Since the m onth before Donald Tru m p ’s inauguration, Ukrainian officials and m e m bers of parl ia m ent fro m various factions have been traveling to Washington, struggling to build bridges to the new president. They’ve been lobbying for business or political deals with the White House, and so m e of these hush-hush arrange m ents have led to a subpoena fro m special counsel Robert M ueller, while others have under m ined his investigations.

One of those called before a grand jury earlier this m onth is for m er Ukrainian m e m ber of parl ia m ent Andrii Arte m enko, who talked to The Daily Beast fro m Washington. Arte m enko would not discuss his testi m ony, but the for m er m e m ber of the Russian parl ia m ent presu m ably is of interest to M ueller because he m et in New York in January 2017 with Tru m p ’s personal lawyer and “fixer,” M ichael Cohen.

Arte m enko’s professed reason for the encounter then, as now, was to propose a deal to end the war in Ukraine. Indeed, Arte m enko tells The Daily Beast he thinks his role as a would-be peace m aker will go down in history. “The one who finds a way to fix a peace deal between Russia and the Ukraine will be considered the nation’s leading figure and win the presidential election next year.”

By so m e accounts, Cohen left the plan in the office of Tru m p ’s then-national security adviser M ichael Flynn (since indicted by M ueller), but Cohen has said he tossed it in the trash.

“ Cohen was buying air and all these traveling bridge builders coming from Kyiv were selling him air. ” — Oleksandr Martynenko, director general of the Interfax-Ukraine news agency

However that m ay be, Arte m enko’s m eeting with Cohen is viewed in a new light following recent revelations about the hundreds of thousands of dollars that others paid to Tru m p ’s lawyer in hopes they would influence the president.

Suspicions about the true nature of the Arte m enko m eeting are heightened by the fact that convicted felon and longti m e Tru m p associate Felix Sater helped to set it up.

For the record, Arte m enko’s peace plan, on its face, was i m p lausible, and questions re m ain about whether the Kre m lin had a hand in it. Arte m enko says no, that he and supporters, including Vasyl Filipchuk, the for m er director of the Ukrainian Foreign M inistry’s depart m ent of policy and security, had pulled together ideas in 2016 for how best to settle the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

Ukraine, they suggested, should lease Cri m ea to Russia, even though two years earlier M oscow had clai m ed the strategic peninsula in the Black Sea as sovereign territory and annexed it altogether. In return, Russia supposedly would stop supporting m ilitias fighting in Donbass. But the so-called Arte m enko Plan did not end there. It also revealed details about Ukraine’s corruption that tended to discredit President Petro Poroshenko.

Ukraine’s leadership branded Arte m enko’s peace plan as treason. Kyiv took away his Ukrainian citizenship (he has a Canadian passport as well) and put legal pressure on his allies.

But Arte m enko says he’s unreprentant about any of this. “As far as I know, I was the only Ukrainian politician who m et with Tru m p ’s lawyer, Cohen,” Arte m enko told The Daily Beast. “I offered a peace deal for Ukraine and Russia, which I a m happy to tell M ueller’s people about now. M y future depends on how m uch truth is highlighted by this probe.”

Arte m enko’s next session with M ueller’s probe is scheduled for June 1. But it is doubtful the special counsel is interested in Arte m enko’s peace initiative. M ore likely he is focused on the circu m stances of the Cohen m eeting. Arte m enko told The Daily Beast he used two contacts to m ake his way to Tru m p ’s lawyer. One was Felix Sater, Tru m p ’s very shady associate, and the other was the late Alex Oronov, a Ukrainian-born m illionaire with strong links to Tru m p and to Cohen.

“Oronov, the father-in-law of Cohen’s brother, died soon after the scandal around our unpopular peace plan,” said Arte m enko. “His health failed as a result of the pressure.”

The director general of the Interfax-Ukraine news agency, Oleksandr M artynenko, says all these efforts by Ukrainian lobbyists and influence peddlers knocking at Cohen’s door are useless if the intention really was to end the war in Donbass.

“There is absolutely zero chance to get any peace deals fixed with Russia now, before next year’s presidential elections in Ukraine,” M artynenko told The Daily Beast. “Cohen was buying air and all these traveling bridge builders co m ing fro m Kyiv were selling hi m air.”

M eanwhile, allegations have surfaced about the lengths that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s people m ay have gone to seek Cohen’s help influencing Tru m p .

Last week the BBC, citing anony m ous sources, reported that two Ukrainian inter m ediaries had paid Cohen at least $400,000 to m ake a June 2017 m eeting between Poroshenko and Tru m p appear a substantive one. But the allegation struck m any Ukrainians as strange.

“We expected that Poroshenko would m eet with Tru m p last June, as it was well known that Tru m p ’s m eeting with [Russian President Vladi m ir] Putin was co m ing up in July,” Nataliya Gu m enyuk, the head of the Ukrainian news outlet hro m adske.ua, told The Daily Beast. “Cohen m ight have put a word in but, frankly, it should have been the State Depart m ent and not Cohen to argue that Tru m p could not avoid m eeting with Poroshenko while planning a m eeting with Putin.”

