(This is a Substack article by Frank Snepp.)
"Killing Kyiv with a Wink"
Is Trump paying off an old debt to Putin?
10/18/26
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Ruminating on why this administration seems so determined to undercut Volodymyr Zelensky and aid Vladimir Putin in his assault on Ukraine, New York Times columnist David French reminds us of Trump’s infamous phone call with the newly elected Ukrainian president in July 2019.
French’s column, “Russia Was Losing. Enter President Trump,” appeared just a few days ago, on October 15.
That call was a major scandal we’ve almost forgotten, and it triggered Trump’s first impeachment. Most of the outrage focused on Trump’s pressure on Zelensky to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son, while American military aid to Ukraine hung in the balance.
French zeroes in on the less-noticed part of the call. Trump also pressed Zelensky to chase a debunked conspiracy theory that holds Ukraine, not Russia, responsible for election meddling in 2016. In French’s reading, Trump blames Ukraine for the Russiagate investigation that dogged his first term, and that grudge still drives his tilt toward Putin.
French may be right as far as he goes. But I believe something far darker nags at Trump. It is the lingering odor, the potential combustibility, of a toxic deal Moscow first dangled before him in mid-2016 through his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. The deal would come due if and when Trump gained the White House. Once elected, he was to help cede Ukraine’s eastern borderlands to Putin, dressed up as peace.
In May 2017, four months into Trump’s first term, the Justice Department appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russia’s interference in the election and any links to the Trump campaign. Mueller’s lead prosecutor came to suspect the Ukraine deal was the price of Russia’s help in nudging the election Trump’s way through hacking, propaganda and disinformation.
For a variety of reasons, the deal went nowhere during Trump’s first term. The Mueller investigation made any overt favor to Putin politically radioactive, so Trump dithered. Manafort ended up in a federal courtroom, and the deal’s Russian architect, an intelligence operative named Konstantin Kilimnik, fled to Moscow. Meanwhile Ukraine kept turning west, a shift capped by Zelensky’s landslide election in April 2019 on a platform of reform and closer ties to Europe.
It is not a stretch to wonder whether Trump’s handling of the Ukraine crisis in his second term, nearly all of it to Zelensky’s disadvantage, is his belated way of making good on that original debt. Nor is it hard to imagine what Putin might hold over him in the meantime: the threat of exposing the sordid bargain itself.
Debts to Putin don’t expire. They compound.
I first pieced this story together in an article published April 17, 2022, at Spy Talk, Jeff Stein’s Substack newsletter on intelligence matters. What follows is a condensed and updated version.
The Architects
Of all the schemes that swirled around Trump and Russia during the 2016 campaign and the early years of his presidency, one went further than the rest in showing what Moscow wanted from him. It was a Ukraine “peace plan,” pushed by Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and written by his pal, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik. Under the cover of a negotiated settlement, it would have handed eastern Ukraine to Putin.
All it required, its author wrote, was a wink from the newly elected president.
Kilimnik was a small, tireless Russian who had worked alongside Manafort in Ukraine for more than a decade. Special Counsel Mueller described him as having ties to Russian intelligence. The Senate Intelligence Committee, in its bipartisan report of August 2020, called him a Russian intelligence officer outright and cited evidence suggesting he may have been connected to the hack-and-leak operation against the Democrats in 2016.
Both men answered to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch whom the Senate investigators described as a proxy for the Russian state and its intelligence services. In 2004, Deripaska hired Manafort and Kilimnik to advise his business ventures. He soon had them doing double duty as political strategists for pro-Russian politicians in Kyiv.
Their star client was ex-president Viktor Yanukovych. His fraudulent 2004 victory had been overturned by the Orange Revolution. With their help he remade his image and regained the presidency in 2010.
In February 2014, the Euromaidan uprising drove Yanukovych from power, and he fled to Russia. Putin answered by seizing Crimea and stoking a separatist war in the Russian-speaking Donbas region. Two rounds of ceasefire talks in Minsk, in September 2014 and February 2015, froze the bloodshed without ending it.
Gone was not forgotten. Yanukovych would become the centerpiece of the plan Kilimnik began to build.
Enter Trump
Kilimnik first floated the idea in an email to the chief political officer at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv on May 21, 2015. He spoke of a new political movement in eastern Ukraine with Yanukovych as its figurehead.
