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Konstantin Kilimnik, a dual Ukrainian and Russian citizen, worked for Paul Manafort’s political consulting firm and ran its office in Ukraine. The Special Counsel’s Office has said Kilimnik has links to Russian intelligence and his interactions with Manafort during the 2016 campaign lie “at the heart” of Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Kilimnik’s background indeed suggests he may have worked for Russian intelligence. He served as a translator for the Soviet military in the 1980s and trained at a military academy known for producing linguists for Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). Those ties may not be solely in the past, either. In court filings, the Special Counsel’s Office has repeatedly referenced the FBI’s assessment that Kilimnik has “a relationship with Russian intelligence” and “had such ties in 2016.”
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Those links may be why prosecutors are so interested in Kilimnik’s interactions with Manafort during the election. Special Counsel’s Office prosecutor Andrew Weissman told a Washington, D.C. judge that Manafort’s interactions with Kilimnik were “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.”
Mueller’s team focused on two particular exchanges between the men, both of which took place during a meeting in the summer of 2016, when questioning Manafort.
Manafort handed over 75 pages of internal Trump campaign polling data to Kilimnik during an Aug. 2, 2016, meeting in New York while Manafort was still serving as Trump campaign chairman. That’s consistent with emails obtained by The Washington Post that show Manafort offered “private briefings” on the status of the campaign to Oleg Deripaska, another Russian national linked to the GRU, in June 2016.
Kilimnik denied he received any insider access to the Trump campaign and told The Wall Street Journal that his conversation with Manafort on Aug. 2 was “very general and did not include any in-depth discussions of the U.S. polls or any themes that were not in the public domain.”
Kilimnik also pitched Manafort on a peace plan to end the war in Ukraine on Russian-friendly terms at the same meeting. Russia invaded Ukraine after it threw its pro-Russian president (and Manafort’s former client) out of power and Moscow has been keen to rid itself of the Western sanctions placed on it as a result of its aggression. Little is known about the peace plan, but Kilimnik did tell a reporter for RFERL that it involved the return of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych as a leader in parts of eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed militants.
Those interactions have led many to suspect a possibly closer link between Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign. The fact that Manafort was willing to blow up his plea agreement by lying about the meeting has only added more speculation about what actually transpired that day.
Kilimnik has denied any links to Russian intelligence, both now and during his service in the Soviet army. But some former U.S. officials, who found Kilimnik palatable enough to meet with before Manafort’s indictment, have also painted Kilimnik as more of an errand boy doing the bidding of local oligarchs than a master spy at the heart of Kremlin strategy.
Nevertheless, the Special Counsel’s Office indicted Kilimnik alongside Manafort in June 2018 and alleged that he reached out to witnesses in Manafort’s Washington, D.C. case in an attempt to obstruct justice. Prosecutors charged that Manafort broke lobbying laws by getting the Hapsburg Group, a collection of former European politicians organized by Kilimnik, to lobby Congress on behalf of Manafort’s pro-Russian clients in the Ukrainian government. Text messages obtained by the Special Counsel’s Office show Kilimnik and Manafort texted witnesses in an apparent attempt to get them to say they hadn’t done lobbying work in the U.S.
