What really struck observers in Ukraine about the plan was its reported author, Andrii Artemenko, who according to the Times “sees himself as a Trump-style leader of a future Ukraine.” “That’s the thing,” said Natalia Gumenyuk, the head of the Hromadske.tv, a prominent news outlet that gained stature as the television station of the Maidan protests. “None of us had heard much about him.” What she had heard about him was that he was “marginal,” “a really obscure member of parliament from a shady political party.” She observed that “it’s interesting that it’s this kind of person who got in touch with someone over there,” in the United States…

“All these signals are coming either from the Russian Federation or from their allies here inside the country,” Nayyem told me. “The fact that this proposal was put forward by an obscure Ukrainian politician speaks to the fact that this is an attempt to feel out the environment and try to understand whether [Ukrainian] society is ready for this. Fortunately, these attempts only unite the Ukrainian political class against any sort of trade negotiations when it comes to Ukrainian territory.”