A Maine native who is a key national leader on Russia policy is being investigated by a congressional committee after making trips to Ukraine and buying gear for the country’s military, The New York Times reported on Monday.
Kyle Parker, who grew up in Old Town and graduated from the University of Maine in 1999, told the newspaper through a representative that he has been targeted in a “campaign of retaliation” those who wrote the report on his conduct for the so-called Helsinki Commission, the European foreign policy panel led by members of Congress that Parker works for.
A lecture he gave last year at UMaine in 2023 “raised alarms” within the commission, the Times reported. He recounted being one of the first Americans to travel to Ukraine shortly after Russia invaded in February 2022. The panel’s confidential report cites articles about the lecture, which was covered by the Bangor Daily News and The Maine Campus, a student-run news site.
“We have almost no eyes on the ground, no presence,” Parker said then. “So, you know, I feel like that makes the travel even more important, to be able to say, ‘Hey, here’s what I’ve seen.’”
At the lecture, Parker said a relative who lives in Ukraine gave him $30,000 in donated money to buy sniper equipment that he took to the country in a spring visit. The confidential report, which was reviewed by The Times, said this may make Parker an unregistered foreign agent.
It also alleges that Parker went to the frontlines wearing Ukrainian military garb and hired an parliamentary aide for a fellowship despite objections from security, ethics and legal officials.
“Mr. Parker’s unofficial travel and media promoting himself as a foreign military interlocutor raise further legal and ethical concerns amid reported Ukrainian military corruption,” the report says, according to the Times.
The allegations in the report prompted commission co-chair Rep. Joe Wilson, R-South Carolina, to write a letter to Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Maryland, the other co-chair, asking Cardin to recommend that Parker be fired, The Times reported. He still holds his position amid a wider investigation that also is addressing Parker’s complaints against the report’s authors.
Parker’s representative denied to the Times that Parker had been acting as a foreign agent, adding that the trips that the report focuses on were not official ones and some of them were chiefly to lobby family members to leave the country on the heels of the invasion.
Parker has worked for the commission since 2006, serving in a senior role on the Senate side since 2018. He is best known for helping to draft the Magnitsky Act, which was signed by former President Barack Obama in 2012 and allows the U.S. government to freeze assets and ban travel visas of those who violate human rights. He has been sanctioned by Russia.
“If you’re a corrupt Russian official, the last place you want to keep your money is in Russia where it’s at risk for other corrupt Russian officials who are on the take,” Parker told Maine Public in 2014. “So you need to have access to Western financial institutions.”