Frank Snepp, a former top CIA analyst, now a Peabody-Award winning journalist, specializes in national security issues. His CIA memoir, Decent Interval, triggered a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

(Author’s Note: Just when you thought you were safe from Donald Trump, Putin’s Plan B blitzkrieg into eastern Ukraine is beginning to look like a “back door” takeover scheme once secretly promoted by Trump insiders and Russian operatives. On top of this, it was Trump who piqued Putin’s worst instincts in the first place, by encouraging him to believe our strategic partnerships are transactional and our aid commitments up for barter. Ukrainian patriots are now paying the price in blood.)

No one would ever accuse the murderous Vladimir Putin of going soft on Ukraine. But the recent shift of his military operations to Ukraine’s eastern borderlands, following his failed assault on Kyiv, represents a dramatic step away from his original goal of outright military victory. It also suggests a growing preference for a “backdoor” approach to victory along lines once envisioned by operatives from his own intelligence services—and two of Donald Trump’s closest associates.

On March 25, Colonel General Sergei Rudskoy, first deputy chief of Moscow’s General Staff, declared that Russian forces, having accomplished the “first stage” of their Ukraine “operation,” would now concentrate on their “top goal—the liberation of Donbas.”

This is the storied region in the easternmost section of the country where Donetsk and Luhansk have proclaimed themselves “republics” and pro-Russian separatists backed by Putin operatives have been battling government forces since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. 

The Donbas is 450 miles from Kyiv and therefore a secondary theater of operation, not exactly where you would expect to see Russia’s final victory parade. But given its location, it is key to one of Putin’s major fallback objectives, creation of the Russia-controlled enclave along the eastern border.

A shadow of this “Second Ukraine” is already taking shape. Putin’s forces appear to be consolidating their control along a crescent bending from an area east of Chernihiv in the north down through Kharkiv, Donbas, Mariupol and along the Sea-of-Azov coastline to the Crimea peninsula.

Once fortified, this enclave will be Putin’s political ace in the hole, a powerful force multiplier in any future negotiations and a secure rear base area from which he can launch military strikes to strengthen his bargaining hand. It may also provide a home for a Putin-backed front government capable of lending an aura of legitimacy to his demands for “restoring” all occupied territory to Mother Russia.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could find himself under pressure to treat the puppet “president” of Donbas as a political equal, a legitimate sparring partner in any international forum to determine the fate of his country.

As an old Saigon hand, I am reminded of the communist effort in 1973 to set up a supposedly self-governing mini-state along South Vietnam’s western border—a “Third Vietnam”—fronted by a “Provisional Revolutionary Government” and designed to give throw-weight to Hanoi’s political demands.

If Putin is headed in this direction, or somewhere near it, he has two fully developed roadmaps in his knapsack, two faux “peace proposals,” to guide him.

They were devised several years ago by spies and surrogates operating on his string and promoted by two prominent recruits from MAGA World, Trump’s one-time campaign Manager Paul Manafort, and his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen (whose wife happens to be Ukrainian).

These two “peace” plans differ from each other in various particulars. But both would secure Russian control of eastern Ukraine under the guise of a negotiated settlement and establish a Trojan Horse regime there to wreak havoc on the rest of the country.

The Cohen Gambit 

Much of what we know about the politics and policies that produced these plans comes from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose separate Trump-Russia reports were published in 2019 and 2020, respectively. But for unexplained reasons, neither volume provides specific background on the proposal associated with Michael Cohen.

What we know about it is based on extensive real-time press coverage.

A bombshell story, published in The New York Times on February 19, 2017, right after the Trump inauguration, introduced the Cohen plan to the public.

Follow-up reports in The Atlantic magazine, Mother Jones and Vanity Fair, among other periodicals, added colorful, often lavish detail. A year later, in May 2018, a brief news item highlighted a Mueller Q & A with Cohen’s Ukrainian collaborator, a far-right pro-Putin parliamentarian named Andrey Artemenko.

Reporters variously described this unlikely peace-maker as “burly,” overbearing, obsessed with his own importance and marginal in terms of real power in Kyiv. By general account he fancied himself a Slavic version of Donald Trump, with an inside track to the man himself since his wife professed to know Melania from shared modeling gigs in eastern Europe. 

In early 2017, many reformers in Kyiv seemed convinced (according to their own press leaks) that Artemenko had been plucked from obscurity by Putin himself to carry out the single mission of bringing his concept of a Ukrainian “peace” to Trump and his minions. 

