While various proposals to end Russia’s war against Ukraine circulate in the media and in high offices, an unlikely one has landed in the White House.
The New York Times reported on Feb. 19 that a controversial peace plan, crafted by a Ukrainian opposition lawmaker, was delivered to ex-National Security Adviser Michael T. Flynn. The plan didn’t make it to President Donald J. Trump, however, as Flynn was fired on Feb. 13 – ostensibly for lying about his friendly talks with the Russians.
The controversial plan includes leasing Crimea to Russia for 50 years, giving amnesty to the Russia-backed separatists in the Ukrainian eastern Donbas, and lifting the Russian sanctions.
The plan, crafted by previously little-known lawmaker Andrey Artemenko and passed to the White House through Trump associates Michael D. Cohen and Felix Sater, found little sympathy in Ukraine: The reactions ranged from surprise at Artemenko’s involvement to rage and accusations of treason.
Artemenko’s peace plan resonates with a somewhat similar proposal made by Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk two months before. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Pinchuk argued that Ukraine should sacrifice the annexed Crimea peninsula to get peace in the Donbas.
But Artemenko’s proposal was a particular bombshell in Ukraine: It reportedly arrived in the White House with compromising information about Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko that can take him down.
Opposition lawmaker
The author of the plan, lawmaker Artemenko, was elected to the Ukrainian parliament in 2014 on the opposition Radical Party ticket. He has been a low-key lawmaker, never stepping into the spotlight.
Who is Andrey Artemenko? Read the profile
The Radical Party’s faction kicked him out on Feb. 20 after his proposal to the Trump administration was reported. Though excluded from the party, Artemenko remains a member of parliament.
Party leader Oleh Lyashko first said that the party will discuss Artemenko’s actions some time at the next meeting, but later in the day changed his stance and announced his exclusion.
Artemenko owns a number of businesses in Ukraine and abroad. He used to trade arms and served jail time for embezzlement, although the conviction was later overturned.
Artemenko couldn’t be reached for comment.
What’s in the plan
While the plan itself wasn’t made public, Artemenko detailed it in an interview to a Ukrainian Strana.ua website.
In his plan to end the Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine, which has been going on for nearly three years and already took 10,000 lives, Artemenko proposes to hold national referendums: one to give Crimea into a lease to Russia for 30-50 years (50-100 years, according to the New York Times) and another to grant the special status, or a broad autonomy, to the Donbas. The plan envisions an amnesty for the Russian-backed separatists and lifting of the sanctions that U.S. and European Union imposed on Russia.
Artemenko also proposed that U.S. took the role of the mediator in the peace talks with Ukraine and Russia, replacing Germany and France in the so-called Normandy format.
In his scenario, Ukraine should remain neutral country, refusing from the EU and NATO membership, which contradicts the current course of Ukraine but plays well with Russia’s interests.
Russia, however, denied its involvement into the plan. Spokesman of Russian president Vladimir Putin Dmitry Peskov said that Russia wouldn’t agree on leasing Crimea from Ukraine since the peninsula already belongs to it.
Some in Ukraine thought that Artemenko was too unlikely a figure to be the real author of the plan that made it into the Trump’s White House.
Political analyst and technologist Taras Berezovets said that, from what he knew, Artemenko was close to Sergiy Lyovochkin, ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s chief of staff and one of the leaders of the Opposition Bloc, a successor of Yanukovych’s party.
“So that’s a Lyovochkin-Artemenko’s plan. This is a position of the lawmakers close to Russia,” Berezovets said, adding that it could be linked to Putin’s influential advisor Vladislav Surkov, who’s been looking for ways to get the Western sanctions against Russia lifted.
Timothy Ash, a London-based senior sovereign strategist with Bluebay Asset Management, doesn’t believe anyone in Ukraine will accept the plan proposed by Artemenko.
“In the end any deal has to be workable and saleable in Ukraine,” Ash wrote on Feb. 20. “And this deal is not in my view, as it will make Ukraine less, not more, stable.”
Poroshenko targeted
Apart from the plan that plays well with Russia’s interests, Artemenko delivered to the White House compromising materials that allegedly prove corruption of Poroshenko, including evidence of illegal offshore activities.
Artemenko claimed that he received the materials from Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, ex-chief of the Security Service in Ukraine, who was fired by Poroshenko in 2015.
Nalyvaichenko, however, said that he gave such materials directly to Trump representatives in January, to the U.S. Department of Justice and to Ukraine’s prosecutor general.
He denied giving the materials to Artemenko and said he hasn’t seen Artemenko’s peace plan. Instead, he said that he shared with the Americans his own ideas for ending the conflict.
