial expansion in eastern Ukraine and why it was so important to him that Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton became the 45th US president. the Mariupol plan, after the strategically vital port city, … called for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded and -directed “separatists” were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead. The new republic’s leader would be none other than Yanukovych. The trade-off: “peace” for a broken and subservient Ukraine. The scheme cut against decades of American policy promoting a free and united Ukraine, and a President Clinton would no doubt maintain, or perhaps even harden, that stance. But Trump was already suggesting that he would upend the diplomatic status quo; if elected, Kilimnik believed, Trump could help make the Mariupol plan a reality. First, though, he would have to win, an unlikely proposition at best. Which brought the men to the second prong of their agenda that evening — internal campaign polling data tracing a path through battleground states to victory. Manafort’s sharing of that information — the “eyes only” code guiding Trump’s strategy — would have been unremarkable if not for one important piece of Kilimnik’s biography: He was not simply a colleague; he was, U.S. officials would later assert, a Russian agent. Their business concluded, the men left by separate routes to avoid detection, though they continued to text deep into the night, according to federal investigators. In the weeks that followed, operatives in Moscow and St. Petersburg would intensify their hacking and disinformation campaign to damage Clinton and help turn the election toward Trump, which would form the core of the scandal known as Russiagate. The Mariupol plan would become a footnote, all but forgotten. But what the plan offered on paper is essentially what Putin — on the dangerous defensive after a raft of strategic miscalculations and mounting battlefield losses — is now trying to seize through sham referendums and illegal annexation. www.nytimes.com/... Putin has yet to succeed in achieving the aims of the Mariupol Plan by means of military force, but he may yet accomplish them through economic blackmail, appeasement and capitulation. Voices mainly on the Right — but also on the Left www.pbs.org/... have called for a ‘peace’ settlement in Ukraine — exchanging territory in the east for cessation of hostilities and a promise of lasting peace. Some of those appeals are couched in a veil of humanitarian concern for the Ukrainian people, who are terrorized daily by artillery barrages, drone strikes and cruise missile attacks on civilian targets and critical infrastructure including power plants and water supply facilities. Others have shown concern for the economic cost the war has imposed on the wider world including inflation, higher fuel prices and the potential for broader famine in places dependent on grain and fertilizer exports from Russia and Ukraine. Other calls for a peace settlement come from those in western Europe worried about natural gas supplies and destabilizing effects of Ukrainian refugees who are likely to flee the widening war zone as winter arrives and electricity and destroyed infrastructure make daily life more difficult. History suggests that appeasing tyrants like Putin can be catastrophic en.wikipedia.org/.... But the lessons of history are easily forgotten. Just how costly that may be could become clear quiet soon if Republican's gain control of congress following the mid-term elections and then make good on threats to withdraw or limit US military and economic support that Ukraine needs to successfully resist Putin’s military aggression www.cnn.com/... . One way or another Putin may still accomplish the goals of The Mariupol Plan. In the process he has demonstrated just how fragile democracies are and in the social media age, how easily broad swaths of voters can be manipulated to serve his ends. You could just wait for the the movie — but when the film or TV version of these events does eventually air, you may appreciate it more if you’ve first read the article. For those who do read Rutenberg’s article, consider whether the richness and complexity and importance of this story would be possible without professional journalists like Jim Rutenberg and news organizations like the NT Times who employ them and make their work possible. I am a NYT subscriber to support work like this. At turns I am disappointed and dismayed by some of the things I read in the Times, but not this time. The NYT reported this week that their digital subscriptions are up 180,000 www.nytimes.com/...— so in the near term there is some hope for more pieces like this one, but I fear a future in which oligarchs grow ever richer and their grip on information and disinformation makes stories like this less likely. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/3/2133106/-The-Mariupol-Plan Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/