Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met repeatedly with Putin’s negotiator, Kirill Dmitriev, who pushed the idea that ending the war could come through U.S.–Russia cooperation — reopening Russia’s economy with America, not Europe, as the main partner.

The conversations ranged from using frozen Russian funds to help rebuild Ukraine, to U.S. access to Arctic energy and Siberian minerals, to restarting major projects like Sakhalin and even the crippled Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

U.S. investors and Russian oligarchs were already positioning themselves in case a deal took shape.

There were also political pieces: territorial ideas Ukraine rejected, talk of a massive prisoner swap, and U.S. economic incentives for Kyiv.

Russia even floated a return to space cooperation — including the symbolic idea of a joint mission to Mars — as part of a “new relationship.”

Source: WSJ

"Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land," Steve Witkoff says.

Witkoff, who hasn't traveled to Ukraine this year, is set to visit Russia for the sixth time next week and will again meet Putin.

Sanctioned billionaires of Russia — Gennady Timchenko, Yuri Kovalchuk, and the Rotenberg brothers, Boris and Arkady — have sent representatives to quietly meet American companies.

Earlier this year, Exxon Mobil met with Russia's biggest state energy company, Rosneft, to discuss returning to the massive Sakhalin gas project.

Gentry Beach, a college friend of Donald Trump Jr. and campaign donor to his father, has been in talks to acquire a stake in a Russian Arctic gas project.

Stephen P. Lynch, who paid $600,000 this year to a lobbyist close to Trump Jr., is seeking to obtain a Treasury Department license to buy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from a Russian state-owned company.

Exxon, billionaire investor Todd Boehly, and others have explored buying assets owned by Lukoil, Russia's second-largest oil producer.

More recently, Kremlin-linked businessmen Timchenko, Kovalchuk, and the Rotenbergs have been offering U.S. counterparts gas concessions in the Sea of Okhotsk.

Putin gave Witkoff a medal, the Order of Lenin, to pass to a CIA deputy director whose mentally unwell son was killed fighting for Russia in Ukraine.

It is also noted that figures such as Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are the only ones playing roles in facilitating business discussions between U.S. and Russian interests.

American officials across both parties had long viewed Yermak as abrasive and obstructive.

One insider reportedly called him a “bipartisan irritator.”

His role in arranging a disastrous Oval Office meeting with Trump, and his decision to show Trump disturbing images of starving Ukrainian POWs, badly damaged Kyiv’s standing in Washington.

After that meeting, Trump officials advised Zelensky to fire him, citing both diplomatic mishandling and the fact that Yermak required an English translator.

European allies were also believed to have pushed Zelensky to let Yermak go, worried that his growing power, abrasive style, and links to the scandal threatened unity and accountability within Ukraine’s leadership at a critical moment.

In the end, foreign diplomats saw Yermak as a politically toxic figure who jeopardized Western support.

Source: The Telegraph

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