“All these signals are coming either from the Russian Federation or from allies within the country,” Ukrainian parliament member Mustafa Nayyem assured The Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe.

Artemenko himself gave credence to the theory by bragging to The New York Times (as reported in its original story) that he had “received encouragement” from “top aides to Mr. Putin.” 

The peace formula he and Cohen espoused called for a lifting of U.S. sanctions levied on Russia for seizing Crimea, a Putin-endorsed ceasefire in the embattled separatist east, and an agreement by all parties to support a nationwide referendum on whether Crimea, already in Putin’s pocket, was to be “leased” to Russia for a period of 50 to 100 years.

“Maybe it’s dual management of Crimea, or maybe it’s a lease like the Panama Canal and Hong Kong,” Artemenko told Foreign Policy, adding that his proposal more closely resembled a “road map” than a set plan.

“It should be obvious that there is no military solution, only a diplomatic one,” he insisted.

The cast of characters who assembled around Cohen and his Ukrainian pal to make their dream come true would have shamed a clown car.

The most colorful of them was Felix Sater, a Russian-born American who allegedly brokered Artemenko’s introduction to Cohen.

A self-professed “investment” adviser to Trump, Sater boasted an impressive rap sheet, having done jail time for smashing a glass into a tormentor’s face during a Manhattan bar fight. Before that, he had pleaded guilty to stock manipulation in a mafia-related scam.

For nearly two years Sater had worked with Cohen to advance plans for a Trump Tower project in Moscow, the same undertaking that was now feeding fevered speculation about Trump’s own ties to Russia.  

Funding for the Cohen initiative came from Russian oligarch Viktor Veselberg, whose assets had been impacted by US sanctions—this, from Vanity Fair. A cheering section, led by former Republican Congressman Carl Weldon, whose cozy ties to Russia had unsettled fellow lawmakers, rounded out this comedy act.

The story of how these guys got their proposal to the White House is a case of Forrest Gump-meets-Mr. Bumble.

Several days after the inauguration, Cohen reportedly received a final draft from Artemenko and Sater over a liquid breakfast at a posh Washington-area hotel. He then popped over to the White House and dropped it off at the office of Trump’s newly installed national security adviser, Michael Flynn. But before Flynn could act on it, literally a day or two later, he was ousted for having lied about discussions he’d had with Moscow’s ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak, during the transition period—about Russian sanctions, no less.

The coup de grace followed quickly when The New York Times published its inaugural story about the Cohen-Artemenko demarche. Carl Weldon, the iffy ex-Congressman, was outraged at what he saw as untimely media intrusion on Ukraine’s last best chance for peace. “We were so close,” he wailed to a confidante who promptly leaked his plaint to The Atlantic.

Affecting a stiff upper lip, Artemenko continued to slog around Capitol Hill for a while, flogging the proposal to gullible lawmakers. One of his contacts, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, sponsored a resolution in mid-April 2017, calling airily for a political solution in Ukraine. Artemenko claimed his proposal had shaped the measure. Portman’s press office denied it.

The last we heard of Artemenko in any major news story came a year later when Politico quoted him as saying he had recently been questioned by Robert Mueller.

The Manafort Gambit

Investigators for the Mueller and the Senate teams gave exhaustive treatment to the other Ukraine peace plan, the one linked to Paul Manafort.

Its true author, they discovered, was a pint-sized Russian dynamo named Konstantin Kilimnik. Mueller described him as having ties to Russian intelligence. The Senate panel pegged him outright as a Russian spy and found it likely that he had collaborated with the Putin hackers who broke into Democratic campaign computers in 2016.

According to Senate investigators, both Kilimnik and Manafort answered to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with extensive investments in Ukraine and elsewhere. The Senate report described him “as a proxy for the Russian state and intelligence services,” and cast him as a specialist in precisely the kind of cyber intrusion and disinformation initiatives that drove Russia’s assault on the US electoral process.

In 2004 Deripaska hired Manafort and Kilimnik to consult for his business ventures in Ukraine and elsewhere, then had them do double duty as strategy advisers to pro-Russia politicians, including thuggish Viktor Yanukovych who, with their help and some ballot tampering won the Ukrainian presidential election of 2010.

