What Do Countries Do When the Head of Their Government Is a Foreign Asset?
Other democracies have been here. Here is what they did.
In September 2014, Marine Le Pen’s National Front party took out a €9.4 million loan from the First Czech-Russian Bank, a Moscow-connected financial institution whose owner had previously worked for one of Vladimir Putin’s billionaire associates.¹ The timing was not subtle. The loan was signed as Russia annexed Crimea, an annexation Le Pen publicly supported, leading French observers to ask openly whether the money and the politics were connected.¹ French intelligence tracked the relationship. Prosecutors opened investigations. Two years later, regulators revoked the bank’s license for anti-money laundering violations.¹ The loan then passed through a shell company to an aviation parts supplier with documented ties to Russian intelligence and active contracts with the Syrian Ministry of Defense.¹ A French parliamentary committee eventually concluded that Le Pen’s party functioned as a political relay for the Kremlin inside French politics, amplifying Russian messaging at every turn.²
Marine Le Pen ran for president in 2017. She ran again in 2022, and in a nationally televised debate Emmanuel Macron told her directly that she was talking to her banker when she talked to Russia.² She nearly won. She is currently preparing her fourth presidential run in 2027.²
Gerhard Schröder served as Germany’s chancellor from 1998 to 2005. In his final weeks in office he signed the agreement to build the Nord Stream pipeline, a project that would route Russian gas directly into Germany and give Moscow structural leverage over Europe’s largest economy.³ Within days of leaving office, he accepted the chairmanship of the Nord Stream shareholders’ committee.³ He went on to chair the board of Nord Stream 2, then accepted a nomination to the supervisory board of Gazprom itself.⁴ He called Putin a personal friend. When Russian forces killed civilians in the Ukrainian city of Bucha in 2022, he told the New York Times he saw no reason to believe Putin had ordered it.⁵
The German Social Democratic Party, the party Schröder had once led, defended his conduct for years. His fellow SPD member Olaf Scholz, who became chancellor and inherited the energy dependency Schröder helped build, initially said Schröder had made a great contribution to Germany and that what he did in his professional life was not worth discussing.⁶ The German parliament stripped Schröder of his taxpayer-funded office and staff in May 2022.⁷ He resigned from the Rosneft board shortly after, under sustained public pressure.⁷ It took Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with German soldiers being asked to defend an alliance whose energy infrastructure had been quietly handed to Moscow, to produce even those consequences. Seventeen years late and two pipeline projects deep.
Robert Fico won Slovakia’s September 2023 parliamentary election on a platform that explicitly opposed military aid to Ukraine, called for friendly relations with Moscow, and promised to reverse his country’s pro-Western course.⁸ Once in office, his government eliminated the special anti-corruption prosecutor’s office that had been investigating people connected to his party, reduced criminal penalties for bribery and fraud in ways that halted active prosecutions, and moved to bring public broadcasting under direct government control.⁸ In May 2024, a gunman shot him five times outside a government meeting in the town of Handlova.⁹ He survived. In December 2024, he flew to Moscow to meet with Putin personally, becoming one of the very few Western heads of government to do so since the invasion of Ukraine.¹⁰ His governing coalition lost a partner party in early 2025, briefly opening the possibility of a no-confidence vote.¹⁰ As of this writing, he is still governing.
Then there is Ukraine.
Paul Manafort first traveled to Ukraine in 2004 as a political consultant for Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian politician whose presidential campaign that year was so thoroughly corrupt that international observers refused to certify the results, triggering the first wave of mass protests.¹¹ Manafort worked with Yanukovych for a decade, shaping his image for Western audiences and collecting tens of millions of dollars in payments he concealed in undeclared accounts in Cyprus and the Caribbean.¹¹ With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began steering Ukraine toward Moscow. In November 2013, under direct Russian pressure, he reversed Ukraine’s course toward a trade agreement with the European Union and accepted a three-billion-dollar loan from Russia instead.¹¹ Ukrainian students went into Independence Square in Kyiv to protest. The anger spread across the country. The protests grew through the winter, and government forces killed more than a hundred people in the streets.¹¹
In February 2014, Yanukovych fled to Russia.¹¹ He left behind an estate with gold-plated bathroom fixtures, a full-sized replica galleon floating on a private lake, and a garage holding a hundred cars.¹¹ The Ukrainian parliament voted to remove him and call new elections. The crowd had been standing outside in the cold for three months.
