Washington is pitching Moscow a slate of business deals, from Sakhalin oil to the Druzhba pipeline, to try to buy an end to the war in Ukraine.
The list under discussion between US and Russian envoys includes joint ventures for American oil majors off Sakhalin, a role for US companies in restarting Russian crude sales to Europe, titanium supplies and the reopening of Russian airspace to US airlines, the Financial Times reported on October 27. A US official told the paper that economic agreements "would be included in and subject to a comprehensive peace framework" and that "nothing is finalised".
The thinking in the White House is that trade, not tanks, keeps the peace. Russian oil and gas flowing west again would revive the flagging economies of Europe and Ukraine, Ukraine would earn transit fees, and the West would in return offer security guarantees to both Kyiv and Moscow. Kyiv hates the idea. It wants Russia defeated, not enriched, and its own security built on a strong army backed by its allies rather than on renewed commercial dependence on its enemy.
Negotiating deals with Russian President Vladimir Putin now can help end the war by showing him that the US is serious about a new and prosperous relationship with Moscow, in the Trump team's view, the New York Times reported on October 27. US special envoy Steve Witkoff said the possibilities were now being shown to Kyiv as well: "We even talk about it now openly with the Ukrainians, to give them some sort of sense about what the possibilities will be when this whole conflict is ended," Witkoff told Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), in St Petersburg last week.
From Arctic oil to titanium
President Donald Trump's administration made clear from the start that it wanted to do business with Russia, floating joint Arctic oil and gas development in February 2025. Dmitriev, Putin's special envoy for economic co-operation, has since put together the so-called Dmitriev package of energy, mineral and infrastructure projects, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in February that his intelligence services valued at $12 trillion. Anton Gerashchenko, a former Ukrainian deputy interior minister, has called it business in exchange for war.
The Trump administration has shown how keen it is one doing business with Dmitiriev by suggesting this week that it may lift sanction on the RDIF, Russia's sovereign wealth fund.
The deals now under discussion are more concrete and, according to the Financial Times, include:
Sakhalin: reviving a joint venture of US and Russian oil companies off Russia's Pacific island. ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM), which held 30% of Sakhalin-1 until it was forced out in 2022, has ruled out a return;
Druzhba: bringing American majors into a resumption of Russian crude sales to European refineries through the pipeline, where flows have been suspended;
Nord Stream: restarting gas supplies to Europe through the surviving pipeline infrastructure, after US envoy Jared Kushner and Dmitriev discussed a US investor for the pipelines;
Lukoil: selling the international assets of Lukoil (MOEX: LKOH) to investors connected to the White House, a process in which Carlyle pulled out as US-backed bidders emerged;
Alaska LNG: involving Novatek (MOEX: NVTK) in a US gas project, after Novatek discussed funding the venture through a UAE intermediary;
Titanium: reviving co-operation on production and supply. Boeing (NYSE: BA) suspended its Russian titanium venture after the full-scale invasion, and Moscow has floated aircraft parts deals before;
Airspace: letting US airlines fly over Russia again;
Potash: easing sanctions on Russian potash and allowing exports through Baltic ports, which would need EU approval. Moscow has already offered fertilisers to the US;
Zaporizhzhia: handing management of the Russian-occupied nuclear power plant to a US entity that would split its electricity between Ukraine and Russia.
Several of the items run straight into a brick wall of European sanctions. The EU has legislated to phase out Russian gas and rejected a US push to restart imports as part of a peace deal, even as the bloc faces a gas crisis, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has rejected reviving Nord Stream 2. US officials say none of the ventures would go ahead until the war ends, while two people familiar with the talks told the Financial Times that Moscow sees them as a reason for Trump to normalise relations while the fighting continues. Geoffrey Pyatt, a former senior US energy diplomat, was blunt: "I can't see any of it lasting contact with the real world."
But despite Brussels' huffing and puffing, some of this business is already happening. The administration suggested lifting sanctions on RDIF, which the Biden administration called Putin's "slush fund", as the fund brokers Russian diesel shipments to the US, the New York Times reported. "The ice has finally broken," Dmitriev told a conference in Moscow on October 16, saying deals were being discussed "right now" rather than only after the war.
"Our model is Poland"
Kyiv's reaction came in a three-hour meeting at the Shell Bay golf club in Florida on October 9, Le Monde reported. Witkoff and Kushner pitched Kyrylo Budanov, head of Zelenskiy's presidential office, a postwar "regional prosperity" plan built on restoring Russian oil and gas flows to Europe through Ukrainian pipelines. Ukraine would collect transit revenue, Europe would get cheaper energy and Russia would regain trade routes cut by the war.
Budanov objected that the arrangement would recreate Ukraine's dependence on Moscow. "Our model is not Belarus, but Poland!" he replied, according to a witness. The meeting was interrupted while he called Zelenskiy.