Two months later, at the FreedomFest convention in Las Vegas, a Russian “student” named Maria Butina asked a dark horse candidate whether he favored sanctions on Russia. Butina later pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered agent of the Kremlin. Donald Trump, the dark horse, told her he didn’t think the sanctions would be needed.
For Kilimnik and Manafort, this was an invitation to dance.
Here was a celebrity mogul with financial ties to Russia, an outsized appetite for flattery and an open admiration for Putin. As Trump climbed the polls, Manafort muscled his way into the campaign through his old friend Roger Stone. He became convention manager in March 2016 and campaign chairman that May.
Manafort had his own angle. He owed Deripaska money from soured business deals. Delivering a pliable American president would square the ledger as nothing else could.
He moved quickly. In April 2016, according to the Mueller report, he emailed Kilimnik about ways to cash in on his new access to Trump. He later passed Kilimnik internal campaign polling data, the kind of material that would have been pure gold to anyone microtargeting a disinformation campaign.
The Summer of 2016
The peace plan ripened in a season of extraordinary tension, as Russia’s hand in the American election became impossible to miss.
On June 14, 2016, the Democratic National Committee disclosed that Russian government hackers had penetrated its networks. On July 22, days before the Democratic convention, WikiLeaks dumped thousands of stolen DNC emails. The party chair resigned within days.
That same month the Trump team stripped a pledge of lethal aid for Ukraine out of the Republican platform. On July 27, Trump stood before reporters in Florida and invited Moscow to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. “Russia, if you’re listening,” he said. According to Mueller’s indictment, Russian military hackers took their first run at Clinton’s personal office that very day.
Four days later, on July 31, 2016, Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that Putin was “not going into Ukraine.” Stephanopoulos reminded him that Russia was already there. Moscow had seized Crimea in 2014, and its forces had been fighting in eastern Ukraine for two years. Trump then suggested the people of Crimea would rather be with Russia anyway.
Kyiv was alarmed. Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington, Valeriy Chaly, criticized Trump’s Crimea remarks in an op-ed for The Hill. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov denounced him on social media.
Then, on August 14, The New York Times reported that a secret “black ledger” kept by Yanukovych’s party listed $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments earmarked for Manafort. The ledger surfaced through Ukrainian anticorruption investigators and a reform-minded member of parliament.
A Kyiv administrative court later ruled that publicizing the ledger had amounted to improper meddling in the American election. An appeals court overturned that ruling in 2019, but by then Trump’s allies had seized on it.
Remember those Ukrainian voices. Their criticism, and their role in exposing Manafort, would later be twisted into the claim that Ukraine, not Russia, had meddled in 2016.
The Cigar Bar
Twelve days before the ledger story broke, Kilimnik flew to New York and met Manafort at the Grand Havana Room, a cigar club in midtown Manhattan. The date was August 2, 2016, with the general election just around the corner. Manafort briefed his old associate on campaign strategy and walked him through the battleground states. They also talked about the peace plan, and it had grown more ambitious. Yanukovych would no longer simply front a political movement. He would be “elected” to lead a new autonomous republic in the industrial Donbas.
Manafort later admitted to Mueller’s investigators what this amounted to: a “backdoor” way for Russia to take control of eastern Ukraine.
The ledger revelations finished him. Manafort resigned from the campaign on August 19. Kilimnik was unfazed.
On October 7, the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security formally accused Russia’s senior leadership of directing the hacking. Within hours the announcement was drowned out, first by the Access Hollywood tape, and then by WikiLeaks’ release of emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Trump kept suggesting the culprit might be China, or “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”
Meanwhile, the Russian side stepped up the pressure in Donbas. According to Julia Ioffe’s reporting in The Atlantic, U.S. officials believed Moscow began throwing sticks in the wheels of the Minsk process that October, once a Trump victory looked plausible, in hopes of getting better terms from him.
Then Trump won.
The Wink
On December 8, 2016, during the transition, Kilimnik emailed Manafort to remind him of unfinished business. Both Mueller and the Senate committee cite the message at length. It is the most explicit statement we have of what the Kremlin’s circle expected of the incoming president.
“All that is required to start the process,” Kilimnik wrote, “is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from DT and a decision to authorize you to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.”
