As the Russian intrigues surrounding Donald Trump continue to pile up, The New York Times offers a bewildering new plot point in the unfolding spy-thriller melodrama roiling Washington: Michael Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, reportedly hand-delivered a secret “peace plan” to resolve the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, allegedly cooked up by a troika consisting of himself, a Trump business partner with ties to the Mafia, and a wealthy pro-Putin Ukrainian lawmaker.

In what the Times characterized as a bit of “diplomatic freelancing”, Cohen, who has served as special counsel to the Trump Organization since 2007, and Felix Sater, who worked with Trump on several real estate projects including the Trump SoHo in New York, met with Andrii Artemenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, to discuss a proposal outlining how Trump could lift U.S. sanctions against Moscow. Under the plan, Russian forces would be forced to withdraw from Eastern Ukraine and Ukrainian voters would decide in a referendum vote whether Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014, would be leased to Russia for either a 50 year or 100 year term. Cohen billed the troika’s meeting as an effort to end the ongoing conflict between the two Eastern European nations. “Who doesn’t want to help bring about peace?” Cohen asked the newspaper.

Of course, nothing is quite so simple. According to the Times, Artemenko is also hoping to effect the ouster of Petro Poroshenko, the pro-Western president of Ukraine. Artemenko reportedly belongs to the same pro-Putin bloc of lawmakers with which Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was involved. (Manafort told The Washington Post that he has “no role” in Artemenko’s initiative.) The Times reports that Artemenko views himself “as a Trump-style leader of a future Ukraine” and claimed to have evidence of corruption by Poroshenko that could lead to his ejection from office. “A lot of people will call me a Russian agent, a U.S. agent, a C.I.A. agent,” Artemenko said. “But how can you find a good solution between our countries if we do not talk?” Politico reports that Artemenko met with Trump campaign officials in Cleveland last summer during the Republican National Convention.

There is no indication of any wrongdoing by Cohen, Artemenko and Sater, who met at the Loews Regency hotel in Manhattan to hash out the plan, but the report does suggest that Russia may be seeking to circumvent the State Department by seeking diplomatic backchannels to President Trump. Last week, another Trump ally with ties to Russia, Mike Flynn, resigned as national security adviser after it was revealed that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about having discussed U.S. sanctions against Moscow with the Russian ambassador. Flynn was also the intended recipient of Artemenko’s peace plan, which Cohen reportedly hand-delivered to the retired general’s office.

Whether the plan was ever actually delivered remains a point of contention. Shortly after the Times published its report on Sunday, The Washington Post reached out to Cohen to confirm the story, at which point he confirmed that the meeting took place, but denied having delivered the proposal to Flynn. “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 told the Post, adding that he told Artmenko he could mail the document to Flynn at the White House. The Times, however, defended its original reporting in a statement to the Post. “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.