Amid Russia scrutiny, Trump associates received informal Ukraine policy proposal

President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and a former business associate met privately in New York City last month with a member of the Ukrainian parliament to discuss a peace plan for that country that could give Russia long-term control over territory it seized in 2014 and lead to the lifting of sanctions against Moscow.

The meeting with Andrey Artemenko, the Ukrainian politician, involved Michael Cohen, a Trump Organization lawyer since 2007, and Felix Sater, a Russian emigre to the United States who worked on real estate projects with Trump’s company.

The occurrence of the meeting, first reported Sunday by the New York Times, 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 signaled 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.

The Times reported that Cohen said he left the proposal in a sealed envelope in the office of then-national security adviser Michael Flynn while visiting Trump in the White House. The meeting took place days before Flynn’s resignation last week following a report in the Washington Post that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about his discussions in December of election-related sanctions with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Cohen, speaking with the Post on Sunday, acknowledged that the meeting took place and that he had left with the peace proposal in hand.

But Cohen said he did not take the envelope to the White House and did not discuss it with anyone.

“I acknowledge that the brief meeting took place, but emphatically deny discussing this topic or delivering any documents to the White House and/or General Flynn,” Cohen said. He said he told the Ukrainian official that he could send the proposal to Flynn by writing him at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

The Times stood by its story Sunday.

“Mr. Cohen told The Times in no uncertain terms that he delivered the Ukraine proposal to Michael Flynn’s office at the White House. Mr. Sater told The Times that Mr. Cohen had told him the same thing,” Matt Purdy, a deputy managing editor, said in a statement to the Post.

The Times reported that the proposal discussed at last month’s meeting included a plan to require the withdrawal of Russian forces from Eastern Ukraine. Then, Ukrainian voters would decide in a referendum whether Crimea, the territory Russia seized in 2014, would be leased to Russia for a 50-year or a 100-year term. Artemenko said Russian leaders supported his proposal, the Times reported.

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. Manafort told the Post that he had “no role” in Artemenko’s initiative.

Cohen had worked for a decade for the Trump Organization, where he earned a reputation as a trusted and aggressive defender of the celebrity mogul. He left the company in January to assume a more amorphous role as Trump’s personal counsel. The role holds no public policy portfolio.

Sater confirmed that the meeting at the New York hotel took place at his request after he heard about the peace plan from Artemenko.

“I got excited about trying to stop a war,” he said. “I thought if this could improve conditions in three countries, good, so be it.”

Sater said he held the recent meeting out of honorable intent only.

“I was not practicing 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.”