Follow us on social

Shutterstock_192890837

Ukraine launched lobbying blitz ahead of pipeline vote

Kyiv and allied interests have hired nine firms and spent more than $1 million in just the past year.

Reporting | Europe

With Ukraine-Russia tensions reaching a boiling point, the Senate is poised to vote this afternoon on a bill championed by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) to sanction Russian businesses associated with the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. If completed the pipeline would allow Russia to circumvent Ukraine and export natural gas directly to Germany, a move Ukrainian interests fiercely oppose as, amongst other issues, it will cost the country hundreds-of-millions in energy transit fees it receives every year under the current pipeline system.

While the vote and seemingly all things Ukraine-Russia have garnered front-page headlines, behind the scenes, Ukraine has launched a multi-million dollar lobbying push to steer U.S. foreign policy on this, and other issues, in its direction.

In just the past year, the Ukrainian government and other interests in Ukraine have hired nine firms that registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Most prominently, Yorktown Solutions, has reported receiving more than $1 million from Ukraine clients in 2021 and contacted congressional offices hundreds of times on behalf of the Ukraine Federation of the Employers of the Oil and Gas Industry (UFEOGI), including at least one meeting between these lobbyists and Senator Cruz himself. Yesterday, the firm sent a “Nord Stream 2 pipeline - Facts on the Ground” brief in support of Cruz’s bill to hundreds of congressional offices.

Additionally, UFEOGI inked deals with Karv Communications and Arent Fox in the summer of 2021, which, respectively received nearly $120,000 and more than $300,000 from UFEOGI to advocate against Nord Stream 2. Karv has focused heavily on media outreach related to the pipeline, and reported meeting with journalists at the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Reuters, and others on UFEOGI’s behalf. Arent Fox has played more of an inside game for UFEOGI, focusing its efforts on influence at the State Department. 

These and many more details about the Ukraine lobby in the United States will be chronicled in a forthcoming Quincy Institute report on the topic. And, as for the vote today, even if Cruz’s bill isn’t passed as is expected, it’s well worth noting that Ukraine’s lobbyists and public relations professionals were a vital reason the bill even made it this far. 


Image: Carlos Yudica via shutterstock.com
Reporting | Europe
Thomas Barrack
Top image credit: U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and U.S. special envoy for Syria Thomas Barrack speaks after meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun (not pictured) at the presidential palace in Baabda, Lebanon August 26, 2025. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir

Tom Barrack has an offer that Lebanon simply can't refuse

Middle East

A tale of two envoys recently unfolded in Beirut, encapsulating the crossroads at which Lebanon now stands. Tanned and sporting a pink tie, the U.S. Envoy Tom Barrack arrived with Deputy Special Presidential Envoy to the Middle East, Morgan Ortagus in mid-August. Their meetings with top Lebanese officials underscored Washington’s insistence that lasting stability in Lebanon depends on consolidating state authority, and disarming Hezbollah.

Days earlier, Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s National Security Council, had departed, leaving a message equally blunt but diametrically opposed: Hezbollah’s arms are a red line and are necessary tools for its “resistance” to Israel. These visits represent the opposing magnetic poles pulling at the country.

Lebanon is reeling from a confluence of catastrophes. A devastating scuffle with Israel last year decapitated Hezbollah’s leadership and ravaged its strongholds. Compounding this military blow was a strategic amputation: the swift collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, which severed the critical land bridge that for decades funneled Iranian arms and support to Iran’s most prized regional proxy. Into this vortex has stepped Barrack, a 40-year friend of Donald Trump and a businessman by trade, embodying a U.S. strategy that is quintessentially Trumpian in its DNA.

keep readingShow less
Afghanistan withdrawal
Lloyd Austin, Kenneth McKenzie, and Mark Milley in 2021. (MSNBC screengrab)

Turns out leaving Afghanistan did not unleash terror on US or region

Military Industrial Complex

It will be four years since the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan on Aug. 30, 2021, ending a nearly 20-year occupation that could serve as a poster child for mission creep.

What began in October 2001 as a narrow intervention to destroy al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, and topple the Taliban government for refusing to hand over al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, morphed into an open-ended nation-building operation that killed 2,334 U.S. military personnel and wounded over 20,000 more.

keep readingShow less
Francois Bayrou Emmanuel Macron
Top image credit: France's Prime Minister Francois Bayrou arrives to hear France's President Emmanuel Macron deliver a speech to army leaders at l'Hotel de Brienne in Paris on July 13, 2025, on the eve of the annual Bastille Day Parade in the French capital. LUDOVIC MARIN/Pool via REUTERS

Europe facing revolts, promising more guns with no money

Europe

If you wanted to create a classic recipe for political crisis, you could well choose a mixture of a stagnant economy, a huge and growing public debt, a perceived need radically to increase military spending, an immigration crisis, a deeply unpopular president, a government without a majority in parliament, and growing radical parties on the right and left.

In other words, France today. And France’s crisis is only one part of the growing crisis of Western Europe as a whole, with serious implications for the future of transatlantic relations.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.