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As the Russian intrigues surrounding Donald Trump continue to pile up, The New York Times offers a bewildering new plot point in the unfolding spy-thriller melodrama roiling Washington: Michael Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, reportedly hand-delivered a secret “peace plan” to resolve the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, allegedly cooked up by a troika consisting of himself, a Trump business partner with ties to the Mafia, and a wealthy pro-Putin Ukrainian lawmaker.
In what the Times characterized as a bit of “diplomatic freelancing”, Cohen, who has served as special counsel to the Trump Organization since 2007, and Felix Sater, who worked with Trump on several real estate projects including the Trump SoHo in New York, met with Andrii Artemenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, to discuss a proposal outlining how Trump could lift U.S. sanctions against Moscow. Under the plan, Russian forces would be forced to withdraw from Eastern Ukraine and Ukrainian voters would decide in a referendum vote whether Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014, would be leased to Russia for either a 50 year or 100 year term. Cohen billed the troika’s meeting as an effort to end the ongoing conflict between the two Eastern European nations. “Who doesn’t want to help bring about peace?” Cohen asked the newspaper.
Of course, nothing is quite so simple. According to the Times, Artemenko is also hoping to effect the ouster of Petro Poroshenko, the pro-Western president of Ukraine. Artemenko reportedly belongs to the same pro-Putin bloc of lawmakers with which Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was involved. (Manafort told The Washington Post that he has “no role” in Artemenko’s initiative.) The Times reports that Artemenko views himself “as a Trump-style leader of a future Ukraine” and claimed to have evidence of corruption by Poroshenko that could lead to his ejection from office. “A lot of people will call me a Russian agent, a U.S. agent, a C.I.A. agent,” Artemenko said. “But how can you find a good solution between our countries if we do not talk?” Politico reports that Artemenko met with Trump campaign officials in Cleveland last summer during the Republican National Convention.
more:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/02/donald-trump-associates-russia-ukraine
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