KYIV — It was Sunday evening, and my friends and I were reminiscing about movies from the ’90s as we dug into bowls of fire red vindaloo, yellow chicken curry, and green spinach paneer at an Indian restaurant in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

Someone had just mentioned the reported drop in US sales of the Corona beer we were drinking due to the outbreak of the coronavirus when two rather surprising dining companions strolled in and sat at a nearby table. One of them was Ukraine’s prime minister, Oleksiy Honcharuk, and the other was the president’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. It was a shock to see them together because neither man is rumored to be terribly fond of the other.

As they settled in and ordered dinner, I did what any half-decent journalist would do when they spot a politician in a restaurant — especially when rumors are swirling, as they had been in recent days, about potentially seismic changes in the Ukrainian government that may include the dismissal of Honcharuk and other ministers — I snapped a few photographs and tweeted them before getting back to my dinner.

My friends and I tried to listen to their conversation for a few minutes, but it was hard to decipher exactly what they were discussing over the brassy jazz wafting from the restaurant’s sound system. We were able to make out only a couple of things: the serious tone of their conversation (they went from speaking in hushed whispers to raised voices at times) and the name of a notorious and powerful oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky.

The name of billionaire Kolomoisky — an alleged money launderer who is reportedly in the sights of the FBI and bankrolled private battalions to fight in eastern Ukraine — is one that makes you pay attention. So I knew whatever it was they were talking about it was likely to be as spicy as the vindaloo on my plate.

As the owner of Ukraine’s largest television station, 1+1, Kolomoisky also aired the comedy shows that made former actor Volodymyr Zelensky famous and helped propel him to the presidency. And he has been leveraging that to get back the bank he used to own that was found to have a $5.5 billion black hole in its balance sheet.

A number of dubious actors have been helping him along the way, including most recently a lawmaker by the name of Oleksandr Dubinsky, who represents Zelensky’s ruling Servant of the People party.

Ever since he became president, Zelensky has tried to shake allegations that he’s helping Kolomoisky. So hearing the oligarch’s name come up in conversation between two of the most senior people in government was certainly noteworthy. A moment after I heard it, I tweeted about it with another photograph. Then my friends and I went back to eating, and I didn’t think much more about the encounter until the next morning.