DT, of course, was Donald Trump.
Once Trump gave that signal, Kilimnik promised, Manafort could be in Russia within ten days with Yanukovych’s full backing. Yanukovych, he wrote, “guarantees your reception at the very top level.” There was only one top level in Moscow.
And Yanukovych believed, Kilimnik added, that “DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.”
Peace, in this telling, meant Putin’s peace. Russia would get its puppet enclave. Kyiv would get a Trojan horse.
Three weeks later, on December 29, outgoing President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats and imposed new sanctions as punishment for the election interference. That same day, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, urged Russia’s ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, not to escalate. Putin held his fire. Trump tweeted his approval: “Great move on delay (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!”
The Kremlin had reason to believe the wink was coming.
Fishing in the Same Waters
Manafort and Kilimnik were not the only ones peddling a Ukraine deal to the new administration. A second plan, promoted by Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, reached the White House first.
Its Ukrainian sponsor was Andrey Artemenko, a far-right, pro-Putin member of parliament. Reporters described him as burly, self-important and marginal in Kyiv’s real power structure. He fancied himself a Slavic Donald Trump and claimed an inside track through his wife, who said she knew Melania from modeling work in Eastern Europe. Artemenko told The New York Times he had received encouragement from top aides to Putin. Ukrainian reformers suspected the Kremlin had plucked him from obscurity for exactly this mission.
His formula called for lifting U.S. sanctions on Russia, a ceasefire in the east, and a Ukrainian referendum on “leasing” Crimea to Russia for 50 or 100 years. He compared it to the Panama Canal and Hong Kong.
The cast assembled around him would have shamed a clown car.
Artemenko’s introduction to Cohen reportedly came through Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman who had served prison time for slashing a man’s face with a margarita glass in a Manhattan bar fight. He later pleaded guilty in a mob-linked stock fraud scheme. Sater and Cohen had spent much of 2015 and 2016 chasing a Trump Tower in Moscow, a project Trump kept quiet while praising Putin on the campaign trail.
Vanity Fair later raised the question of whether the effort had been bankrolled indirectly by Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch who was later placed under U.S. sanctions. His American affiliate paid Cohen hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees after the inauguration. Cheering from the sidelines was former Republican congressman Curt Weldon, whose cozy Moscow ties had long unsettled his colleagues.
The plan’s journey to the White House was a case of Forrest Gump meets Mr. Bumble. According to the Times, Artemenko and Sater handed Cohen the proposal at a hotel near Washington in late January 2017. Cohen said he left it in Flynn’s office in early February. About a week later, on February 13, Flynn resigned for lying about his December talks with Kislyak. Sanctions again.
The Times exposed the scheme on February 19, 2017. Cohen later gave conflicting accounts of whether he had delivered anything at all. Weldon reportedly lamented to an associate that they had been “so close.” Artemenko kept roaming Capitol Hill for months, claiming credit for a Senate resolution on Ukraine that Senator Rob Portman’s office denied he had shaped. Kyiv stripped him of his citizenship. Mueller’s team later questioned him.
The Cohen gambit collapsed in comic disarray. But its logic matched the Manafort plan: lift the pressure on Putin, freeze the war on his terms, and dress up the surrender as peace.
Two separate channels, both leading to Trump’s inner circle, were offering Russia the same prize.
The Plan on Paper
The Manafort-Kilimnik channel proved more durable. According to the Senate investigators, the two men conferred about the plan in January, February and August of 2017. By early 2018, Kilimnik had produced a three-page draft titled “A New Initiative to Settle the Conflict in South-East of Ukraine.” The Senate committee said it was designed to win Trump’s support.
On February 21, 2018, Manafort, by then under federal indictment, sent a copy to Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s campaign pollster and an old associate from Ukraine. Fabrizio was to use it in preparing a survey of how Ukrainians might react to Yanukovych’s return. Whether the poll was ever run is unclear. It hardly mattered. The plan called for Yanukovych to be imposed, not chosen.
Kilimnik’s draft reads less like a policy paper than a sermon from the Mount. He blames Ukraine’s sitting president, Petro Poroshenko, for the collapse of the Minsk ceasefire. His remedy is a new “Autonomous Region of Donbas,” with its own parliament and prime minister, midwifed by Trump and Putin acting together. Collaboration between the two presidents is, in Kilimnik’s words, the “key driver.”
