The revelation that Robert Mueller subpoenaed a bit player in the Trump-Russia melodrama, Andrii Artemenko, to appear before a Virginia grand jury last month went largely unnoticed. But among careful observers of the escalating F.B.I. probe, the development was significant. Artemenko, after all, is the Ukrainian politician who worked alongside Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, and Felix Sater, a Russian-born real-estate developer with ties to both Trump and organized crime, to hand-deliver a Kremlin-approved peace plan to former national security adviser Mike Flynn shortly after the inauguration. “What this is is another strand. It’s another person who I believe the investigators suspect is, or has been in the past, acting as a de facto agent for the Russian government, having significant policy political communications with the Trump organization,” Patrick Cotter, a former assistant U.S. Attorney and longtime white-collar defense attorney, told me at the time. Trump biographer Tim O’Brien suggested that Artemenko’s entanglement in the Mueller probe signaled that the special counsel might be “trying to look for quid pro quos that involve the exchange of either business favors or money to people in Trump’s orbit, or Trump himself, in exchange for policy shifts.”

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Cohen and Artemenko have dismissed the notion that their effort to forge peace between Russia and Ukraine was driven by anything other than altruism. “Who doesn’t want to help bring about peace?” Cohen quipped to The New York Times, which first reported on the clandestine effort. (Cohen has vigorously denied delivering the plan to Flynn, though not his involvement in crafting it.) But a new report suggests that the peace scheme was not incentivized by Good Samaritan-ship alone: Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, recently in the news for his connection to a half-million-dollar payment to Cohen, might also have been bankrolling the endeavor.

Curt Weldon, a former congressman whose Russian ties have drawn congressional attention and who has known Artemenko for more than a decade, let slip that bombshell in conversation with a source, according to The Atlantic’s Natasha Bertrand. Weldon, this source recalled, was incensed that the Times had exposed the Artemenko-Cohen-Sater plan, and Flynn’s alleged involvement. “We were so close,” Weldon reportedly said. The source added: “He said [he and Artemenko] had already secured funding for the promotion of the plan from Viktor Vekselberg’s fund in New York City.” (Vekselberg could not be reached for comment by The Atlantic.)

Vekselberg’s alleged connection to the peace-plan operation adds another layer to an already-complicated subplot of the Russia investigation. The source told Bertrand that Weldon was indeed referring to Columbus Nova, the same U.S. investment arm of the Renova Group—an investment conglomerate Vekselberg founded in 1990—that was recently reported to have funneled more than $500,000 over a seven-month period in 2017 to Essential Consultants, the limited liability company Cohen set up in the final months of the 2016 election. While Columbus Nova confirmed that it had hired Cohen as a consultant, it has sought to distance itself from Vekselberg. “Columbus Nova itself is not now, and has never been, owned by any foreign entity or person including Viktor Vekselberg or the Renova Group,” the company said in a statement, which omitted that Vekselberg is the cousin of its C.E.O., Andrew Intrater. (In a statement to The Atlantic, Weldon said, “I have never met Viktor Vekselburg [sic] and am not aware of any peace plan that he would have funded.”)

That Vekselberg might have backed the Ukrainian peace plan raises further questions about the Columbus Nova payment to Cohen and the role the president’s attorney played as a surrogate of the Trump campaign during and after the election. As Cotter told me last month, “If you wanted influence with Trump, you went through Michael Cohen.” And notably, Vekselberg, who was questioned by Mueller’s team earlier this year in the Trump-Russia probe, would have been a victor if the peace plan had come to fruition. According to the Times, the proposal, written by Artemenko, outlined how Trump could lift U.S. sanctions against Moscow as part of a settlement of the Ukraine crisis that also involved allowing Russia to “lease” the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine for 50 to 100 years. Reuters reported in April that assets totaling between $1.5 billion and $2 billion were frozen as a result of sanctions imposed on Vekselberg and the Renova Group.