The Russian lawyer and real-estate tycoon described in the e-mail exchange between Donald Trump, Jr., and a British entertainment publicist are being described in American press reports as having “connections to the Kremlin” or even “close ties to Vladimir Putin.” Both individuals, the lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and the construction oligarch Aras Agalarov, indeed have ties that link them to centers of power in Moscow. But who are they exactly, how much do their interests align with the Kremlin’s, and what exactly were they doing mixed up with the Trump family?

Veselnitskaya’s past as a lawyer for state officials and those close to them in murky real-estate deals in the Moscow region suggests a proximity to the world of Russian officialdom, but far from its most powerful or well-connected members. She had an apparent specialty working at the nexus in which mysteriously wealthy Russian bureaucrats and their family members and business associates all stew. That is what brought her to New York in recent years: she defended a man named Denis Katsyv, the son of a Russian transport official and the owner of a real-estate company that, as U.S. federal prosecutors alleged, laundered millions in corrupt profits through the purchase of luxury properties in Manhattan.

Katsyv denied any wrongdoing, but prosecutors alleged that this money in part came from a tax scam worth two hundred and thirty million dollars uncovered by a Russian lawyer named Sergey Magnitsky. His death in a Moscow jail ultimately led to the passage of the Magnitsky Act, in 2012, which froze the U.S. assets of Russian officials implicated in corruption or human-rights violations. It’s hard to remember now, given the acerbic state of U.S.-Russian relations, but at the time, no U.S. move in years incensed the Kremlin as much. (Putin’s revenge was cutting: he responded by banning U.S. adoptions of Russian children, the issue that, in early versions of the story, Veselnitskaya supposedly wanted to discuss with Trump, Jr.) Leonid Bershidsky, a cautious and astute Russia-watcher, argued in Bloomberg View that the Trump Tower meeting was more likely a personal stunt for Veselnitskaya, “the tenacious and ambitious lawyer who could pull every string in the Moscow region, did so to get her pet issue—the repeal of the Magnitsky Act, which was getting her major client in trouble—in front of some important Americans.”

Still, the Russian government was undeniably interested in the Katsyv case and its fallout. Russian officials all the way up to Putin have spoken repeatedly of their displeasure with the Magnitsky law and its implementation. The Katsyv trial was among the first tests of how the law would be put in practice—and the U.S. government was trying to seize twenty-four million dollars of prime real estate, surely a galling turn of events as seen in Moscow. (The case ended, in May, with a surprise six-million-dollar settlement in which Katsyv admitted no guilt.) Veselnitskaya may have indeed been a private lawyer, hired by no one other than Katsyv, but it strains credulity to think that, as Putin’s spokesman put it, “We do not know who that is.” At minimum, Veselnitskaya was a familiar character to Kremlin officials; whether she was more than that is a question about which one for now can only guess.

In his initial e-mail, the publicist Rob Goldstone wrote to Trump that the “Crown prosecutor of Russia” had offered to provide the Trump campaign with damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Russia has no crown prosecutor. He could have been referring Russia’s most senior prosecutor, Yuri Chaika, who has served as the country’s prosecutor general since 2006. By dint of his post, Chaika is unquestionably a part of the Kremlin’s upper caste of power, but is not thought to be among those with the most personal or familiar access to Putin. Chaika has periodically had to fight off efforts by other state officials to encroach on his authority as Russia’s top crime-fighting officer—battles he has sometimes lost to other, savvier, or even more well-connected players. But, again, there is no way of knowing who was Goldstone’s “crown prosecutor,” if anyone.

Whether Veselnitskaya was acting on her own, or in accordance with the instructions of those above her—Chaika, Putin, others in the orbit of power in Moscow—is impossible to know. Chaika’s loyalty and willingness to serve the Kremlin’s political needs is not in doubt. In 2015, a team of researchers led by the opposition leader Alexey Navalny released a detailed, forty-five-minute video investigation into alleged corruption surrounding Chaika and his two adult sons. Chaika dismissed the allegations but the evidence appeared damning, including the murky acquisition of a state shipping company, luxury properties in Greece and Switzerland, and ties to a notorious mafia clan from southern Russia.

Among those who came to Chaika’s defense was Aras Agalarov, who discussed various ill-fated real-estate deals with Trump and helped Trump bring the Miss Universe contest to Moscow, in 2013. He published an open letter in support of Chaika in Kommersant, a Russian business daily favored by the élite. Having watched the video, Agalarov wrote, “the first impression is shock” from how its creators attempted to “cover a person and his family with mud to try and manipulate public opinion.” He tried to rebut the film’s many allegations, citing his own experience and knowledge as a construction magnate. “I would like to ask the creators a key question: By what right do you make such peremptory accusations? What specific provisions of the law were violated by the film’s characters, seeing as they are businessmen? Are they forbidden to have real estate abroad? As far as I know, no.”

In the broadest sense, it could be fair to call Agalarov, the construction tycoon, a Putin-linked oligarch because, in the age of Putin, every businessperson of a certain size—and at nearly two billion dollars, Agalarov’s wealth is certainly not minuscule—must keep in mind state interests, and be ready to sacrifice personal interest or profit for the will of the Kremlin. But Agalarov is far from among those with particularly deep or long-standing ties to Putin. (For an example of that kind of oligarch, who is a member of what could be called Putin’s “shadow cabinet,” see my piece for the magazine from May on Arkady Rotenberg.)

It would be more accurate to say that Agalarov, in order to keep his large construction empire in good standing, must always remember that Putin’s will supersedes his own, and so, every now and then, he will have to incur losses to prove that he is a team player. Most of the time, he can run his business as he likes, but when the Kremlin asks him to, say, build a university campus, at a cost of a billion and a half dollars, in Vladivostok in advance of the 2012 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, he does so. Agalarov’s holding company is now building two soccer stadiums in Rostov and Kaliningrad, at a total cost of nearly six hundred million dollars*, ahead of the 2018 World Cup.

In a 2015 interview with Russian Forbes, Agalarov said that his government orders were a kind of “status project. I’m not able to make a profit on state construction projects.” All that suggests, that if the Kremlin did, in fact, use the Agalarov family to try and pass information to the Trump campaign, it was not because Putin and Agalarov were all that close, but because, as chance would have it, the Agalarovs and the Trumps were. And, Agalarov, knowing the right answer when Putin and his top officials call, would do the job asked of him.

The two Russian figures at the immediate center of the latest scandal—Veselnitskaya and Emin Agalarov, the pop star and heir to his father Aras’s fortune—look like potential bit players and opportunists out to advance their own agendas, powerful in their own worlds but not in the arena of Russian high-level politics. Veselnitskaya parlayed a set of contacts in the Moscow region into a meeting in Trump Tower; Emin was able to use a relationship built on a beauty pageant and a music-video cameo to make it happen. The open question now is whether the Putin state put them up to it. What’s hard to fathom, knowing the way that the system and its component parts work, is that after the fateful meeting in Trump Tower, those who wield the real power in Moscow didn’t, at the very least, know of the Trump campaign’s willingness to hear them out.

*A previous version of this post reported the amount as being billions rather millions of dollars.