Have you also received a request to appear? I asked him. There was some obfuscation, but then he said, “Let me check my spam filter … oh, here it is.” OK, no outright lie, because I believe he was disinclined to lie to me. Then, after I gave him a brief rundown of how my grilling had gone, he added something that stuck in my head for many months. “Funny,” he said. “I received a message today from BuzzFeed asking about many of these same things.” It was funny indeed, because my production of documents to the Senate panel was supposed to have been confidential. So why would BuzzFeed be privy to them?

Months later, despite the new constraints on our communications, I asked Kostya if he could produce the communication he’d referenced on January 5 for me. “What communication? I don’t remember.” I pressed him and said I very damn well did remember. Shortly after that, he pinged me back and apologized: “Completely slipped my mind, here it is.”

To be fair, he’d probably had a lot on his mind in those intervening months, and one of many outreaches from an American reporter was likely less significant to him than it was to me. The point being, when I would press, he would tell me the truth, I believe. But to expect him to volunteer it would be silly. Looking back, there is no shortage of examples of my being a fool.

For Kostya, any assessment of who Ukrainians are is complicated. He told me more than once that Viktor Yanukovich, the former president who fled to Russia after the second Maidan uprising, was very much misunderstood and was not a traitor but a true Ukrainian patriot. “He put this country’s interests first; after all, why was his first foreign visit after being inaugurated to Brussels and not to Moscow?”

Each time Kostya brought up Yanukovich, I would change the subject. No matter how great the nostalgia among certain OB supporters was for their former hetman, I considered him to be yesterday’s news. Maybe Kostya considered Yanukovich’s election in 2010 to be his greatest professional achievement. I don’t know, because I had always hoped there would be greater and more redeeming accomplishments just over the horizon.

If Kostya were the linchpin between Manafort and the Kremlin that he has been alleged to be, why did so few of our pitches get funded? I can only conclude that it is either because the Kremlin’s reach is vastly overstated or that Kostya was precisely what I considered him to be—a man trying to make the most of his circumstances.

Born in an industrial armpit of Ukraine, he made his way first to Moscow and then, through IRI and later Manafort, to European capitals and Washington—a city that, now that he has been indicted, he is unlikely ever to see again.

His preoccupation with a peace deal to end the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is another factor I can only attribute to a man caught between two countries trying to do what he could to ensure that one didn’t destroy the other. According to disclosures coming again from the special counsel’s office to the judge tasked with determining whether Manafort had lied to our government, Kostya pestered the then-Trump campaign chair with whatever the latest iteration of a peace deal might have been in August 2016 which, reportedly, Manafort dismissed as being “nuts.” Manafort couldn’t care less, but Kostya did.

I may never know for sure whether Kostya was or is a Russian agent. “Having ties to Russian intelligence,” as US media generally describes him today, is a cop-out as far as I’m concerned. Russia’s secret police services have run that country for over 400 years, and President Putin rose through the ranks of the KGB. Just about every Russian who isn’t digging potatoes in Tver or drinking himself into oblivion in Magadan probably has some tie to intelligence services.