Ukraine:
the pipeline, and the female oligarch

What connects them is the thing this whole site documents: a man who converted access into position, and position into money, using whichever system was locally available.

In Brazil the available system was a modelling contest. In the Virgin Islands it was a tax statute. In Ukraine in 2019 it was a country in the middle of a political rupture, with an economy he described in writing as offering “sophisticated corruption” and “huge amounts of money.”

And the recruitment operation ran throughout. Kyiv agencies under contract to a New York agency. Women flown out. A Kyiv Hyatt used for bookings. A Lviv property plan.

What has not happened. No Ukrainian authority has opened an investigation. Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Brazil and France all have. Ukraine, which appears more centrally in the recruitment record than any of them, has not.

The obvious reason is the war — and it is a real one. But the effect is that the country with the clearest documented pipeline is the one doing least about it.

At least two Kyiv modelling agencies appear in direct correspondence in the released files.

Linea 12 Models — EFTA00753670. The files contain correspondence between its director, Masha Manyuk, and Jean-Luc Brunel, the agent later named by the FBI as a co-conspirator in Epstein’s trafficking.

L-Models — EFTA01894132.

1Mother Agency — whose co-founder Yudashkin described the arrangement in the plainest terms available anywhere in this archive: the agency was “obliged to send to MC2.”

What “mother agency” means. A legitimate industry term. A local agency scouts and develops a model, then places her with a larger agency abroad under contract, taking a share. The structure requires no adaptation to move a person across a border under someone else’s control.

The Kyiv co-founder’s account of what the women were told, and what was true:

They were told they had been called to New York because they were the best. “In reality, they simply had no choice. The agencies were financially tied.”

The movement. The files show travel arrangements for women from Kyiv and Odesa, and booking arrangements at the Hyatt in downtown Kyiv — allegedly involving the hotel’s owner.

Nastia N. A Ukrainian woman whose education, travel and expenses were arranged through Epstein’s office by Lesley Groff between 2015 and 2019 — one of the four assistants granted immunity by the 2007 non-prosecution agreement, and never charged.

May 2019. Two months before his arrest, Epstein wrote to an unnamed correspondent — presumed by the Kyiv Independent to be a Ukrainian woman — instructing her to “start following” Ukrainian politics: Zelensky, the parliament, and corruption.

The email implies this will contribute to her future “success.”

She replies that it would be interesting to follow.

His response is the most revealing single passage in the Ukrainian file:

“Yes, it is funny, but sophisticated corruption. Huge amounts of money will be made. Huge.

I’d like to see you as a female oligarch.”

Read what is being described. Not an observation about Ukrainian politics — an instruction. He is telling a young woman to study a country’s corruption because that is where the money will be, and framing her future in it as something he wants.

The Kyiv Independent’s assessment is that he is apparently encouraging his interlocutor to engage in corruption.

Why this matters beyond one email. Every other document on this page shows women being moved as commodities. This one shows something different and arguably worse: a woman being cultivated as an instrument — groomed not for trafficking but for placement inside a political economy he expected to become extremely lucrative.

The identity of the correspondent is not established, and no evidence indicates she acted on it.

Epstein was following Ukraine’s presidential race closely enough to ask about it through a foreign minister.

In correspondence with Miroslav Lajčák — the Slovak diplomat who resigned two days after the files were released — Epstein asked about the chances of Petro Poroshenko’s rival in the election, which Ukrainian journalists analysing the documents take to mean Zelensky.

He was also in the country. Reporting places Epstein in Kyiv in February 2019, a month before the first round.

And he was discussing it with a banking chief executive. Emails between Epstein and Ariane de Rothschild — head of the Geneva-based Edmond de Rothschild Group — include discussion of Ukraine and the upheaval there.

The volume, in context. Zelensky is mentioned roughly 10 to 24 times depending on the count. Ukrinform’s fact-check establishes that these are mostly news headlines or articles emailed to FBI staff, likely relating to the 2019 campaign.

That is the same mechanism documented in Australia and Russia: a newsworthy name accumulating mentions through news digests rather than contact.

What the political material actually shows. Not influence over Ukraine — interest in it, at exactly the moment its politics were being remade, from a man who had spent two decades converting political access into money.

1 May 2019. Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers writes to Epstein:

“We can discuss UKRAINE. I know a little, having been number of times to Pinchuk conf and having helped push their debt relief during Jaresko’s time as FM.”

Who those references are. The Pinchuk conference is the Yalta European Strategy forum run by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk. Natalie Jaresko was Ukraine’s finance minister from 2014 to 2016, during the post-Maidan debt restructuring.

Summers is establishing credentials on Ukraine to a convicted sex offender — offering his access to the country’s elite policy circuit as conversational currency.

Epstein’s reply is the line that has travelled furthest:

“Zelinsky looking for help. putin dismissive saying he is run by Israelis”

How to read that sentence carefully, because it has been widely misused.

It is Epstein relaying, to an American economist, a characterisation he attributes to Vladimir Putin about Ukraine’s incoming president. It is third-hand at minimum, unverifiable, and reproduces a smear with a long antisemitic lineage — Zelensky is Jewish.

What it does establish: that six weeks after Zelensky’s election, Epstein was representing himself as knowing what Putin privately thought of him — the same posture documented on the Russia page, where five years of documented attempts never produced a confirmed meeting.

Summers has not been charged with any offence. The exchange shows a conversation, not a transaction.

The geography of the Ukrainian file is wider than the modelling agencies.

Kyiv — the agencies, the Hyatt bookings, and Epstein’s own February 2019 stay.

Odesa — travel arrangements for women, alongside Kyiv. Odesa is Ukraine’s principal port city, and its inclusion widens the recruitment map beyond the capital.

Lviv — a plan to purchase real estate. The Kyiv Independent describes it as a failed deal.

Why the Lviv plan matters even though it failed. Every other documented Epstein property sits in a jurisdiction where he had a working relationship with power — the Virgin Islands, New Mexico, Paris, New York, London.

A property plan in western Ukraine indicates he was contemplating a durable physical footprint in a country he had no other stated business in — in the same period he was telling a correspondent that huge amounts of money would be made there.

What is not established. What the property was for, who was involved, or why it collapsed. No purchase was completed.

The claim. Circulated by TASS, RT and Russian state media from February 2026, and picked up across Central and Eastern European outlets: that the files show Zelensky involved in trafficking women and children, and possibly collaborating with Brunel.

Its sole basis. A single letter dated 2024, with both the author’s and the recipient’s identities hidden, asking rhetorical questions about whether Zelensky intends to stop trafficking and why Ukrainian media are silent about it.

What Ukrinform established in its fact-check:

• No evidence of the correspondence exists. Russian outlets published no screenshots and made no direct references. Outlets analysing the files routinely publish scans; none exists here.
• The real Brunel–Ukraine material is agency correspondence — Masha Manyuk of Linea 12 — and concerns modelling agencies, not the government.
• The Zelensky mentions are news headlines and articles emailed to FBI staff.

The Veridica assessment notes the anonymous letter’s actual content was that Zelensky is ungrateful to Americans and does not want peace — a political complaint, retrofitted into a trafficking allegation.

Why this is the most damaging fabrication on the site. Ukraine has the clearest recruitment record of any European country. The invented Zelensky claim has made that record radioactive — any journalist reporting the Kyiv agencies risks being read as amplifying Russian propaganda.

The fabrication protects the operation it pretends to expose.