Black Caviar: Konstantin Kilimnik, the Grand Havana Room Meeting, and the Future of Ukraine
This article covers the pivotal meeting between Paul Manafort and the alleged Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik at the Grand Havana cigar bar where they discussed a potential Ukrainian peace plan. It is the fourth article in the series “Black Caviar: Paul Manafort, the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict, and the Trump Campaign.” While it is not necessary to read the previous entries, it is strongly recommended.
I published a series of articles covering Paul Manafort’s background as a lobbyist and political consultant, and his work in Ukraine prior to the 2016 election here.
The first article covered Manafort’s activities in post-Maidan Revolution Ukraine and his dual family/fiscal crisis.
The second article covers how Manafort was hired onto the Trump Campaign and his possible connections to the GRU’s hack-and-leak operation.
The third article covered Manafort’s commications with pro-Kremlin oligrachs and Konstantin Kilimnik’s provision of polling data to Russian intelligence.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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On July 28th, 2016, the alleged Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik traveled from Kyiv to Moscow. The next day, he sent Paul Manafort an email with “Black caviar” as the subject.
“I met today with the guy who gave you your biggest black caviar jar several years ago,” Kilimnik wrote. Manafort later identified the man who gave him the “black caviar” as the ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was living in exile in Moscow.
Yanukovych, the Kremlin’s preferred candidate in Ukraine, had been a top client of Manafort’s for years.
According to Manafort, in 2010 Yanukovych had given him a $30-$40,000 jar of black caviar to celebrate his victory in the presidential election.
“According to Konstantin,” Sam Patten later testified, “they [Kilimnik and Manafort] were having breakfast with the president, President Yanukovych … Mr. Manafort complimented the caviar. And [Yanukovych] said: Oh you like it; I’ll get you more. And sort of snapped his fingers, and he’s given a big vat of it.”
“We spent about 5 hours talking about his story,” Kilimnik’s email to Manafort continued, “and I have several important messages from him to you. He asked me to go and brief you on our conversation. I said I have to run it by you first, but in principle I am prepared to do it, provided that he buys me a ticket. It has to do about the future of his country and is quite interesting. So, if you are absolutely not against the concept, please let me know which dates/places will work, even next week, and I could come and see you.”
“Tuesday’s best,” Manafort replied.
They settled on the evening of August 2nd. Kilimnik returned to Kyiv from Moscow on July 31st and emailed Manafort explaining that he needed “about two hours” to meet with him as “it is a long caviar story to tell.”
Meeting at the Grand Havana Room
Kilimnik passed through customs at JFK international airport at 7:43pm on August 2nd.
After wrapping up a 5:30pm meeting with Trump and Rudy Giuliani, Manafort made his way to his rendezvous with Kilimnik scheduled for 9pm at the Grand Havana Room, a private cigar lounge located in a building once owned by Jared Kushner, 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Manafort and Kilimnik met for dinner sometime after 9pm, with Rick Gates arriving late.
While we possess certain details about this critical August 2nd meeting between Trump’s campaign chairman and a Russian intelligence officer, there is no definitive account of what Manafort and Kilimnik discussed in Grand Havana Club.
Gates’ and Manafort’s accounts differ slightly, and as Manafort is known to have lied to subsequent Federal investigators about a number of matters so his testimony is unreliable. According to their testimony, Manafort and Kilimnik broached at least three topics of conversation:
- Internal Trump campaign polling numbers and strategy,
- A proposed peace plan for Ukraine that would create an autonomous republic in the East along lines preferred by the Kremlin, and
- Manafort’s debts and business disputes with Deripaska and various figures in Ukraine related to the Opposition Bloc.
Manafort briefed Kilimnik, who had been receiving internal polling data via WhatsApp from Rick Gates since at least May, on the status of the presidential campaign. Kilimnik was keen on understanding Manafort’s strategy to win. Walking him through the polling data, Manafort explained that the polls had identified swaths of voters in blue-collar, democratic-leaning states that Trump could peel away if he focused on economics and established a strong campaign ground game.
Manafort emphasized these efforts in the following battleground states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota.
Days earlier, on July 27th, Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio had sent Manafort an email with the subject “CONFIDENTIAL — EYES ONLY.”
Fabrizio’s firm had just conducted polling in seventeen “target states” over mid-July and detected what they viewed as a significant shift in the public view of the candidates’ images, with Trump having a 7-point net positive swing, while Clinton suffered a 7-point downward swing. Manafort suggested to Kilimnik at the Grand Havana Club meeting that Clinton’s high negative ratings could tip the election toward Trump.
