Kremlin scoffs at peace deal from Trump lawyer
Proposal mulls leasing Crimea to Russia
WASHINGTON • The Kremlin dismissed as “absurd” a peace plan reportedly outlined by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, a former Trump business associate and a member of the Ukrainian parliament that could give Russia long-term control over the Crimea.
The meeting with Andrii Artemenko, the Ukrainian politician, involved Michael Cohen, a Trump Organization lawyer since 2007, and Felix Sater, a Russian émigré to the United States who worked on real estate projects with Trump’s company.
The draft plan, first reported by The New York Times, calls for all Russian forces to withdraw from eastern Ukraine. It also calls for a referendum to let Ukrainian voters decide whether the Crimea should be leased to Moscow for 50 or 100 years. The peace plan would then allow for the lifting of sanctions against Russia.
The Kremlin said the proposal would be unacceptable. “There’s nothing to talk about. How can Russia rent its own region from itself?” asked Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s press secretary.
Added Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov: “It is difficult for me to comment because it is not possible to lease something from oneself.”
Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, and Russian-speaking separatists in Ukraine began protests that escalated into a war. More than 9,800 people have died since April 2014 in fighting in eastern Ukraine between government forces and Russia-backed separatists.
The occurrence of the meeting suggests that some in the region aligned with Russia have been seeking to use Trump business associates as an informal conduit to a new president who has signalled a desire to forge warmer relations with Russia. The discussion took place amid increasingly intense scrutiny of the ties between Trump’s team and Russia, as well as escalating investigations on Capitol Hill of the determination by U.S. intelligence agencies that the Kremlin intervened in last year’s election to help Trump.
In Ukraine, Artemenko belongs to a bloc that opposes the nation’s current president, Petro Poroshenko. It is a group whose efforts were previously aided by Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, who had advised Ukraine’s previous pro-Vladimir Putin president until his ouster amid public protests in 2014 — a development that sparked the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The back-channel discussions could disrupt delicate diplomacy between the new Trump administration and Poroshenko. Artemenko said he hopes evidence of corruption by Poroshenko could be used to effect his ouster, a necessary first step to pushing his peace proposal.
Cohen said the meeting between himself, the Ukrainian politician, and Sater lasted less than 15 minutes and took place at a New York hotel.
He said he received the proposal and took it with him from the hotel meeting out of politeness, but never relayed its contents to anyone in the administration.
Cohen has been in the public spotlight since his name was mentioned in a dossier prepared by a former British spy hired by Trump’s political opponents suggesting he had once served as a liaison between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, an allegation he has emphatically denied.
Sater said he held the meeting out of honourable intent only.
“I was not practising diplomacy and I was not having clandestine meetings,” Sater said.
He said he called Cohen because his Ukrainian lawmaker acquaintance “was emphatic that he wants the war to end.”
He said the conversations with Cohen and Artemenko were not “a back channel to the Kremlin or anything like that.”