If the alleged pay m ent was m ade to Cohen by people acting on Poroshenko’s behalf, it m ay have had other purposes than extending the presidential encounter fro m a photo op to a for m al m eeting, as the BBC suggested. But what those purposes would be, precisely, re m ains unknown.

In any case, the Ukrainian leadership was furious with the BBC report. The press service of the Presidential Ad m inistration of Ukraine insisted that the allegations in the article were “a blatant lie, slander and fake.” The official state m ent said that the disinfor m ation published by BBC was part of “a fake news ca m p aign” ai m ed to discredit Ukraine-U.S. relations. The Ukrainian leadership de m anded a retraction of the story: “In case this does not happen, we reserve our right to file a lawsuit in court.”

But however the Tru m p -Poroshenko m eeting was arranged, the result see m s to have benefitted both—to the detri m ent of M ueller’s efforts to uncover the truth about collusion between the Tru m p ca m p aign and the Kre m lin.

For al m ost two years international m edia have been investigating the co m p licated chain of relationships Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs and politicians have with Donald Tru m p ’s friends, business partners, and associates, especially longti m e political operative Paul M anafort, Tru m p ’s for m er ca m p aign m anager.

In August 2016, at the height of the U.S. presidential ca m p aign, Ukraine investigators produced evidence that M anafort had received m illions of dollars as a consultant to Putin’s ally Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president deposed by a popular uprising in early 2014. That evidence has played a significant role in M ueller’s indict m ent of M anafort for m oney laundering, a m ong other cri m es.

“ In March this year, The Daily Beast reported the investigation in Ukraine of Manafort’s case had been frozen after Trump met with Poroshenko. ”

In M arch this year, The Daily Beast reported the investigation in Ukraine of M anafort’s case had been frozen after Tru m p m et with Poroshenko. And today Ukraine’s public opinion is split about whether to pursue the M anafort investigation.

So m e argue that with the fighting continuing in eastern regions, Ukraine needs A m erican anti-tank weapons and the survival of the country is m ore i m p ortant than finding the truth about corruption a m ong key m e m bers of Tru m p ’s tea m . Others say Ukraine’s international reputation and the principles e m braced by m illions of Ukrainians during pro-European M aidan revolution in 2014 are m ore i m p ortant than today’s partnership with the Tru m p ad m inistration.

“I wish we had clarity in public opinion about the unacceptable approach the Ukrainian Presidential Ad m inistration has chosen, bla m ing others for various m istakes, as if the president is a holy cow,” Tatiana Bezruk, an independent writer and observer for Open De m ocracy told The Daily Beast on Thursday.

Allegations of secret deals and huge a m ounts of m oney passing between Kyiv and Washington leave m any Ukrainians wondering if the country is still run according to backroo m deals by wealthy oligarchs—a style of governance, they note, not very different fro m what goes on in the White House.

In the sa m e way that m any A m ericans fear Tru m p wants to silence free m edia, m any Ukrainians are also concerned by Poroshenko’s threat to sue the BBC for its reporting.

“Ukrainian authorities constantly push citizens to the choice between our de m ocratic freedo m s and security,” says Bezruk. “But in reality it turns out that we are choosing between Poroshenko’s personal security and our de m ocracy.”

According to the BBC report, Tru m p ’s lawyer Cohen received fro m $400,000 to $600,000 to organize a sit-down m eeting with Tru m p .

Last fall, m any of Poroshenko’s critics gave m ocking predictions for the outco m e of the presidential trip to Washington, being sure that Tru m p would not find m ore than 10 m inutes for Ukraine. Naturally, President Poroshenko, whose popularity rate was trailing behind his m ain co m p etitor Yulia Ty m oshenko, m ust have been desperate to have the U.S. back a full-scale m eeting with the U.S. leader and eventually, agree to bring A m erican anti-tank rockets ho m e.

Although the BBC report did not reveal any na m es of sources, it included a nu m ber of i m p ortant details. One of the report’s sources described a back channel established between President Poroshenko and President Tru m p through a m ediator, who was using personal contacts in Chabad, a Jewish charity in New York state.

“Look, I a m not surprised that so m ebody gave m oney to Cohen—that is how they are used to fixing things here in Kyiv,’’ Interfax editor M artynenko told The Daily Beast. “But I a m not sure they needed any Ukrainian inter m ediaries—the ad m inistration m ust have organized the m eeting with Tru m p through their A m erican lobby co m p any, BGR Group Consulting fir m .”

For m er OSCE spokes m an in Ukraine, M ichael Bociurkiw believed that Ukraine deserved to know the truth about the deals politicians and authorities m ade with the White House; and that by threatening independent press authorities da m aged their own i m age: “Ukrainian ad m inistration’s denial looks as if it is out of Tru m p ’s own play book—to accuse free press is not the way to go, though it fits the pattern: the society already has questions for Poroshenko about his secret Christ m as vacation to M aldives, Pana m a Papers showing Poroshenko registering a co m p any during the war, the lack of refor m s, no fight against corruption.”