GENEVA, Switzerland — One evening in late October, the skies above Dnipropetrovsk whirled with the sound of helicopters. Below, armored vehicles and a 500-strong SWAT team moved in assault formation. Even by Ukrainian standards, it was a dramatic scene. As he was dragged from his doorstep, the target of the exaggerated raid — the businessman-turned-politician Hennadiy Korban — seemed as shocked as anyone. Regardless of what he might have done, it just wasn’t how things were done in Ukraine.

Korban was airlifted away, first to Chernihiv, a provincial town north of Kiev, and then to the capital itself. His allies immediately cried foul, claiming political persecution. Prosecutors responded, after some delay, with an official explanation. The operation was “part of an ongoing battle with organized criminal groups,” they said. Korban was responsible for “kidnappings” and the “misappropriation of donations given for the frontline.”

A self-styled “conflict manager” who made his name in Ukraine’s ultraviolent 1990s, Korban could hardly profess moral purity. But claims of selective justice from a politically motivated prosecutor’s office rang too true, and Korban's plight attracted support from quarters not ordinarily sympathetic to him.

It was, after all, no secret that Korban’s boss — the spiky, potent billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky — was in serious conflict with the country’s president, Petro Poroshenko.

* * *

On the day of Korban’s arrest, Kolomoisky was 2,000 kilometers away at his lakeside apartment in Geneva. The billionaire slept, as he says he always sleeps, a full night, waking untroubled at 10 a.m. He learned of Korban’s arrest four hours after the event.

“I live my life to my own rhythm and take a fatalistic view of everything,” he says. “If things happen, they happen.” Kolomoisky was not the only person unaware of the operation. Several members of the government, including the prime minister, were deliberately kept in the dark.

Kolomoisky is a complicated and provocative character; a complete contrast to the anodyne bling of the lobby bar at Geneva’s President Wilson hotel, where this interview takes place. Almost without noticing, Kolomoisky switches between a sharp business brain and hotheadedness, between the most courteous European manners and expletive-laden tirades.

Behind one shoulder are the paradisiac vistas of the Wilson Quay and Lake Geneva, a suitable backdrop for a Bond movie. Behind the other is a Christmas tree constructed entirely from fluffy, white teddy bears. Kolomoisky’s rounded build and white beard, since shaved, complete the seasonal look.

The oligarch begins in conciliatory mode. His associate’s arrest was “the predictable result of the country’s war effort,” he says. Everyone was a patriot: Korban was a patriot, Poroshenko was a patriot, and Kolomoisky was a patriot.

Korban had broken some rules. He said things he shouldn’t have said — probably. He didn’t know his place in “the hierarchy of power” at a time of war — sure. He was insubordinate — of course. Then again, some wounds ran deep. Korban had spent most of last year fighting separatism on the frontline, and there were serious differences of opinion about military tactics. He had strong feelings about the crushing reverse inflicted at Ilovaisk last summer, where several hundred Ukrainian soldiers were wiped out in a Russian-led ambush.

In the days following Korban's arrest, Ukrainian media looked for signals from Kolomoisky about how he was intending to play out the crisis. Several commentators sensed the oligarch was somehow attempting to distance himself from his junior partner. This is his position today — or initially at least. Korban was “independent,” Kolomoisky says, and any idea of him being “my man” was “journalistic parrot talk.”

Kolomoisky’s assertion of being an entirely neutral bystander does not hold for too long, however. Eventually, he accepts the obvious: The arrest was about more than just Korban.

Poroshenko had taken a strike at him — Kolomoisky — he says; and he had done so because he was the only oligarch unwilling to cut a deal. Rinat Akhmetov, Viktor Pinchuk, Sergei Lyovochkin, Dmytro Firtash — these other oligarchs were exactly where the president wanted them, dependent.

“Take Firtash in Vienna,” he says. “I’ve seen him a couple of times in the last months, and the guy is in a terrible state, morally defeated, no fight in him. The only thing he is thinking about is how to avoid extradition to the U.S.”

Other oligarchs had chosen a path of cooperation. The Yanukovych-associate Sergei Lyovochkin, for example, was now “openly collaborating” with the president. He was hoping to become prime minister — an unlikely proposition, “but, then again, no one expected the criminal Yanukovych to become president either.”

“Tell me,” he continues. “Could a political figure in the U.K. be arrested if the head of state has a conflict with a leading businessman? Could Milibad [sic] be imprisoned over a battle with Lakshmi Mittal? Could he?”