Trump was to lean on Poroshenko to accept the new entity. Then he and Putin were to persuade its parliament to install Yanukovych as prime minister. “Election of Mr. Yanukovych as head of the ARD with consent of the United States and Russia,” Kilimnik wrote, “will significantly increase chances of peaceful settlement of the conflict.”
He went further, insisting that American backing for the scheme “will be a fair and democratic decision with respect to Mr. Yanukovych.” Democracy, in Kilimnik’s hands, was a two-man election held in Washington and Moscow.
He even rewrote history to burnish his candidate. Yanukovych had done “everything possible for peaceful settlement,” he claimed, only to see his efforts “blown up by the radicals.” He meant the Ukrainians who threw him out.
Any way you read it, this was a filigreed prescription for cramming a pro-Putin peace down Ukrainian throats.
The Heart of the Matter
Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s lead prosecutor on the Manafort case, came to see the plan as the possible missing piece of the collusion puzzle. Manafort lied repeatedly to investigators after his September 2018 plea deal, and he was never more evasive than when asked about Ukraine.
In a closed hearing in February 2019, Weissmann told the judge that the August 2016 cigar-bar meeting went, in his words, “very much to the heart” of what the special counsel was investigating.
In his 2020 book, Where Law Ends, Weissmann spelled out his thinking. Russia, he wrote, had revealed to Manafort, and through him to the campaign, exactly what it wanted: a nod from Trump as it took over Ukraine’s richest region. Asking such a thing of a presidential candidate required audacity or leverage. The question that haunted him was why Trump would ever agree unless he was getting something in return. Both Manafort and Trump, he observed, were too transactional to give something away for nothing.
The investigators never got the answer. When a grand jury indicted Kilimnik alongside Manafort for witness tampering in June 2018, Kilimnik was already beyond reach in Moscow. Poroshenko’s government, then angling for a U.S. sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles and freezing its own Manafort investigations, had done nothing to stop him from leaving. The one man who could explain the plan was gone for good.
What Did Trump Know?
In written answers to Mueller, Trump said he did not remember Manafort ever passing along positions that Russia or Ukraine wanted the United States to adopt. Mueller reported finding no evidence that Manafort had briefed the candidate or anyone else in the campaign or administration on the peace plans.
Really?
Kilimnik had talked up his “Mariupol plan” in an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-government-funded outlet, shortly after the inauguration. The Cohen plan made front-page news in February 2017. The New York Times revisited Kilimnik’s interview in January 2019. That same month, Manafort’s lawyers bungled a redaction and exposed sealed material about the plan. The Times then published a readout of Weissmann’s closed-door remarks. Anyone in the White House with an interest in Ukraine had ample opportunity to know.
And then there is Trump’s own loose talk. Speaking at CPAC on February 26, 2022, two days after Putin’s full-scale invasion, the former president said, “I was with Putin a lot.” Moments later he added, “Someday I’ll tell you exactly what we talked about.” Putin, he went on, had an “affinity” for Ukraine, and Trump said he had warned him, “You better not let it happen.”
Better not let what happen? The phrase hints that while in office Trump felt pressure to satisfy Putin on Ukraine and held back. What constrained him, he did not say. But given the circumstances he faced, with Mueller and Senate investigators buzzing around him, handing Ukraine to Russia under a peace banner would have been politically unsafe at any speed.
Trump and Putin spoke privately at least 16 times during his first term. They met in Hamburg in July 2017 and in Osaka in June 2019. Most notably, they met with only interpreters present in Helsinki in July 2018, months after Kilimnik finished his final draft. At the press conference afterward, Trump fawned over Putin and sided with him against America’s own intelligence agencies on election interference. In hindsight, this looks like a consolation prize for the unfinished business in Ukraine.
The Price
If the backdoor deal died, Trump’s habit of treating Ukraine’s security as a bargaining chip did not.
In July 2019, Trump froze nearly $400 million in military aid to Kyiv, then pressed Zelensky for the favors described at the start of this essay. The Ukrainians who had criticized him and exposed Manafort in the summer of 2016 had become, in his telling, the real culprits. Only after a CIA whistleblower exposed the squeeze was the aid released.
