remembers wondering why Bensh would be invited to a pri-
vate dinner with senior government officials. “Smells like
trouble,” Danyliuk remembers thinking.
The deal Bensh and his partners had in mind was very simi-
lar to the one Perry had raised during his first trip to Kyiv eight
months earlier. To them, at least, it seemed like a win all around.
Shipping U.S. gas via Poland to Ukraine and then reselling it in
the European Union would “make money for LNGE,” Bensh
explains. It could also make a lot of money for an American
company like Energy Transfer that was looking for long-term
buyers of gas from its export terminal. “To be able to build their
terminals, they have to get orders,” says Bensh. And of course
the deal would also fit with Perry’s agenda of selling American
“freedom gas” to the world.
But from Ukraine’s point of view, the plan had some criti-
cal flaws. One was the cost of transport: shipping American gas
to Europe is expensive. And if Ukrainians agreed to buy that
gas, they might get stuck paying a premium for many years to
come. While prior governments in Kyiv had espoused the idea,
the new administration there was skeptical. “It looks like it
would be a big disaster,” says Danyliuk, the national security
adviser. In any case, during that dinner near the White House,
he was too preoccupied with the day’s “drug deal” to talk about
any gas deals. Bensh could see it was the wrong time to push.
But Perry continued to promote his vision for American
natural gas exports. That same month, July 2019, he was
among the U.S. officials urging Trump to hold a phone call with
Ukraine’s new President. “The only reason I made the
call was because Rick asked me to,” the President later
told a group of Republican lawmakers, according to a
report in Axios that cited three of them. “Something
about an LNG plant,” Trump reportedly added. When
the call took place on July 25, 2019, Trump urged the
Ukrainian President to open investigations against the
Biden family, famously asking Zelensky to “do us a
favor.” A rough transcript of the call would become
Exhibit A of the impeachment inquiry.
The rough transcript makes no mention of Perry’s
gas agenda, but in the wake of the presidential shake-
down, Perry pressed ahead. For much of that summer,
his staff had been preparing to sign an international
energy agreement during a summit in Warsaw. The
aim of the summit, which began at the end of August
2019, was to pave the way for U.S. companies to ship
gas to Ukraine via Poland. LNGE was angling to be-
come one of those U.S. companies, and Perry’s team
had invited the company’s chief executive to attend.
The company had even written up a preliminary offer
to Naftogaz, Ukraine’s state energy firm.
Perry and his staff were urging Ukraine to sign it,
according to three energy executives close to the on-
going negotiations. “They basically said: ‘If you want
us as friends, you’ve got to do this,’ ” one of them re-
called. But the Ukrainians had bigger worries at the
time. A few days before the summit, Politico had
broken the news that the Trump Administration had
frozen a package of military aid to Ukraine later re-
vealed to be worth $400 million. The Kyiv delegation was
desperate to get the freeze lifted. “The biggest priority for me
was the military aid,” says Danyliuk.
So he left it to Naftogaz, the state energy company, to
consider the offer of a deal with LNGE. “We looked them up,”
says Andrew Favorov, the Naftogaz executive who vetted the
potential partner. A Google search led them to the past legal
woes of Miller, LNGE’s co-founder and director. That was a red
flag for the Ukrainians. Moreover, says Favorov, “The company
has no real assets.” So Naftogaz advised its government not to
pursue a gas deal with the Louisiana company.
Soon the deal faced another problem. Three weeks after the
Warsaw summit, news broke that a whistle-blower had raised
the alarm over Trump’s pressure campaign in Ukraine, and the
White House released the rough transcript of Trump’s phone
call with Zelensky. Amid all the public attention, the discus-
sions of a U.S.-Ukraine gas deal went quiet, according to energy
executives involved on both sides. With the impeachment in-
vestigation gaining steam, and his name emerging as a central
player in the Ukraine saga, Perry announced in October that he
would resign from the Energy Department at the end of the year.
The deal ThaT Perry and his allies pursued for three
years while he was in Washington didn’t die when he stepped
down and returned to Texas. After Trump’s acquittal in the
Senate on Feb. 5, Perry’s allies inside and outside of govern-
ment revived the massive U.S. gas-export deal he had been
Key players in
Perry’s energy
deals include
Ukrainian
negotiator
Yuriy Vitrenko,
gesturing at far
left, and Perry
friend Michael
Bleyzer, below
right, with Perry
and Ambassador
Yovanovitch.
A tanker off-loads
U.S. gas, left
VITRENKO, TANKER: GETTY IMAGES; PERRY: COURTESY U.S. EMBASSY KYIV
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