Kolomoisky begins to free himself from any visage of political correctness. The only difference between Poroshenko and Yanukovych, he says, is “a good education, good English and lack of a criminal record.” Everything else is the same: “It’s the same blood, the same flesh reincarnated. If Yanukovych was a lumpen dictator, Poroshenko is the educated usurper, slave to his absolute power, craven to absolute power.”

The last time Kolomoisky and Poroshenko spoke was August 21.

* * *

In early spring 2014, the very future of Ukraine was in doubt. A popular revolution had paralyzed much of the nation, and had set in motion an altogether different wave of terrifying counterreactions across the east. Russia’s “little green men” began appearing on the shores of Crimea, separatist flames broke out across many eastern cities, and a screwy Russian military fantasist named Igor Girkin, aka “Strelkov,” barricaded himself in a sleepy town called Slavyansk. It was an explosive mix that even the most skilled or resourced authority in the world would have had trouble containing.

The new government of Ukraine was neither.

In the chaos, Kolomoisky seized the moment. First, he intervened to disrupt a plan that would have seen an alternative eastern republic established in Ukraine’s second city and former capital, Kharkiv.

Kolomoisky was good friends with city’s main power player, the crafty mayor Hennadiy Kernes, and he pushed him not to make a deal with the retreating Yanukovych. At this point Kernes was unsure of his allegiances; indeed, he seemed to be supporting the other side. “I told him he was risking everything by betting on the wrong horse,” Kolomoisky recalls. “He didn’t understand the regime was over.”

Kolomoisky persuaded Kernes to visit him in Geneva, which he did in late February 2015, after Yanukovych had fled for Russia. Unusually, Kernes was in full listening mode, and agreed with Kolomoisky that he would return to Kharkiv and declare himself a Ukrainian patriot. Slowly, the separatist storm in Kharkiv — at one point the most violent in the land — began to dampen down.

A few days later, Kolomoisky suggested to then acting president Oleksandr Turchynov that he be made governor of his native Dnipropetrovsk region, which had shown real signs of going the anarchic ways of neighboring Donetsk.

Obviously, the appointment of Ukraine’s second richest man to high government position was not the most logical consequence of the Euromaidan revolution. But there was such disarray in Kiev, Turchynov readily agreed to the proposal.

In quick time, Kolomoisky delivered on security in Dnipropetrovsk. There were all kinds of rumors about how he did this: marches to the woods, summary shootings, gang warfare. Kolomoisky refuses to discuss the methods used, save for saying that faiWere I to disclose what we did”, he says, “Poroshenko would declare that I was part of an organized crime group and file criminal charges tomorrow.”

What was important was the result: “We had a problem, we dealt with it, and thank God we did.”

Dnipropetrovsk remained in a febrile situation for many months, and the job of defending it was not one for the faint-hearted. Local security officials repeatedly raised the threat of a Russian invasion to the highest level possible. Full mobilization plans were enacted — tanks, planes, special forces, artillery. And Kolomoisky took a leading role in creating new and well-equipped territorial “volunteer” battalions.

The most important thing, says the oligarch, was the process of securing the street. “If robbery, rape, murder and pillage had become the norm in Dnipropetrovsk, the people would have welcomed any strong hand, Ukrainian or not.”

* * *

“If robbery, rape, murder and pillage had become the norm in Dnipropetrovsk, the people would have welcomed any strong hand, Ukrainian or not.”

Kolomoisky earned plaudits from friends and enemies for his decisive action in those months. Not everyone was convinced that his investment in military means was a completely selfless endeavor, however. Many began to express concern that the oligarch had used the war to build up private armies that he was now using to settle business and political scores.

A well-placed governmental source says that the president became concerned by what he saw in the early months of 2015. “We understood we had to act to disarm his irregular forces or to bring them under the direct control of the army command,” the source said.

The standoff between Poroshenko and Kolomoisky peaked in March this year, coinciding exactly with government attempts to curb the economic influence of the oligarchs.

The change that affected Kolomoisky most directly was a new law, passed on March 19, that returned control of notionally state-controled businesses to the state. There were several examples of minority-shareholding oligarchs exercising full de facto control via loyal managers installed under the previous regime.

Kolomoisky’s people were particularly fond of blocking undesirable management changes by not turning up at board meetings and ruling the meetings inquorate. The new law made the tactic impossible by reducing quorum to 50 percent.

That very evening, Kolomoisky received news that an ally had been removed as chief executive of the oil pipeline operator UkrTransNafta, a company where he was a minority shareholder. Within a matter of hours, Kolomoisky presented himself at the company’s Kiev headquarters with a group of armed men.

