By Bradley Devlin, The American Conservative, 1/25/22

As tensions continue to escalate between Russia and Ukraine, the Ukrainian government’s actors in Washington have kicked their influence efforts into overdrive.

New analysis from the Quincy Institute’s Ben Freeman found the Ukrainian government hired just under a dozen firms registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), shelling out about $2 million last year to firms who lobbied on their behalf. Freeman described the Ukrainian lobby as “small but mighty” in a phone interview with The American Conservative, and said their efforts to influence Washington and America’s political apparatus are intense relative to their modest budget.

While Ukraine’s lobbyists have primarily focused on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline given Russia’s buildup along the Ukrainian borders, they have also spent time on Ukrainian security issues and promoting support for Ukraine’s political system. The completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would allow Russia to export natural gas directly to the core of Europe via Germany. The pipeline would cut out Ukrainian middlemen, who would continue to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars annually in energy-transit fees if the pipeline’s completion were prevented. In the beginning of his tenure, Biden waived sanctions against Nord Stream 2 construction.

FARA disclosures show Yorktown Solutions, one of the lobbying firms hired by the Ukrainian government to work behind the scenes, received nearly $1 million from the Ukraine Federation of the Employers of the Oil and Gas Industry (UFEOGI) between Dec. 1, 2020 and Nov. 30, 2021. UFEOGI members include the state-owned Naftogaz and several other joint-stock and subsidiary energy enterprises. In that same period of time, UFEOGI’s Yorktown lobbyists made more than 11,000 connections—meetings, emails, and phone calls—with representatives in government (from Congress to the State Department and the National Security Council), think tanks (such as the Atlantic Council and the Heritage Foundation), and media outlets (like Foreign Policy, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and NBC News). Freeman told TAC he’s “never seen something so expansive” as Yorktown’s efforts in his decade-plus of analyzing FARA disclosures.

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