The story got even more intricate when another player surfaced: Fugitive lawmaker Oleksandr Onyshchenko told the Kyiv Post that Artemenko’s evidence of Poroshenko’s alleged corruption was the same or similar to the materials he himself had submitted to the U.S. authorities in December.
This can’t be happy news for Poroshenko, whose own relationship with the Trump administration hasn’t been ideal.
Kyiv Post sources say that soon after Trump’s election in November, Flynn had long talks on Ukraine’s future with Ukraine’s Ambassador to U.S. Valery Chaly and deputy head of Poroshenko’s administration Kostiantyn Yeliseyev, with whom he was meeting in the Trump Tower in New York.
But the talks revealed a lack of trust between Trump and Poroshenko, presumably after Ukrainian leader openly supported Trump’s adversary Hillary Clinton in the presidential campaign.
American accomplices
Artemenko told Strana.ua that he delivered his plan to Trump’s lawyer Cohen and former business partner Sater, but denied meeting Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who the New York Times named along with Cohen and Sater as one of the people who arranged for the plan to land in the White House.
All three of the alleged accomplices have links to Ukraine and Russia.
Paul Manafort used to work as political consultant for the Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, helping it to rise again after the 2004 presidential election that ended in the Orange Revolution and Viktor Yushchenko’s victory over Yanukovych. He helped Yanukovych win the 2010 election.
After the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014, Manafort was employed by Lyovochkin and Opposition Bloc, according to the New York Times. He worked as Trump’s campaign chairman for six months in 2016 and resigned after reports alleged that he received undeclared millions in cash from Yanukovych.
Sater, who was born in the Soviet Russia and moved to New York in the age of five, used to be Trump’s partner in real estate deals.
In the 1990s, Sater served a year in prison for a bar fight in which he stabbed an opponent with a stem of a margarita glass. Several years later, working as a broker, he was found guilty of a fraud in connection to a $7.9 million penny stock pump and dump scheme. He got away with a fine. During the investigation he temporarily fled to Russia, according to the New York Times profile of him.
His wife Viktoria Sater is a Ukrainian immigrant.
But probably the most intricate links to Ukraine and Russia are the ones Trump’s personal attorney Cohen can boast.
Ukraine and Trump’s lawyer
Cohen, Trump’s longtime attorney and personal counsel, is reported in the New York Times story to have tried to invest in Ukraine’s ethanol industry through a family connection.
Businessmen familiar with Ukraine’s ethanol market said that it is split between fuel ethanol, which is relatively open for private investment, and other forms of ethanol, which are managed by state-owned firm Ukrspirt.
Rostyslav Tchaikivsky, a CFA who has worked and written extensively in Ukraine’s ethanol industry, had not heard of any investment by Cohen. He did say that the Ukrspirt section – drinkable ethanol – had a number of “schemes connected to the mafia.”
On the side of fuel ethanol, one project has had American investment – a $90 million processing plant built in 2006 at Zolotoshna in Cherkasy Oblast, which was sold to former Coal Industry Minister Viktor Topolov in 2010. Ukrainian media reported that Vadim Novinsky had a role in the deal, though the Kyiv Post could not independently confirm that.
The Cherkasy ethanol plant was financed by a company called Harvest Moon East, which later turned into Grain Alliance. That company is run by a man named Aleks Oronov, an American businessman who emigrated to the U.S. from Kharkiv during the Soviet Union times.
Oronov’s daughter, Oxana Cohen, appears to be married to Bryan Cohen, the brother of Trump’s lawyer. In 2006, corporate records show that the two brothers set up a firm in Delaware called International Ethanol of Ukraine, Ltd., with Bryan as director and the company listed to Michael at a New York City address.
The elder Oronov is married to Tania Oronov. The couple appear to reside in Trump Hollywoood, a development located in Miami, Florida.
Cohen did not immediately reply to an emailed request for comment.
The Trump attorney has another Ukraine link: Simon Garber, an Odesa-born businessman who owns taxicab services in New York, Chicago, and New Orleans. Before linking up with Trump, Cohen was a business partner with Garber.
But American press reports suggest that Garber has his own Kremlin connections. The Chicago Tribune wrote in 2004 that Garber befriended Russian parliamentarian Vladimir Sloutsker while on a 1992 trip to Monaco.
Sloutsker, who served as a Russian senator from 2002 to 2010, reportedly gave Garber the political connections to run a Moscow taxi service until the 1998 Russian economic collapse.
Cohen said he sold his stake in the taxi business in the early 2000s.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that Cohen ran a cruise service that took customers on boats out of U.S. territorial waters to allow them to gamble. Florida business records show that Cohen partnered with two men, Leonid Tatarchuk and Arkady Vaygensberg, for the venture. The WSJ reported that both were also Ukrainian.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov contributed to this story.
