The Man Who Chased History
In February, when the bombs began falling on Kyiv, I immediately thought of Sergii Leshchenko. He isn’t a friend or colleague exactly, but I feel indebted to him. Over the years, at a series of Kyiv cafés, he has patiently explained the dark corners of Ukrainian politics to me, sharing insights gleaned from his long career as an investigative reporter. In those earliest hours of the war, as I watched CNN correspondents crouching in the parking garages of their hotels, I worried about what might befall him. I sent him a text extending my “solidarity and prayers,” a gesture that, even as I made it, felt inadequate to the moment.
I had first met Leshchenko in May 2014, in the back room of a sleek Kyiv restaurant serving food from the republic of Georgia. A group of journalists, both local and foreign, had assembled, and the mood was ebullient. Three months earlier, a revolution had chased President Viktor Yanukovych, a Russian-backed kleptocrat, from power.
Leshchenko seemed young then: wiry, bespectacled, clad in a button-down shirt, a quiet presence. He had been something of a prodigy; the son of engineers, he had obtained his first press pass when he was 17. In the early years of independence from the Soviet Union, he roamed the corridors of Parliament, gawking at the new titans of the nation’s politics.
He didn’t set out to be an investigative journalist. The vocation was thrust upon him. In 2000, two weeks after he began working for a newspaper, his editor went missing. Two months later, the editor’s corpse was discovered in the forest, decapitated, drenched with chemicals, and charred. Investigating the murder, which was never officially solved but strongly implicated a former president, provided Leshchenko with an advanced education in the hideous tactics of the powerful.
Revealing the corruption of the elite was dangerous but also exhilarating. Perhaps Leshchenko’s greatest subject was Yanukovych’s extravagant lifestyle, especially his ornate palace, built on 340 illegally obtained acres. Among the amenities were a museum for the president’s car collection and a pirate ship anchored in a river that passed through the property. Leshchenko’s stories helped stoke the anger that brought protesters into the streets.
On the night I met him, however, Leshchenko was contemplating a new career. His small circle of reformers shared a growing belief that the moment demanded more than just railing against the rot. Ukraine’s democracy needed builders. With the encouragement of the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, Leshchenko ran for Parliament and won. At age 34, he occupied one of the seats of power that had so dazzled his teenage self.
It never occurred to me that I would see Leshchenko again. Then, in 2016, he made a brief but consequential cameo in American politics. Soon after Donald Trump won the Republican nomination, Leshchenko held a press conference in Kyiv. Waving a sheaf of documents, he revealed the existence of a “black ledger,” which contained notations of furtive payments disbursed by Yanukovych’s party. A few months later, The New York Times reported the presence of Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, in the pages of the ledger. He had apparently received millions in illicit payments from powerful backers of the party. Manafort immediately resigned from the campaign.
I emailed Leshchenko asking if we could meet. On my subsequent reporting trips to Kyiv,