Four years later, amid the Euromaidan uprising, a spontaneous eruption of pro-western sentiment, Yanukovych was booted out of the presidential palace in Kyiv and fled to Russia.

But gone was not forgotten. He would soon become a key player in the peace scenario cobbled together by Kilimnik in collaboration with Manafort and Deripaska.

If the plan had been implemented—let’s call it the “Manafort” draft for convenience—Yanukovych would have been hauled out of exile and installed as front man for the prospective Putin-controlled enclave in east Ukraine.

The Mueller and Senate reports have Deripaska and/or his operatives waxing conspiratorial about the peace plan and Yanukovych’s role in it through 2018.

The Plan Evolves  

Yanukovych’s ouster had left Putin stunned. Obsessed as he was with restoring Russia to its past imperial glory, he could not abide the idea of once fully owned-and-operated Ukraine tilting westward—and promptly sought to rebalance the scales by seizing Crimea, then re-stoking separatist fighters in the Russian-speaking Donbas region.

The following September, 2014, he put a happy face on his banditry by acceding to the so-called Minsk Protocol, which had been drawn up by Moscow and Kyiv, with international mediators looking on, and underwritten by representatives of the separatist regions in east Ukraine.

While advertised as a ceasefire pact with frills, it effectively froze the violence-wracked status quo and conferred a crude legitimacy on Putin-bred fifth columnists in Donbas decked out as persecuted Russian-speaking locals.

To make sure they had every advantage, Putin soon flooded the region with the same “little green men” who had nabbed Crimea, Spetsnaz operatives with no insignia on their olive-drab fatigues but plenty of firepower at their disposal.

Hostilities re-ignited. Negotiations resumed amid heavy breathing from western capitals and in February 2015 Minsk II was born. It was mostly a reassertion of noble intent by the signatories and endorsers of the original agreement.

One of the unintended consequences of Minsk II was a sudden scramble among freebooters and grifters who spied an opportunity to ingratiate themselves with Putin by helping him wage war on Ukraine by other means.

Enter Kilimnik and Manafort with their peace proposal.

The first reference to it in any of Kilimnik’s extant writings appears in an email he posted to the chief political officer at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv on May 21, 2015. Claiming to be keying off something overheard from third parties, he raised the prospect of mounting a new political movement in eastern Ukraine with Yanukovych as its figurehead.

A few weeks later, in the United States, another cog fell into place. In July 2015, during a GOP rally in Las Vegas, an “exchange student” from Siberia, Maria Butina, who would eventually admit to being a Russian agent, asked the dark horse at the podium if he supported sanctions against Russia.

Donald Trump responded: “[W]here we have the strength, I don’t think you’d need the sanctions.”

For Kalimnik and Manafort, this was an invitation to dance. Here was a media-savvy mogul with financial ties to Russia and oversized (potentially blackmailable) appetites playing to Putin’s core obsession.

Could Ukraine bring them together?

The answer to that question became increasingly apparent as Trump climbed up the popularity polls, dropping bons mots about Putin at every whistle stop, exuding limitless admiration for all things Russian and a commensurate distaste for NATO.

Manafort leapt to the opportunity. Through an old friend, political dirty trickster Roger Stone, and capitalizing on his own past advisory services to Gerald Ford and Bush I, he thrust his way into Trump’s campaign and landed a job there as manager of the upcoming party convention.

For Manafort, this was a hustler’s equivalent of killing two birds with one “stone”: Not only was he now positioned to manipulate the candidate himself, the political payoff he could deliver for Russia would enable him to square accounts with his controller, Deripaska, to whom he had become indebted financially because of busted business deals between them. Turning Trump into a tightly managed agent of influence for Putin would clear the ledger with Deripaska as nothing else would.

It wouldn’t hurt Manafort’s standing with Putin, either.

On April 11, according to the Mueller report, Manafort secretly discoursed with Kilimnik by email about possible ways of cashing in on his new access to Trump. He soon whetted appetites by forwarding campaign polling data to Kilimnik that would have been pure gold for anyone (like Russian intel operatives) interested in microtargeting a dirty-leaks campaign against Hillary Clinton.

The following July Manafort nudged the candidate in the desired direction on Ukraine (in furtherance of Putin’s interests) by rejiggering the party platform to remove a stated commitment to lethal aid for Kyiv.

In early August, just after Trump had publicly invited Russian hackers to search for Hillary’s “hidden emails,” Kilimnik traveled to New York with a newly defined line of march.