When asked by journalists what he was doing there, he subjected them to a torrent of profanity, before claiming he had come to protect the company from a “raider attack” and “Russian saboteurs.”

Kolomoisky made another controversial appearance March 22, this time at the headquarters of the oil and gas behemoth Ukrnafta, where he held a now-insufficient 43 percent stake. Kolomoisky claimed, once again, that he had traveled there to protect his business interests from a raider attack. He said that the 40 or 50 men who accompanied him were, in fact, the company’s own private security forces.

“Poroshenko and his scribblers peddle this myth about Kolomoisky working with his private armies, yet they don’t understand the difference between an army and a private corporate security firm,” he said.

But the president had seen enough and, encouraged by American and European partners, in late March he asked Kolomoisky to leave his post as governor of Dnipropetrovsk. The deal was simple: Kolomoisky’s business would be left alone if he stopped attacking the government; and Poroshenko promised Kolomoisky that his team would be not be touched by law enforcement in connection with anything they may or may not have done while defending Dnipropetrovsk.

The agreement did not, however, resolve the fate of Ihor Palytsa, Kolomoisky’s long-time business partner, who he had helped install as governor of neighboring Odessa region. Palytsa was to remain in position for just two more months, before he was sensationally replaced by the former Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

“If I ever catch sight of him, I tell you, I will smash his face in. As soon as he leaves his post, I’ll beat him up and down like a dog.”

That appointment triggered a dramatic and public war of words between Kolomoisky and Saakashvili. Saakashvili told journalists Kolomoisky was a “gangster” and “smuggler.” Kolomoisky told them Saakashvili was “a dog without a muzzle” and “a snotty-nosed addict.” If nothing else, Kolomoisky won on linguistic style.

Kolomoisky says things had not always been so unfriendly between the two men. In 2011, they went yachting together in Croatia: “He was there with his favorite, this big-titted economics minister of his — his lover,” says Kolomoisky. “I even gave him money for his election campaign in Georgia.”

Just before Saakashvili was installed in Odessa, the Georgian traveled to Dnipropetrovsk to visit him, Kolomoisky says. “He showered us with praise and his Georgian toasts, told us how wonderful we were, how I had replaced him as Putin’s enemy number one,” recalls Kolomoisky. “Then he went directly to Poroshenko to ask for Palytsa’s job.”

Kolomoisky shows no sign of forgiving the betrayal. “If I ever catch sight of him, I tell you, I will smash his face in. As soon as he leaves his post, I’ll beat him up and down like a dog,” he says.

He looks me in the eye: “Well, you’re from Liverpool. You grew up on the streets, didn’t you?”

* * *

Poroshenko and Kolomoisky may have had a deal to stay out of each other’s business, but politics soon got in the way. Ahead of October’s local elections, the presidential administration became increasingly concerned that Kolomoisky was working to bring down Poroshenko’s governing coalition and to force snap parliamentary elections. With some justification, they feared that such elections would lead to a “Balkanization” of the national Parliament and destroy Poroshenko’s already fading grip on power.

Kolomoisky says he sees no future in the current coalition. “And I don’t see any prospects for Ukraine until it returns to its proper constitutional set-up either,” he says. “We are supposed to be a parliamentary-presidential republic, but Poroshenko has managed to switch that around.”

In the build-up to the election, Kolomoisky supported an incongruously broad palette of political movements — from the populist, anti-Russian Dill party to a new, eastern-leaning party called Renaissance, made up of the more pragmatic wing of Yanukovych’s old Party of Regions.

“Rather than tell you who I support, let me tell you who I don’t support,” he says. “I don’t support Poroshenko’s bloc, I don’t support the Opposition Bloc, and I don’t support Yulia Tymoshenko” — the former prime minister.

The presidential administration was, in fact, working on the assumption Kolomoisky was collaborating with the newly resurgent Tymoshenko. Both hailing from Dnipropetrovsk, the two shared a long — if complicated — history.

“She has every chance to become prime minister or president still, though it's true that she isn’t getting any younger.”

The prospect of a grand anti-Poroshenko coalition could easily have been a strong enough bond to unite them. Tymoshenko was still the most assured politician in the land: No one matches her populist touch or hunger for power. And Poroshenko had reason enough to fear her. When, as prime minister, Tymoshenko plotted to overthrow President Yushchenko in 2006, Poroshenko was the man chairing the country’s National Security and Defense Council.

