podobnyy

Sergey Gorkov
A graduate of the FSB’s finishing school for spies, Gorkov heads Vnesheconombank, Russia’s state-owned development bank—effectively Putin’s slush fund. With its board seeded with Kremlin ministers, including Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, the bank was the majority lender for the Sochi Olympics, has helped Russia gain financial power in Ukraine, and is currently under US sanctions because of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. In December 2016, Gorkov attended a meeting with Jared Kushner brokered by Kislyak—after which Gorkov appears to have gone directly to meet with Putin.

Felix Sater
This Russian American businessman (and onetime FBI informant) has quite the rap sheet, including prison time for stabbing a man with the stem of a margarita glass and a guilty plea in a Mafia-linked racketeering case. Though Trump claimed in a 2013 deposition that he wouldn’t know Sater if they were in the same room, the pair in fact worked together on a variety of projects, including a potential Moscow hotel. Once a managing partner of Bayrock Group, a real estate firm with offices in Trump Tower and alleged organized crime ties, Sater reportedly worked as a senior adviser to Trump in 2010, with a Trump Organization email address and business card. In January,Sater met with Trump attorney Michael Cohen and Andrii Artemenko, a pro-Putin Ukrainian lawmaker, to discuss a “peace plan” for Ukraine and Russia.

Andrii Artemenko
Currently facing an inquiry by Ukrainian prosecutors into possible treason over his collaboration with Trump associates on the Russia-friendly peace plan, the Ukrainian parliament member claims to have evidence of corruption that could oust his country’s current pro-European president. Artemenko has spent time in prison on embezzlement charges (eventually dropped) that he says were politically motivated.

Tevfik Arif
The Kazakh founder of the Bayrock real estate firm was formerly a USSR commerce official. He hired Sater, who by 2005 became Bayrock’s managing partner; subsequently, the firm entered into deals with Trump to develop various hotel and condo projects. In 2010, Bayrock’s former finance director sued the company (but not Trump) over one of those joint ventures, the Trump SoHo, calling the building “a Russian mob project” financed with mysterious cash from Kazakhstan and Russia.
Victor Podobnyy
At a January 2013 energy conference in New York, Podobnyy met future Trump adviser Carter Page. At the time, Podobnyy was a clandestine Russian intelligence agent working under diplomatic cover in Russia’s UN delegation. For the next five months, Page met with, emailed, and provided documents to Podobnyy about the energy business, believing that Podobnyy’s UN position would help him broker deals in Russia. All the while, Podobnyy and one of his colleagues attempted to recruit Page as an asset. In 2015, Podobnyy was busted by the FBI for being an unregistered agent of a foreign government, along with two other Russians, but avoided arrest and prosecution because of his diplomatic immunity.