He and Manafort met discreetly at a midtown cigar bar to discuss mobilizing the candidate behind their ever-gestating Ukraine peace deal. But there was a new wrinkle. Yanukovych wouldn’t just head up an emergent pro-Putin political movement in the east. He would be “elected” to lead a new “autonomous republic” in the “more industrialized region of Donbas.”

Manafort would later acknowledge to Mueller’s investigators that this was simply a “backdoor” means for Putin to gain control eastern Ukraine.

The stage was set.

But later in the month, the show fell apart when Ukrainian reformers leaked word that Manafort had once received black funds, never reported to the IRS, from Yanukovych and his equally pro-Putin political cronies. The resulting furor forced Manafort off the campaign and into political limbo.

His co-conspirator, the ever-resourceful Kilimnik, remained unfazed. Indeed, once it became apparent in early fall that Trump had a real shot at the prize, everybody who saw him as a potential pawn for Russia, including Kilimnik, Andrey Artemenko, and other advocates of a Trump-Putin “peace” in Ukraine, went into overdrive.

Simultaneously, Russia-backed insurgents in Donbas upped the carnage, aiming to sabotage the Minsk agreements and clear the way for a better deal for Moscow.

Julia Ioffe of The Atlantic mused sagely about these developments in an article published soon afterwards. “According to my U.S. sources,” she wrote, “the Russians started putting sticks in the wheels of the Minsk ceasefire negotiations in October, when they saw Trump’s election as increasingly likely, hoping that with Trump in the White House, they would get more favorable terms in Ukraine.”

With Trump’s surprise victory, Putin achieved the unimaginable, installation in the Oval Office of someone who walked, talked and seemingly thought like a Manchurian Candidate, though it was always anybody’s guess what was on Trump’s mind.

On December 8, during the transition period, Kilimnik reminded Manafort, who was hovering on the fringes of the President-elect’s brat pack, that there was unfinished business to attend to—the peace deal they had concocted.

In an extraordinarily explicit email, extensively referenced by Mueller and his Senate counterparts, Kilimnik explained to Manafort how the proposal was to be implemented and how Trump (“DT”) could nudge things along.

“All that is required to start the process is a very minor wink (or slight push) from DT,” he noted, “and a decision [by DT] to authorize you to be a special representative.”

Once that switch was thrown, he said, Manafort could be in Russia “within ten days and could count on Yanukovych’s full support.

Yanukovych “guarantees your reception at the very top level,” he assured his friend. He also described Yanukovych as being confident “DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.”

There was no immediate follow-through on any of this. The “why” remains elusive. Perhaps it was because of intensifying FBI interest in the Trump-Russia relationship and growing public unease about the same.

Also, as a newcomer to Washington, Trump had neither the savvy nor the staff to address even the most uncomplicated policy issues.

But shutting down was not an option for Manafort and Kilimnik. They had convinced Deripaska, Yanukovych and possibly Putin himself of Trump’s exploitability and knew there would be no forgiveness if the prize slipped away.

So, they kept on plugging—discreetly. According to the Senate investigators, Kilimnik, Manafort and one or two close associates conferred secretly about the peace plan in January, February, and August of 2017, at which point Kilimnik came up with a written prospectus ponderously titled, “Reframing the Russia Ukraine Conflict In pursuit of an Outside-the-box Pathway to Peace.”

He and Manafort were back at it early the following year, honing and polishing their handiwork.

Anyone who cares to slog through the first 123 pages of the Senate report will find a copy of the peace plan as it stood at that point. It is a three-page update of Kilimnik’s original draft from two years before, now slugged, “A New Initiative to Settle the Conflict in South-East of Ukraine.”

Senate investigators wrote that it was designed “to gain Trump’s support,” though they didn’t explain how that would work.

On February 21, 2018, Manafort posted a copy to Trump’s official pollster Tony Fabrizio, an old friend of Manafort’s from Ukraine. Based on the Senate findings, Fabrizio was under instructions to use it in preparing a public opinion survey to determine how Ukrainian citizens might respond to Yanukovych’s return to the political scene.

It is not clear whether the survey was ever conducted. But Yanukovych’s popularity or lack of it would not have mattered. The plan in this latest iteration called for Putin and President Trump to impose Yanukovych on the intended beneficiaries.