When the talks resumed, news arrived that Trump had announced the diesel deal with Putin the same day. An irritated Witkoff then demanded that the Ukrainians accept it and stop striking Russian oil refineries, arguing that the attacks endangered the wider world, according to the paper. Members of the Ukrainian delegation were badly shaken by the encounter.
Three tankers carrying about 140,000 tonnes of Russian diesel are already heading to the US under a temporary sanctions exemption agreed by Trump and Putin, the Financial Times reported on October 28. Two are themselves under Western sanctions: the Talisman is blacklisted by the US, the EU and the UK, and the Hong Kong-owned, Sierra Leone-flagged Leruo by the EU, the UK and Canada. They are due between November 7 and 11, after the US midterm elections, with American diesel at $6.34 a gallon against $3.66 a year ago.
Zelenskiy has warned that Moscow is offering Washington an "economic marriage", and that the diesel deal opens the door to fertilisers, gas, frozen assets and further sanctions relief. Kyiv's fear of being sidelined appears to be shifting its own position. Zelenskiy has for the first time opened the door to giving Moscow security guarantees as part of a peace agreement, the Financial Times reported on October 28, amid concern in Kyiv over the energy, aviation and titanium talks and after recent interruptions to US intelligence sharing and Starlink access.
Kyiv's other backers are thinning out too as Ukraine tries to deal with the gap between the funding promises vs the reality of what is actually arriving. Aid from countries outside the EU is set to fall from €19bn this year to €4bn in 2027, according to a European Commission forecast, leaving Brussels to plug the gap largely on its own.
The Nordic channel
Europe has been trying to get into the room - and failing. At Zelenskiy's request, Finland and Norway hosted the Oslo meeting with Witkoff and Kushner on October 20, after which Witkoff flew to St Petersburg to see Putin. Finnish President Alexander Stubb has said the peace process was close to collapse that week, with relations between Kyiv and Washington in serious trouble.
The effort culminated in the Stubb Store call with Putin on October 27, made with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store and prepared with Kyiv and Washington. Putin spent most of the 90-minute call, scheduled for half an hour, lecturing the two leaders on medieval Slavic history, sources told the Financial Times, although Store has since denied that. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen led the criticism, saying Europe "should stick together rather than going solo" and lambasted her two neighbours for talking to Putin at all.
More was achieved than first appeared, according to Finnish public broadcaster Yle, whose sources described a substantive exchange in which Stubb and Store questioned Putin about the coming talks in Abu Dhabi and told him that dragging out the war would not weaken European support for Ukraine. Freedom of navigation in the Baltic Sea and Russia's shadow fleet were also discussed, while Finnish-Russian relations were not raised at all. The three leaders agreed to stay in direct telephone contact, and Zelenskiy has since defended the call.
Pressure Europe too
The Kremlin has made it clear that it has no interest in dealing with the EU at all. Putin's view of Brussels is that it is like trying to herd cats and a pointless task, which he has handed over to Trump to manage. the Kremlin has barred European from taking part in the trilateral technical talks with Ukraine and the US in Abu Dhabi, which Zelenskiy expects between November 6 and 10. What Moscow wants is for Washington to deliver Kyiv, and now Europe too.
"It's not enough to talk only with Kyiv," Putin's foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told state television presenter Pavel Zarubin on October 25, recalling that after the Alaska summit on August 15 between Putin and Trump "there was an impression that the American administration could dictate something" and that "so far, it hasn't quite worked out" because of Europe's relentless backing of Kyiv.
The remark has been widely read in the West as Moscow reaching out to Europe. It was nothing of the sort, according to Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who resigned over the invasion in 2022. Ushakov used an impersonal construction, "it is necessary", rather than "we", and the message was addressed to Washington:
"You pressure Kyiv, now pressure Europe too, or you won't get Kyiv to accept the terms," Bondarev wrote.
What Moscow would ask of Europe is old. The Kremlin is expected to use the talks to demand that Nato roll its military presence back to 1997 levels, the Telegraph reported on October 25. The point is often misread as a demand about national armies or Nato membership, according to security analyst Alexander Graef. It concerns foreign deployments, echoing Article 4 of Russia's December 2021 draft agreement with Nato, which would bar forces beyond those stationed in European states as of May 27, 1997.
Yet the Kremlin is happy to talk bilaterally to its neighbours, as long as they are talking as regional players and not representing the EU - Norway is not part of the EU, although Finland is. The call from the leaders of Finland and Norway stressed that they spoke for their own countries and not for Europe as a whole. This allows Moscow keep a channel open to the Nordic states on the Baltic Sea and the High North while refusing Brussels a seat.
Trump said on October 28 that a meeting with Zelenskiy and Putin could take place "very soon". The first Russian diesel tankers are due in US ports in the same week the negotiators are expected to sit down in Abu Dhabi.
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