The damage was done. America’s word as an ally lost value. Kyiv lost precious time to harden its defenses. And Putin gained one more reason to believe Washington could be bought.
Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council’s Ukraine expert who testified in Trump’s first impeachment, put it succinctly in February 2022. Ukraine could have spent those years preparing and making itself an unappetizing target, he said. Because of Trump’s corruption, it entered the war less capable and less ready.
As for the architects, Kilimnik remains in Moscow, beyond the reach of American prosecutors. Manafort, convicted of tax and bank fraud and sentenced to more than seven years, walked free in December 2020 with a pardon from Trump. Cohen went to prison, partly for crimes committed on Trump’s behalf, and turned against him.
The wink never came. The bill arrived anyway.
Back to the Present
Which brings us back to David French and the events of mid-October 2026.
French’s column lays out a sequence of moves by the administration that, in his judgment, amount to throwing Putin a lifeline. On October 9, 2026, Trump announced that the United States would buy potentially millions of tons of Russian diesel fuel. French estimates the purchase could put roughly $4 billion into Moscow’s treasury while barely denting American fuel prices.
Two days later, Trump declared that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy cease-fire.” Neither country had agreed to anything. Ukraine had been striking Russian refineries and depots so effectively that Moscow’s ability to deliver the diesel was in doubt. Trump blamed Ukraine for rising fuel prices and said the country needed a new president. Zelensky said Washington also threatened to curtail intelligence sharing.
Ukraine complied and halted its energy strikes. Zelensky had already offered to hold new elections in exchange for a 60-day ceasefire. Moscow rebuffed him.
Russia did not stand down. On the nights of October 12 and 13, Russian missiles hit Ukrainian energy sites, darkening parts of Izyum and striking a major heat-and-power plant in Kyiv.
Zelensky said the usual warnings from Ukraine’s partners never came. American and Ukrainian officials insisted intelligence sharing continued. On October 14, reports surfaced that Starshield, the Pentagon-funded version of Starlink, was being throttled in ways that crippled Ukrainian drones.
Two days later came the bigger gift. Trump signed an executive order waiving most of the sanctions in the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, which was due to take effect on October 18.
Congress had passed the law in mid-September by votes of 86-11 in the Senate and 262-159 in the House. It targeted Russian officials and banks and threatened tariffs of up to 100 percent on goods from countries that buy Russian oil and gas in bulk.
Trump used an escape hatch written into the statute, certifying to Congress that a waiver served the national interest. A White House spokesperson told TIME that enforcing the sanctions would impede peace negotiations.
Tatiana Mitrova of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy told TIME that the diesel deal is small change by comparison. Moscow’s real prize, she said, is escaping penalties that threatened its far larger crude oil revenues. She expects little of the promised relief to reach American gas pumps. Brown University political scientist Jeff Colgan said the waiver is “like trading [Ukrainian] democracy for diesel.”
The backlash crossed party lines. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, accused the administration of “capitulating to a Russian dictator.” Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said, “Lindsey would be appalled.” Zelensky wrote that the decision helps only the Russians and does nothing to stop the war.
Congress named the law for a dead senator. Trump buried it before it took effect.
All this came, French notes, just as Russia was losing ground. The Institute for the Study of War reported that Ukrainian counteroffensives had nearly erased Russia’s territorial gains for 2026. French also cites his newsroom colleagues’ reporting that Trump’s peace talks include oil deals that would benefit business figures tied to his envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
French attributes Trump’s behavior to corruption and a conspiracy-fueled grudge against Ukraine. Both may be true.
The history recounted here suggests a third element: a long running pattern.
In 2016 and again in 2018, Moscow’s operatives, working through Manafort, sought Trump’s help in imposing a Kremlin-friendly order on Ukraine in the name of peace. In 2019 Trump held Ukraine’s weapons hostage to political favors. In October 2026, as a second termer, he invented a ceasefire that froze one of Ukraine’s most effective weapons, gutted the sanctions Congress had written to make Moscow pay, and declared that the country needed a new president.
Kilimnik’s plan also called for a new man in charge. His name was Viktor Yanukovych.
The details change. The beneficiary does not.
Topic: Why Vladimir Putin put Donald Trump in the White House (Read 92 times)