Kirill Dmitriev and Steve Witkoff. Photo: AFP via Getty Images

It has emerged that Kirill Dmitriev, Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin’s special envoy, was persuading Steve Witkoff, US President Donald Trump’s Special Envoy, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner of the potential benefits of bilateral cooperation during talks on ending the war in Ukraine.

Source: The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), as reported by European Pravda

Details: The WSJ has established, citing a wide range of sources, that the discussions between American and Russian negotiators during their meetings, especially their latest meeting in Miami in October, went far beyond the Russo-Ukrainian war.

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Among other things, they are believed to have talked about how to revive the Russian economy after the cessation of hostilities, potentially giving American companies priority over European ones.

The WSJ reiterates – reflecting earlier speculation in the media – that the first draft of the 28-point "peace plan" was largely shaped by Dmitriev.

At the meeting, Dmitriev reportedly floated a plan for American companies to use roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank funds held in Europe for "US-Russian investment projects and a US-led reconstruction of Ukraine".

He also reportedly suggested that American and Russian businesses jointly explore mineral deposits in the Arctic, and claimed that cooperation between the US and Russia would yield unlimited prospects. Ideas even surfaced about a joint mission to Mars through SpaceX.

According to unnamed Western security officials, the Kremlin viewed the Miami talks as the "culmination" of a strategy devised before Trump’s inauguration. The plan aimed to "bypass" the conventional US national security apparatus and persuade Trump to see Russia not as a rival or military threat, but as "a land of bountiful opportunity".

This approach appears to have worked on Witkoff and Kushner – both businessmen who share Trump’s view that "borders matter less than the business", the newspaper notes.

Witkoff himself told the WSJ that "Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land", and spoke hopefully about a potential future partnership between the US, Russia and Ukraine.

"If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that’s going to naturally be a bulwark against future conflicts there," the Trump envoy said.

In conversations with Witkoff and Kushner, Dmitriev openly said that Russia would prefer American investment, rather than European, because European leaders had "talked a lot of trash" about "peace efforts".

"A question for history will be whether Putin entertained this approach in the interest of ending the war, or as a ploy to pacify the US while prolonging a conflict he believes is his place in history to slowly, ineluctably win," the journalists write.

Some of the newspaper’s sources say signs of the Kremlin’s willingness to negotiate an end to the war may include recent reports that certain sanctioned oligarchs – Gennady Timchenko, Yuri Kovalchuk and the Rotenberg brothers – have quietly sent envoys to American businesses to explore potential cooperation in rare-earth mining and the energy sector. Talks reportedly also addressed the possible relaunch of the Nord Stream pipelines.

ExxonMobil, before sanctions were imposed by Trump, is also known to have met with representatives of Russian energy giant Rosneft and expressed interest in resuming gas extraction cooperation on Sakhalin, if political approval were granted.

However, the WSJ stresses that there is no evidence to suggest that Witkoff, the White House, or Kushner had any knowledge of or involvement in these interactions.

Sources told the newspaper that, ahead of the planned Putin-Trump meeting in Alaska in August, European intelligence passed a report to senior officials in several European countries detailing the economic plans being discussed between Trump’s envoy and Russia, particularly joint mineral extraction in the Arctic, which caused shock.

Background:

• Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal published a reconstruction of the events that led to the US administration’s emergence of a 28-point plan for a peaceful settlement of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
• Last weekend, US and Ukrainian delegations held talks in Geneva on the initial version of the "peace plan" and began making adjustments.
• On Saturday, the Ukrainian delegation, led by Rustem Umierov, Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council, flew to the United States for new negotiations. Bloomberg had earlier reported that the Ukrainian delegation would be in Florida to meet with Witkoff and Kushner.

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