Tymoshenko has denied ever making contact with Kolomoisky in the run up to the elections, but Kolomoisky insists the two did, in fact, meet in Europe in August.

“We talked about Ukraine, about her ambitions,” he says. A conversation about assisting her did not progress far because Tymoshenko would not leave the coalition: “I couldn’t support her because she is a prostitute. You can’t just be a little bit pregnant. You can’t pretend you are in opposition and be in government at the same time.” He pauses, smiles. “It’s immoral.”

In the end, Tymoshenko polled 13 percent — not as much as anticipated, but a solid enough launchpad for another stab at the presidency down the line. “It was a warm-up,” says Kolomoisky. “She has every chance to become prime minister or president still, though it's true that she isn’t getting any younger.”

Kolomoisky’s own parties polled solidly right across the country. And in a fiercely contested second round run-off, his close associate Borys Filatov was elected mayor of Dnipropetrovsk.

* * *

The success of Kolomoisky’s allies in the elections was certainly a headache for the president. Overall, however, the October election results fell short of being a complete disaster.

Poroshenko avoided the Armageddon scenarios — a coup, enforced early parliamentary elections or Tymoshenko as prime minister. All scenarios were possible had his coalition partners polled as predicted.

Instead, the president now has at least the prospect of muddling through — for as long as the he can control Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s 82 MPs, and manage the now public dispute between Saakashvili and Yatsenyuk.

Meanwhile, it is hard to predict how the president’s relations with the ever-recalcitrant Kolomoisky will play out. On the one hand, there is no obvious knockout punch for either man. A serious escalation likely means mutually assured destruction. And both men face serious challenges in the months ahead.

The situation on the eastern front lines might be calmer than a year ago, but the winter will still be tough for the president, with diversifying security risks, an increasingly disloyal Parliament and the potential for social unrest.

A deadline looms for the controversial parliamentary votes on decentralization and amnesty for the east, both of which were pledged by the president to Western partners during the Minsk peace negotiations. The last time decentralization was discussed in Parliament August 31, live grenades were thrown and four national guardsmen lost their lives. Poroshenko does not yet have the 300 votes needed to carry it through.

Equally unhelpful is the fact that the IMF has delayed approving a final tranche of its agreed 2015 loan over concerns that Ukraine will have problems balancing its budget.

Kolomoisky’s businesses, on the other hand, are not looking quite as formidable as they once were. Minority-owned Ukrnafta still owes €320 million to the taxman (Kolomoisky says the company is owed at least as much by others). His market-leading PrivatBank bank has also attracted the attention of the head of Ukrainian Central Bank, Valeria Gontareva, who has asserted the bank might need significant recapitalization.

The oligarch disputes her figures. “This clever f—ing Gontareva comes along to a hugely successful bank — one that’s nearly 25 years old — and says just everything that has happened over the past 20 years was terrible,” he says. “The problem is that one day she talks about 128 billion hryrvina [€5.1 billion] and then the next she says, no, it’s 15 billion [€602 million]. And today she has her tongue stuck up her arse because she doesn’t know what to say next.”

Such fighting talk aside, it does, however, seem as though both sides have pulled back from all-out war. An emergency peace process has begun, with the head of Poroshenko’s administration, Borys Lozhkin, placed in charge of direct communication with Kolomoisky and his associates.

With a long history of doing business with all of the main players in Ukraine, Lozhkin is considered someone naturally suited to compromise. Kolomoisky confirms he talked to him on a daily basis. “I’m not fighting with anyone there, I’ve done no harm to anyone and I try to find dialogue with everyone,” he says.

Kolomoisky, meanwhile, is recruiting as many friends as he can. He says he enjoys good relations with the prime minister, who, he says, is “the best of all of the viper’s nest.” He also revealed he was coordinating moves with his one-time competitor, the country’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov.

“You know the joke about the dying Armenian?” he asks. “He surrounds himself with all his children and relatives, and he tells them to take care of the Jews. They ask him why. ‘Because if they aren’t there,’ he says, ‘they will come after us next.’ Akhmetov and I need to take care of each other, because if he goes, they’ll come after me. And if I go, they will come after him.”

Double or bust, the oligarch thus presents the president with a real dilemma: Continue to target Kolomoisky, and you face a broader fight you just might not win.

The sensible money would be on the Ukrainian oligarchs — and Kolomoisky — thriving for some time to come.

Oliver Carroll is an independent journalist covering Eastern Europe. A founding editor of Russian Esquire and former editor in chief of OpenDemocracy Russia, Oliver has written extensively on the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. He tweets at @olliecarroll