party [in Ukraine] before Yanukovych was ousted in 2014 and fled to Moscow. That party paid millions of dollars to yet another key figure in the Trump-Russia investigation, Paul Manafort, who was a top Yanukovych adviser before he became Trump’s campaign chairman.”8 Firtash is often accused, notes the Daily Beast, of being a “Moscow [Kremlin] front” because his work in the Russian gas industry eventually resulted in him being in business with the Russian government; indeed, his “thick business ties with the Kremlin” include “a 50-50 partnership with Russia’s state-backed Gazprom to sell gas in Ukraine.”9
Just as Artemenko and Weldon present as credible cutouts for Vekselberg, Rovt presents as a credible front man for Firtash. According to Bloomberg, “Through much of 2017, as the nascent Trump administration navigated controversies of its own making, Vekselberg was giving Russian officials and fellow businessmen vague yet certain assurances about his influence in the White House, according to six people who interacted with him at the time. He’d attended Trump’s swearing-in ceremony in Washington as a guest of [his American cousin and Columbus Nova founder Andrew] Intrater, who’d donated $250,000 to the inaugural committee, and come back with a newfound sense of clout, they said.”10 After being interviewed by Robert Mueller in March 2018, both Vekselberg and another noted “aluminum baron,” Oleg Deripaska, will be subjected to new sanctions, which by the end of 2018 have cost Vekselberg (in total) over $2 billion of his $16.4 billion fortune.11 The oligarch’s financial impetus to want sanctions removed is therefore profound as he helps coordinate the transmission of the Artemenko-Rovt-Weldon deal to Cohen and, thereafter, the White House.
In late December 2018, it will be revealed that Len Blavatnik, “a longtime business associate of Russian oligarchs Oleg Deripaska and Viktor Vekselberg,” had in 2015 suddenly amended his political donation habits, which for years had been bipartisan. As soon as Trump announces his candidacy, Blavatnik begins giving almost exclusively to Republicans, including “$3.5 million to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s PAC from 2015 to 2017” and a “hefty sum” to staunch Trump ally Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC).12 Trump will also enjoy Blavatnik’s largesse directly, with the Soviet-born billionaire donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.13
The story of how, as the Atlantic will put it, “a foreign national sought to influence the president through one of his closest advisers” begins during the presidential transition period, when Cohen and Vekselberg meet on January 9 to “discuss[] U.S.-Russia relations.”14 Just days later, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Columbus Nova, Intrater’s New York City investment management firm—one of whose biggest clients is the Vekselberg-owned company Renova Group—begins paying Cohen a consulting retainer (monthly payments of $83,333) that will total over $500,000 in seven months.15 Vekselberg’s cousin Andrew Intrater is not only the founder of Columbus Nova, but also its president.16
Cohen is thereafter introduced to Artemenko by Felix Sater, who had spent 2015 and 2016 secretly working on a Trump Tower Moscow deal with the Kremlin, Andrey Rozov, Cohen, and Trump. Trump’s Russian real estate “fixer” is therefore, over the period from September 2015 to February 2017, assisting Trump with both a multibillion-dollar property transaction and with a clandestine agreement on U.S. foreign policy—with both deals involving Trump and the Kremlin as consequential principals.17 Any connection between the two deals, such as each using Sater as a Trump- and Kremlin-connected intermediary, raises the prospect of a quid pro quo and therefore a federal charge of bribery; bribery is an impeachable offense under the U.S. Constitution.
The Kremlin-backed Artemenko-Rovt-Weldon-Vekselberg sanctions agreement Cohen ultimately ferries to the White House—with national security advisor Mike Flynn as its initial intended recipient—is fairly simple in its contours, and operates as a Putin-supported alternative to the Red Sea Conspiracy; the latter is a plan that likewise would lead to the ending of all U.S. sanctions on Russia, but potentially at a much higher long-term cost to the Kremlin via the loss of its alliance with Iran. By comparison, as summarized by McClatchy, the Artemenko-Rovt-Weldon-Vekselberg simply says that Trump will “lift[] sanctions on Moscow if the Kremlin withdraw[s] Russian forces from Eastern Ukraine,” though it would also “permit[] Russia to keep Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.”18 As deals go, it is squarely, even exclusively, to the benefit of the Kremlin, as under international law Putin’s armed forces are illegally in Eastern Ukraine; the deal is thus more properly seen as thin diplomatic cover for the unilateral ending of all U.S. sanctions on Russia, without any of the illusory (or merely transitory) benefits