Kilimnik’s voice comes through loud and clear in the draft. Far from being a neutral explicator of dry political precepts, he rages and thunders like Moses newly arrived from the Mount.

Citing increased violence in the eastern region of Ukraine, he accuses President Petro Poroshenko of having brushed aside the Minsk agreements and the ceasefire they prescribed. The only way to restore law and order, as he sees it, is for Trump and Putin to wade arm in arm into this mess and get the new semi-republic up and running.

If everything goes as planned (and as dictated by Kilimnik), this new “Autonomous Region of Donbas” (ARD) will have its own parliament and prime minister and sufficient backing from the U.S. and Russia to hold its own against Kyiv in negotiating a permanent peace.

Collaboration between Trump and Putin is the “key driver,” as Kilimnik explains it, the only thing that can bring the ARD into being and ensure the involvement of “Mr. Yanukovych in the peaceful settlement process.”

Trump, acting on his own, is to make a “practical effort” to convince Poroshenko to accept this new entity. But he and Putin must then, according to Kilimnik, join forces to persuade the ARD’s parliament to anoint Yanukovych prime minister.

“Election of Mr. Yanukovych as head of the ARD with consent of the United States and Russia will significantly increase chances of peaceful settlement of the conflict,” he writes. “Implementation of the plan… can in fact become a starting point for [a] return of peace into Ukraine, where the United States should play a leading role in restoring peace and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”

He adds, “Personal participation of the US President will lead to stopping the bloodshed, returning political balance and stability in Ukraine, creating a stable and effective pro-European legislative majority, [capa]able of implementing effective reforms.”

There is some awkwardness to Kilimnik’s attempt to make all this seem palatable to Kyiv. “This plan will be beneficial for the Ukrainian government,” he maintains, “because Poroshenko will be able to implement his election promise of 2014 and end the war.”

As for the delicate issue of what comes next, Kilimnik prefers to leave it up to the parliament in Kyiv to “determine the legal status and timeframe of incremental reintegration of the ARD into Ukraine.”

But until that happens, the ARD Prime Minister (Yanukovych) will be much more than a placeholder. Instead, he is to serve, in Kilimnik’s imagining, as “a legitimate and plenipotentiary representative of the ARD in talks with international structures within the framework of programs to rebuild the economy and overcome the consequences of the armed conflict.”

Doubtless realizing that Yanukovych will be a hard sell, Kilimnik rewrites history to make him seem a man for all seasons, not just a flak for Putin who got tossed out the door in 2014.

Ignoring Yanukovych’s proven talent for exacerbating factional tensions, he claims this Putin proxy “did everything possible for peaceful settlement in 2011 and signed a plan of peaceful settlement with the Opposition on February 21, 2014.” If these initiatives didn’t work, the fault, as Kilimnik sees it, lies with the pro-democracy agitators who toppled Yanukovych. “This plan subsequently was blown up by the radicals,” he declares flatly.

Kilimnik engages in some doubletalk about democracy (with the emphasis on “double”). Despite insisting that Trump and Putin force Yanukovych on the ARD, he argues incomprehensibly that “support of this initiative by the United States will be a fair and democratic decision with respect to Mr. Yanukovych.”

Any way you read it, this is an exquisitely filigreed prescription for cramming a pro-Putin “peace” down Ukrainian throats – and a chilling look forward to a “Plan B” ending to Putin’s current offensive.

It is particularly relevant to the latter because reports out of Ukraine indicate Putin’s preferred candidate to replace embattled President Zelensky is—Viktor Yanukovych. In early March of this year a Kyiv news site, Ukrayinska Pravda, posted that Yanukovych is to be put in charge if Russian troops topple Zelensky.

This conjures a prospect that would test the nerves and conscience of any right-minded decision-maker 5,000 miles west of ground zero—e.g., Joe Biden.

If Putin were to attempt in the near future to negotiate an opportunistic peace based on the Manafort-Kilimnik model, Biden’s role would be baked in. He would be expected/forced/abjured to collude in the process, implicitly or on paper, just as Trump was invited to do. How could Biden do that, given the atrocities we now know Russian troops have committed?

Peace Plans, Extortion, Escape and Collusion

One of the more interesting aspects of Kilimnik’s final draft is its time stamp. Why did he and Manafort choose early February 2018 to unveil it?  

Simple answer: It was their last best chance. 

READ PART TWO, “How Trump Gamed Ukraine: The Payoff For Putin,” here.