The sentencing memorandum in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's case against Dutch attorney Alex van der Zwaan referenced someone identified as Person A, a former Russian Intelligence Officer with the GRU had been in communication with Trump deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates.
Anyone familiar with the ongoing Trump-Russia probe could deduce quickly that Person A is Konstantin Kilimnik, Paul Manafort's longtime Ukrainian protégé.
While it's impossible to find a public photograph of Kilimnik, three articles online Friday attempt to paint a picture of a mysterious man now very much at center of at least one part of Mueller's investigation.
Christopher Miller with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty first spoke with Kilimnik in February 2017.
Kilimnik, a dual Russian-Ukrainian citizen, himself studied at the Russian military's main university for languages, which has led to speculation that he has ties to Russian military intelligence.
In the February 22 interview, Kilimnik denied any ties to Russian intelligence. But he said that he and Manafort spoke during the 2016 election "every couple months."
"I was briefing him on Ukraine," he said.
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Manafort did not respond to e-mails and a voicemail seeking comment from RFE/RL after the interview concluded. But shortly after those inquiries, Kilimnik called RFE/RL back and said he had been contacted directly by Manafort.
Kilimnik said that while he was speaking to Manafort "every couple months" about Ukraine, he wanted to clarify that he had not been formally advising him during the U.S. election campaign.
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A short, camera-shy 46-year-old from Kriviy Rih with an affinity for metaphors, Kilimnik studied at Russia’s Military University for Foreign Languages, known today as the Military University of the Ministry of Defense.
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In the early 2000s, Kilimnik worked in Moscow for the International Republican Institute, a Washington-based nongovernmental group that promotes democracy with funding from the U.S. State Department, as well as from European foundations and the United Nations.
In 2005, he began working for Manafort, following the 2004 Orange Revolution -- an earlier series of mass protests that resulted in [Viktor] Yanukovych losing the Ukrainian presidency.
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Yanukovych recovered from his loss and went on to win the presidency in 2010, a victory many observers credited to Manafort’s counsel.
After Yanukovych's election, Kilimnik said he spent 90 percent of his time inside the presidential administration, where he assisted Manafort.
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Despite briefing Manafort during the U.S. election campaign, Kilimnik said he has not been on Manafort's payroll since 2014. He now says he advises members of the political party that used to be led by Yanukovych until his ouster.
The last time Manafort visited Ukraine was in autumn 2015, according to Kilimnik.
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Kilimnik also said that he had drafted a plan to bring peace to Ukraine in the nearly three-year-old conflict with Russia.
He referred to it as a "Mariupol plan," a reference to the southeastern port city that abuts the current line of conflict between government forces and Russia-backed separatist fighters.
It would bring Yanukovych back to Ukraine as a regional leader in the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, where fighting has raged on and off for nearly three years, or possibly involve others such as the current separatist leaders there.
That plan, which Kilimnik said Manafort was not involved with, would face almost certain opposition in Kyiv since it calls for Yanukovych returning to Ukraine from Russia, where he fled in February 2014.
Meanwhile, The New York Times reported February 19 that a peace plan drafted by a little-known Ukrainian lawmaker to end the conflict had made it into the hands of top White House officials.
Friday, Miller released additional information from last year's interview, including audio clips because, as Miller explains, "Kilimnik contacted a Ukrainian news outlet after the original interview to claim that it never took place. But it did, and Kilimnik allowed me to take written notes and record much of the conversation."
Nothing about the physical appearance of Kilimnik, who stands about 162 centimeters (5-foot-3 inches) with shoes on, was particularly remarkable. On that February day he had dressed his small frame in dark jeans with a green-gray half-zip fleece top layered over a red T-shirt. His youthful, clean-shaven face, light eyes, and kempt light brown hair -- peppered with gray -- suggested a man slightly younger than his 46 years (he's now 47). He's the sort of person who could easily vanish into a crowd.
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[H]e did not allow me to photograph him. When the acquaintance discreetly snapped a picture during the interview, he quipped: "Don't show that picture. If you show that picture I will kill you, the KGB will kill you...the GRU will kill you as well.”
Kilimnik loves a good spy joke.
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Kilimnik told me he went to Sweden to work as an interpreter for the Russian military, but insisted he was not working with the GRU. "I had nothing to do with military intelligence," he said.
Asked whether he had ties to the GRU during his time working with Manafort in Ukraine, he answered without hesitation: "No. Zero."
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Kilimnik said Manafort cared about two things: "his personal ambitions, and secondly -- mostly importantly -- he cared about Ukraine."
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Kilimnik told me they spoke "every couple months" while Manafort was working for Trump. "I was briefing him on Ukraine," he explained.
In follow-up conversations by phone and text message after those quotes were published in my February 2016 story, he elaborated on the communication, saying he was merely updating Manafort on news related to his former Opposition Bloc clients, and sending him links to stories in the English-language Kyiv Post newspaper.
However, sources have claimed that Kilimnik was doing more than that, perhaps even playing a part in altering the Republican Party's official endorsement of providing Ukraine with lethal weapons. Ukraine had for years been asking Washington to provide such weapons to bolster its fight against Russia-backed separatists. The Trump administration has since approved the sale of lethal weapons to Kyiv.
