A relative and former business partner of U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael D. Cohen arranged a meeting between the president’s attorney and Radical Party member of parliament Andrey Artemenko, the deputy wrote in a March 4 Facebook post.
But Cohen himself called Artemenko’s claims “inaccurate” in an email to the Kyiv Post.
“First and only meeting with Andrey Artemenko was established and attended by Felix Sater,” Cohen wrote.
Artemenko made the Facebook comments to mourn the death of Alex Oronov, the father of Cohen’s sister-in-law. Oronov died on March 2, according to an online obituary.
“Alex was a relative of Michael Cohen and he organized, among other things, an introduction and meeting with Michael Cohen,” Artemenko wrote.
Sater, who Cohen said “established” the meeting, comes with a range of baggage. After spending a year for stabbing an acquaintance in the face with the stem of a margarita glass in the 1990s, Sater was convicted in a mafia-linked $40 million stock fraud scheme. The Russian-American businessman got out of prison over the scheme by reportedly agreeing to work with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Asia.
Artemenko made headlines in February after a New York Times story reported that he was peddling a peace plan for Ukraine that would see the country “lease” Crimea to the Russians in exchange for peace in the Donbas and the lifting of Western sanctions on Russia.
Artemenko claimed in the story that senior Kremlin officials had approved his plan, before vehemently denying the allegation after the article was published.
Artemenko blamed Oronov’s death on pressure from the media.
“And I am guilty in this!!!!” he wrote. “Because it was me, not suspecting anything, who brought up his name, answering the innocent question of an American journalist ‘who acquainted you with Michael Cohen – the personal lawyer of Donald Trump?’”
Oronov was born in Kharkiv, before emigrating to the United States during the Soviet Union. He returned to Ukraine in the 1990s, where he got involved in the agriculture sector.
In 2006, he invested in an ethanol production plant in Zolotonosha in Cherkasy Oblast. For that project, Michael D. Cohen and his brother Bryan, who is Oronov’s son-in-law, flew to Ukraine.
The two brothers also set up a firm in 2006 called International Ethanol of Ukraine Ltd.
Artemenko did not reply to a request for comment.