Manafort, now unemployed and carrying roughly seventeen million dollars in debt to a Russian oligarch, pitched himself to the Trump campaign in early 2016 and was hired to manage convention delegates, working for free.¹¹ The Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan 2020 report identified Manafort’s longtime Ukrainian business partner as a Russian intelligence officer who served as a direct link between Manafort and his Russian contacts while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign.¹² The consultant who spent a decade constructing a pro-Russian government in Kyiv walked directly into the operation that would place the next American president.
Detection works. Documentation works. Publication works. What consistently fails is the step between knowing and doing, and in the one case where that step got taken, ordinary people took it themselves.
We are not the first democracy to face this. We are, however, the first one with nuclear weapons, a permanent UN Security Council seat, and the world’s reserve currency. The stakes of getting the answer wrong are not comparable to what France faced, or Germany, or Slovakia. What those countries found out, at significant cost, is that the institution cannot fix itself from the inside when the person at the top controls the consequences for everyone inside it. Someone has to act from outside the institution entirely. In every case where anything changed, that is exactly what happened.
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Works Cited
Alliance for Securing Democracy. (n.d.). Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder becomes chairman of Russian state-controlled Nord Stream pipeline company directly after leaving office. German Marshall Fund. https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/incident/former-german-chancellor-gerhard-schr%C3%B6der-becomes-chairman-of-russian-state-controlled-nord-stream-pipeline-company-directly-after-leaving-office/
Alliance for Securing Democracy. (n.d.). French far-right party National Rally receives loan from bank with links to the Kremlin. German Marshall Fund. https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/incident/french-far-right-party-national-rally-formerly-front-national-fn-receives-loan-from-bank-with-links-to-the-kremlin/
Clean Energy Wire. (2022, March). Ex-German chancellor Schröder’s continued ties to Russian energy industry spark outcry. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/ex-german-chancellor-schroders-continued-ties-russian-energy-industry-spark-outcry
Euronews. (2022, May 20). Gerhard Schröder: Germany’s ex-chancellor quits Russian energy giant Rosneft amid pressure over war. https://www.euronews.com/2022/05/20/gerhard-schroder-germany-s-ex-chancellor-quits-russian-energy-giant-rosneft-amid-pressure-
France 24. (2023, September 21). French far right says Russian loan repaid. https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230921-french-far-right-says-russian-loan-repaid
Milwaukee Independent. (2024, February 18). How Paul Manafort got Trump funding from Russian oligarchs and profited from the betrayal of Ukraine. https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/heather-richardson/paul-manafort-got-trump-funding-russian-oligarchs-profited-betrayal-ukraine/
NBC News. (2025, October 21). Slovak PM Fico’s attacker convicted of terrorism, sentenced to 21 years. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/europe/slovakia-robert-fico-attacker-convicted-terrorism-assassination-rcna238830
NPR. (2024, June 6). Slovakia’s Fico: Views on aid to Ukraine were behind assassination attempt. https://www.npr.org/2024/06/06/nx-s1-4994869/fico-slovakia-ukraine-aid-behind-assassination-attempt-first-speech-since
OCCRP. (2020). Russian company sues Marine Le Pen’s party over unpaid loan. https://www.occrp.org/en/news/russian-company-sues-marine-le-pens-party-over-unpaid-loan
ProPublica. (2022, June 23). Let’s recall what exactly Paul Manafort and Rudy Giuliani were doing in Ukraine. https://www.propublica.org/article/lets-recall-what-exactly-paul-manafort-and-rudy-giuliani-were-doing-in-ukraine
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. (2022, May 25). Germany’s former chancellor says he won’t join board of Russia’s Gazprom. https://www.rferl.org/a/gazprom-russia-germany-schroeder/31866644.html
Senate Intelligence Committee. (2020). Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on Russian active measures campaigns and interference in the 2016 U.S. election, volume 5. U.S. Senate.
Fantastic article @Christopher Armitage
USA needs to dethrone its foreign asset & affiliated assets. Your free downloads are impressive.