A source in Kyiv told Politico that "after a late summer trip to the U.S., Kilimnik suggested that he had played a role in gutting" the proposed amendment.
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Kilimnik communicated with me until September 2017. It’s unclear where he is currently, but a December court filing by Mueller’s team suggested he has since fled Kyiv to Russia.
Kilimnik didn’t answer when I called him this week, nor did he reply to an e-mail and a WhatsApp message offering an opportunity to provide fresh comments. But the two blue check marks beside the WhatsApp message and the ironic status at the top of our chat suggested he was out there somewhere and had read them. “Last seen today at 9:32 p.m.” read the status.
The New York Times' Andrew Kramer also interviewed Kilimnik in person last year.
While seated, the most notable element of his appearance was hardly noticeable; only when he stood to introduce himself did it become clear that he is short, almost childlike, in stature, a characteristic that earned him the nickname “the midget” from Russian political operatives.
He spoke flawless English, with only a touch of an accent, was gregarious, and casually brushed aside the main question in this rare interview in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, a year or so ago, saying that of course he was not a Russian spy.
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While Mr. Kilimnik continues to deny that he was a Russian agent, it would have been perfectly normal for Moscow to plant someone in the Manafort operation.
Konstantin Viktorovich Kilimnik was born in eastern Ukraine in the Soviet period. He studied at the Military Institute of the Ministry of Defense in Moscow, and after the Soviet breakup took Russian citizenship, he said in the interview. The institute trains interpreters for the Russian military intelligence agency, formerly known as the G.R.U. and now called the Main Directorate.
He worked for a time in Sweden as an interpreter for a Russian company that exported arms, and later in the Moscow office of the International Republican Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit, where former employees said they suspected he was informing on them to the Russian authorities.
He parted ways with the organization, a former employee of the Moscow office said, after the chief of the F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., talked in a speech about the private meetings of the institute’s officials.
They didn’t have evidence, but suspected Mr. Kilimnik had been the source, said the former official, who could not be cited publicly discussing personnel issues.
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In August of 2016, Mr. Kilimnik was formally investigated in Ukraine on suspicion of ties to Russian spy agencies, according to documents from Parliament and the Prosecutor General’s Office, but no charges were filed.
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In July, 2016, while Mr. Manafort was chairman of the Trump campaign, Mr. Manafort emailed Mr. Kilimnik asking him to offer Mr. Deripaska “private briefings” about the campaign in exchange for resolving a multimillion dollar financial dispute related to the business, according to the Washington Post. Mr. Deripaska has said he never received the offer. Mr. Kilimnik, reached by email, declined to comment on this matter and the special counsel’s court filings.
Mr. Kilimnik has surfaced as a fringe figure in other aspects of the Russian investigation.
Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist who attended a Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr. in June of 2016 where a Russian lawyer had promised to provide negative information on Hillary Clinton, had also worked in Ukraine with Mr. Kilimnik closely enough to know his nickname among Russian-leaning political operatives in Kiev.
At the time, about eight years ago, Mr. Akhmetshin was trying to persuade political advisers of Mr. Yanukovych to buy the rights to a book that cast a domestic political opponent in a negative light, and attended meetings with Mr. Kilimnik.
Finally, The Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand takes a look at Kilimnik's relationship with Sam Patten, a longtime DC-based Republican operative. Patten worked for the "Oregon office of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, helping to fine-tune the firm’s voter targeting operations in the runup to the 2014 midterm elections."
Patten’s long friendship with Kilimnik—which stems from their time working together at the International Republican Institute between 2001 and 2003—would likely be enough to draw scrutiny from Mueller, who appears to have honed in on Kilimnik as a potentially significant link between the Trump campaign and Russia.
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“We’ve known each other for more than 15 years, and we periodically look for places we can work together,” Patten told me of Kilimnik. Their relationship is also proof that Kilimnik’s ability to ingratiate himself with American political consultants went beyond Manafort and Gates—a fact that could serve as a new data point in examining Russia’s ties to Republican operatives in the U.S. By the spring of 2015—when, as my colleague Frank Foer wrote, Manafort’s “life had tipped into a deep trough”—Kilimnik was already working on a new venture with Patten that appeared to be focused on targeted messaging in foreign elections.
That venture, first reported by The Daily Beast this week, was a private LLC incorporated in February 2015 called Begemot Ventures International (BVI) with a mission to “build the right arguments before domestic and international audiences.” Kilimnik is listed as the firm’s principal and Patten is listed as an executive, according to company records, and the company is registered to Patten’s office address in Washington. A website for Begemot—which was built almost two years after the company was incorporated—links to Patten’s email for inquiries, but does not list the company’s clients.
It is not clear why Patten, who already had a consulting firm registered in D.C., decided to open a brand-new company with Kilimnik.
'Person A' In His Own Words: On The Record With Shadowy Operative In Russia Probe (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)
A Suspected Russian Spy, With Curious Ties to Washington (The Atlantic)
He Says He’s an Innocent Victim. Robert Mueller Says He’s a Spy. (NYT)
Who Is Paul Manafort's Man In Kyiv? An Interview With Konstantin Kilimnik (RFE/FL)