I didn’t see any claim of a Trump connection; just mockery of the never terribly plausible and by now not especially new “oh, just some private citizens doing their thing for reasons utterly unrelated to us” denial; which was out in force when ‘patriotic volunteers’ with no doubt wholly coincidental Russian military status and hardware were popping out of the woodwork in one of the more authentic campaigns for self-determination since the CIA’s heyday in Latin America.
Trump certainly doesn’t seem interested in trying to keep the pressure on about that issue; but his support would have been pretty useless when the Ukrainian shenanigans started.
(Manafort was apparently doing well by doing good in the area at that time; but purely as a mercenary at that time.)