Manafort and Kilimnik also discussed a potential resolution to the conflict between the Western-backed Ukrainian government and pro-Russian separatists in the East supported by the Russian military.
According to Gates, Kilimnik brought back an “urgent” message to Manafort from Yanukovych asking if he would run his comeback campaign. Kilimnik then outlined a plan, which he had already run by a member of the Russian government, to have Eastern Ukraine declared an autonomous republic led by Yanukovych.
Manafort recognized the plan as a “backdoor” means for Russia to control the Eastern industrial regions of Ukraine.
Manafort, who later violated a plea agreement with prosecutors by lying, told investigators that he had informed Kilimnik that the plan was “crazy.”
He further claimed that had he not cut off the discussion regarding Yanukovych’s plan, Kilimnik would have asked him to have Trump come out in favor of the plan.
Despite Gates and Manafort’s testimony to the contrary, there are reasons to believe that Manafort did not dismiss Kilimnik’s Ukrainian peace plan.
Manafort and Kilimnik continued discussing and working on elements of the plan after Trump was elected president. As late as 2018, Manafort and Kilimnik worked together to draft a poll to test out elements of the plan.
Manafort and Kilimnik also appear to have spoken about how the Trump campaign formulated its policy vis-a-vis Russia and Ukraine.
In an August 18th email sent to a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Kilimnik wrote that he had “seen Manafort last week” and “got a sense that everything that Trump says about Russia and Ukraine is Trump’s own emotional opinion, not campaign strategy.”
Kilimnik maintained that Manafort was not determining policy related to Russia, “otherwise the message would have been much more balanced.”
The third topic they discussed related to financial disputes Manafort was having with Oleg Deripaska and Ukrainian members of the Opposition Block that Manafort believed owed him money. According to Gates, Kilimnik told Manafort that Deripaska’s lawsuit against him had been dismissed and that Kilimnik was working on getting the paperwork to confirm this outcome.
In February of 2018, a leader of the Russian opposition to the Putin regime, Alexey Navalny, released an online video in which he describes the strange story of a Belorussian escort and self-described “sex coach” named Nastya Rybka, who at a key moment during the 2016 election was present on a yacht with Oleg Deripaska and then-Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko.
Rybka later claimed from a Thai prison to be in possession of audio recordings that established connections between Russian officials, Paul Manafort and Donald Trump and would provide evidence of Russian interference into the US Presidential election. Navalny and his team established that Rybka did know Deripaska and was in fact present with him and Deputy Prime Minister Prikhodko at the time she claimed. However, her claims remain unverified.
Kilimnik also updated Manafort on what was happening with Lyovochkin, Akhmetov, and other of their “friends” in Ukraine.” Kilimnik suggested that Akhmetov would pay Manafort what he was owed, but that he was having trouble getting his money out of Ukraine.
Gates and Manafort left the Grand Havana Club separately from Kilimnik because they knew Manafort was being tailed by the press and they didn’t want to be seen together.
Important unanswered questions remain about the August 2nd meeting. What little is known is solely based upon the testimony of Rick Gates and Paul Manafort. Gates arrived at the meeting significantly late, Manafort and Kilimnik were nearly finished with their dinner, and Manafort was convicted of repeatedly lying to subsequent investigators.
Kilimnik later fled to Russia and was never able to be questioned.
What was actually discussed between Manafort and Kilimnik may never be fully known. One obvious question is whether Manafort, or the Trump campaign, requested anything in return for supporting the Ukrainian peace plan.
On the evening of August 2nd, Oleg Deripaska’s private jet landed at New Jersey’s Teterboro airport. Customs and Border Protection records reported that its only passengers were Deripaska’s wife, daughter, mother and father-in-law.
Records obtained by later investigators show that Kilimnik flew to New York on a commercial flight.
The meeting at the Grand Havana room was not the last time the Ukrainian peace plan was discussed between Manafort and Kilimnik. Following the election, they discussed the plan at a meeting in Madrid, Spain in January of 2017.
Also present at the meeting was Georgiy Oganov, a close advisor to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Manafort initially lied to investigators about the meeting and attempted to conceal his communications about the meeting with Kilimnik.
Information related to the contents of the discussion in Madrid remain unavailable to the public.