I’d learned of Beau’s tumor just months before I received a call regarding Burisma from Devon Archer, one of my business colleagues from Rosemont Seneca. Our deal with the biggest potential was a partnership with a Chinese private equity fund seeking to invest Chinese capital in companies outside the country. I was an unpaid advisor in that deal, and to this day have collected no money from the transaction. Yet, like everything else, it has joined the ever-swelling club of Trump’s conspiratorial delusions, from birtherism to QAnon.
In 2013, Dad asked my then-teenage daughter Finnegan to join him on Air Force Two to Japan and then on to Beijing, where he was meeting with President Xi Jinping. Dad often asked his grandkids to accompany him on overseas trips. It was his chance to catch up. I jumped on the plane from Japan to China to spend time with them both. While we were in Beijing, Dad met one of Devon’s Chinese partners, Jonathan Li, in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel, just long enough to say hello and shake hands. I was meeting with Li as a courtesy call while I was in the country; the business deal had been signed more than a week earlier. Li and I then headed off for a cup of coffee.
And that was that—until Trump declared I walked out of China with $1.5 billion. It’s a figure that was plucked from a statement made by a company official at the time who said that was the amount the firm hoped eventually to raise. The actual amount raised before that trip to China: $4.2 million. I had no equity in the company at the time and only bought a 10 percent stake after my father left office.
A couple of months later, Devon was traveling to raise money, domestically and internationally, for his real estate investment fund, a venture I was not a part of. During one such trip to Kyiv, he met Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner and president of Burisma.
The encounter came at a critical moment for modern Ukraine. After President Viktor Yanukovych rejected an EU trade deal in 2013, Ukrainians flooded the main square in the capital city of Kyiv, demanding economic and human rights reforms and an end to the regime’s massively corrupt, Putin-backed kleptocracy. Protests continued for three months, into the brutally cold winter. Government security forces finally stormed the protesters’ encampments and shot into crowds, killing dozens and leaving bodies to bleed out in the streets. Ukrainians burned tires and barricaded themselves against a larger massacre that felt inevitable. It was a full-blown revolution.
Yanukovych fled for the border under the cover of night and turned up in Moscow, where he’s now in exile and wanted in Ukraine for high treason. But there was no time for celebration in Kyiv. A nation still reeling from so much bloodshed and mayhem at the hands of its government now witnessed a brazen military operation carried out by inscrutable “little green men”—masked Russian special forces in unmarked uniforms. They took over military and government sites across Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula soon annexed by Putin. Russian troops then massed along Ukraine’s eastern border, near where many of Burisma’s natural gas fields are located—fields Russia coveted. Zlochevsky and other Ukrainians viewed Putin as a creeping threat to the country and, by extension, to Burisma.
After returning from Kyiv, Devon told me about his talk with Zlochevsky, Ukraine’s former minister of ecology and natural resources, who cofounded Burisma in 2002. Smart, serious, imposing—six feet two inches tall and at least 250 pounds, with a shaved head, booming laugh, and essentially no neck—Zlochevsky was concerned with protecting his company from Putin’s advances.
Toward that end, Zlochevsky wanted to lure more U.S. and European investors, both as a way to grow his business and as a show of solidarity with the West. He saw that solidarity as a bulwark against Russia’s aggression. To enhance those ties, he wanted to ensure that Burisma’s business practices adhered to Western standards of corporate governance and transparency.
That’s a big ask in Ukraine, long in the lower tier of most-corrupt-country rankings.
To help burnish Burisma’s reputation, Zlochevsky was putting together a board of directors that included non-Ukrainians with name recognition and global contacts. His most prominent get was Aleksander Kwasniewski, former president of Poland and a pro-democracy stalwart.
Devon said he had raised my name for a possible board seat—along with his own. Kwasniewski soon reached out to me. He rolled out his firsthand assessment of the threat Russia posed to an immature democracy like Ukraine. He framed Burisma as critical to maintaining the country’s independence.
A compelling orator, Kwasniewski delivered a pitch to me that was impassioned, even poetic. He underscored the importance of the historical moment. The Soviet Union’s chokehold on the region was still recent history for him: Poland and Ukraine were under Soviet control just over two decades earlier. He said the notion that the Iron Curtain couldn’t descend again overnight was a Western fantasy.
“Russia without Ukraine is just Russia,” he explained. “Russia with Ukraine is the Soviet Union.”
He then brought up the recent elections of right-wing populists in Poland, as well as the sprouting of pro-Russia demagogues in once-budding democracies throughout Eastern Europe.
Russia’s push into Ukraine was Putin’s attempt to annex not only land and people, he said, but also the most profound sectors of the country’s economy, with energy being chief among them.
“The only bulwark against that aggression,” Kwasniewski pronounced near the end of his call with me, “is to strengthen the independent, nongovernmental entities that can give Ukraine the chance to blossom.”
It was inspiring. It was consequential.
And, to be honest,
