Media: The idea of renaming Ukrainian 'Party of Regions' to 'Opposition Bloc' belonged to Manafort
President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman and Political Advisor to the Party of Regions Paul Manafort continued to cooperate with the representatives of Party of Regions even after the former Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, fled Ukraine, Novoye Vremya news outlet reports. The edition adds that according to Bloomberg, Manafort made 17 trips to Ukraine in 2014 and 2015.
The agency’s sources clarified that Manafort returned to Ukraine just a few months after Yanukovych had fled to Russia and Russia had annexed the Crimea. It was Manafort himself who advised rebranding “Party of Regions" to "Opposition Bloc," a universal party that could become the voice of the Russians in the East of Ukraine, the media noted.
Manafort helped the former representatives of Party of Regions in the parliamentary elections in October 2014 and in the local elections in 2015. According to Nestor Shufrych, an Opposition Bloc MP, the party paid Manafort about a million dollars for his consultations during the elections in October 2014.
Bloomberg notes that Manafort stopped consulting the representatives of the Opposition Bloc six months before he started working in Trump's campaign office. He spent at least a month in Ukraine before the local elections in October 2015. A source familiar with the situation revealed that Manafort did not receive full payment for his work.