# Paul Manafort — "greatly benefit the Putin Government" > [!quote] "We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin Government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success." > — Paul Manafort, confidential strategy memo to Oleg Deripaska, June 2005 ## Context The Associated Press obtained this line from a 2005 strategy memorandum [[Paul Manafort]] wrote pitching Russian aluminum magnate [[Oleg Deripaska]], a close [[Vladimir Putin]] ally. Manafort proposed a multi-million-dollar influence operation to shape politics, business, and news coverage across the U.S., Europe, and the former Soviet republics in ways favorable to the Kremlin. He went on to sign a reported $10-million-a-year contract with Deripaska beginning in 2006. ## Why this matters This is the documentary foundation of the Manafort-Russia story, written more than a decade before he chaired Trump's 2016 campaign. In his own words, on paper, Manafort offered to run a covert influence model to "benefit the Putin Government" — establishing the pre-existing financial and operational entanglement with a Putin-aligned oligarch that the [[Senate Intelligence Committee]] later cited in naming him "the single most direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services." Unlike most of the Russia narrative, this receipt is Manafort's own written sentence. A primary-source anchor for the foreign-influence timeline. ## Verification - **Reporting:** [Associated Press, March 2017, via PBS NewsHour](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/former-trump-campaign-chair-manafort-secretly-worked-advance-russian-interests-10-years-ago); [NBC News](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/paul-manafort-once-worked-benefit-putin-government-report-n736881). - **Status:** Verbatim, quoted from documents obtained by the AP; the broader engagement is undisputed and was litigated in Manafort's prosecutions. ## Related quotes - [[Paul Manafort - private briefings we can accommodate]] — the same relationship, eleven years later, during the Trump campaign.