Where things get more complicated is in comparing the specifics of the Russia and Ukraine cases—at least to the extent that we understand them so far. In both cases, a foreign government appears to have influenced the U.S. election in significant but ultimately unquantifiable ways. The Ukrainian government announced an investigation that contributed to the downfall of Trump’s campaign chief, while the Russian government is thought to have spread fake news and hacked and distributed Democratic Party emails that helped shape the political debate in the final stretch of the presidential campaign.

But there are also critical differences in the nature of the influence exercised by these governments: It remains unclear, for instance, whether the Ukrainian investigation into Manafort was expressly designed to weaken Trump, whereas U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded with confidence that Russia’s cyber campaign was intended to hurt Clinton and help Trump. The Russians stealthily dealt in stolen emails, the Ukrainians in evidence collected as part of a public investigation. The Ukrainian probe has been linked to a government agency and a crusading lawmaker, but not to the president himself; the Russian campaign seems to have been directed from Vladimir Putin on down. The Ukraine story involves one government investigation and one woman’s side project; the Russia story involves, as The New York Times once described it, a foreign government-sponsored “cyberespionage and information-warfare campaign” to disrupt an election without precedent in American history.

As Kenneth Vogel, one of the journalists who wrote the original Politico article, noted on Twitter on Wednesday, “overall Russian gov’t effort to sabotage Hillary/boost Trump was obviously MUCH MORE CONCERTED than anything done by anyone in the Ukrainian gov’t.”

“The Ukrainian operation was pretty small beer. It just didn’t rise to the level” of the Russian influence campaign, David Stern, a Ukraine-based journalist and the co-author with Vogel of the Politico article, told me. “I think we’re dealing in very broad strokes with something similar, but when you get into the details, they’re totally different situations.”

In terms of collusion between U.S. political operatives and a foreign government, the evidence is mixed in both instances. In the case of Russia, the clearest indication of collusion so far is Donald Trump Jr.’s eagerness to meet with a Russian lawyer who he thought had dirt on Clinton from the Russian government. Here was a figure at the highest reaches of the Trump campaign seeking out opposition research from a purported representative of a U.S. adversary. Based on what we know so far, however, the meeting didn’t produce further collaboration between the parties. Relative to Trump Jr., Chalupa was a lower-level operative with a far more tenuous connection to the presidential campaign she was associated with. But she claims to have received tangible “help” from actual government officials (albeit U.S. allies), not merely the promise of help from figures with apparent ties to that government.