Donald Trump told Vladimir Putin that ending the war in Ukraine would open large-scale prospects for restoring US-Russian trade, the Kremlin said after an hour-long call on September 8.
"Donald Trump clearly conveyed the idea that an early end to the conflict would be desirable," Yuri Ushakov, the Russian president's foreign policy aide, told reporters in a readout published by the Kremlin at 17:30 Moscow time. Trump pitched it, Ushakov said, as a way to immediately open impressive and large-scale prospects for the full restoration of relations between the two countries, and dwelt on the enormous benefits of developing trade and economic ties. "Donald Trump is interested in achieving a breakthrough during his presidency," Ushakov said.
The commercial framing is the substance of it. Moscow has spent the past month putting a package of energy, Arctic, minerals and infrastructure deals in front of Washington, carried by Kirill Dmitriev through the channel to Steve Witkoff, and has floated everything from the return of American oil majors to a restoration of dollar clearing. On the Kremlin's account of this call, the same offer is now being made in the other direction, by the US president, and the price attached to it is an end to the war.
Ushakov said Putin supported that approach in the context of building a constructive partnership between the two great powers, and again praised US mediation efforts and Trump's personal role. The call followed the visits by Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Moscow on September 5 and Kyiv the following day, whose results Ushakov said both presidents assessed positively. Work through that channel, and through some others, would continue.
What was not agreed is the thing that has blocked every previous round. Putin continues to demand the complete withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the unoccupied parts of Donetsk region as a condition for peace, which Kyiv rejects. Ushakov said Putin gave Trump an objective and thorough analysis of the battlefield situation and his view of the prospects for advances, and that the call set out specific measures the US could take to bring the fighting to an end more quickly. He did not say what they were.
"You understand yourselves that it was confidential, so I will hardly be able to share many important details and nuances," Ushakov said, The Moscow Times reported.
On Europe, Ushakov said it was stressed that Russia has no aggressive plans towards the European Union whatsoever, and that talk of a Russian threat is being used as a pretext for increasing support for Ukraine and raising Western European military spending. The two leaders agreed to stay in contact and to speak again quickly if necessary, and Ushakov said the call ended on a positive note.
The White House did not immediately confirm the call and US officials had not commented on its substance, Meduza reported. Every word of the account above is therefore the Kremlin's.
It was also the second consecutive day on which the diplomacy and the war ran in opposite directions. Russia held off striking Kyiv for three days while the American envoys were in the country and hit the capital with ballistic and cruise missiles within hours of their departure on the night of September 7, killing two people and burning warehouses in four districts.
Russia's envoys pressed a package of energy, mineral and infrastructure deals on the US when Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Vladimir Putin on September 5 – the so called “Dmitriev package” that is reportedly worth $12 trillion according to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
But no deal was done and envoys came away with two things: a harder list of political demands, now including a change to Ukraine's constitution and land swaps taken off the table; and a commercial prospectus.
Nevertheless, the Kremlin reported separately after the meeting that major Russian-American projects had been discussed in detail. IntelliNews as hs reported on the politics of that Moscow meeting and the Kyiv leg that followed but the details of the business package remain sketchy.
Moscow is not offering peace in exchange for business, but business in exchange for war, Anton Gerashchenko, a former Ukrainian deputy interior minister, wrote in an assessment published on September 7. The objective is to “buy American consent” to the normalisation of the war, by creating US commercial interests that would lose money if sanctions were tightened again.
The salesman is Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund and Putin's special envoy, whose route into the administration runs through Witkoff and Kushner. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on February 6 2026 that Ukrainian intelligence had obtained documents putting the value of the package at six-time more than the entire value of the Russian economy. Dmitriev called the $12 trillion figure “fake news” and then raised his own estimate to more than $14 trillion, adding that American businesses had already lost more than $300bn because of sanctions. While the actual number is in dispute, it is clear that deals worth tens of billions of dollars are under serious discussion.
The deals
Sakhalin-1 and Exxon: the template for everything else. On August 15 2025, the day of the Trump and Putin summit in Anchorage, Putin signed Decree No 559 opening a legal route for foreign investors to return. For Exxon that means its former 30% stake and about $4.6bn written off when it left. Exxon has publicly denied plans to return, but talks continued: Reuters reported a non-binding framework agreement between Exxon and Rosneft, the Wall Street Journal reported contacts between Neil Chapman and Igor Sechin, and Darren Woods raised it with Trump. Putin has extended the deadline for transactions involving the stake to January 1 2027. The company held talks in Moscow about a return as early as last year.
Novatek LNG and Gentry Beach: the one deal already signed. The Dallas investor, who has ties to the Trump family, signed an LNG agreement with Novatek after the Anchorage summit, according to the New York Times. Beach said the project had been discussed at the highest levels in Moscow and Washington. It is a concrete American private-sector interest for which better relations with Russia carry a cash value. US interest in the equipment of the sanctioned Arctic LNG 2 project has run in parallel.
Arctic oil and gas: the centre of the offer, because it is where Russian and American interests could be tied together for decades. Russia needs technology, capital and sanctions relief to develop difficult fields; American companies are offered access to the resource. Putin has said publicly that joint energy projects in Alaska and the Arctic are under discussion. The Kremlin's gain arrives when American companies put billions of their own dollars in, because from that point new sanctions cost American shareholders too.
Critical minerals: lithium, nickel, platinum and rare earths, aimed squarely at American dependence on China. In February 2025 Putin explicitly included the so-called new territories, the Ukrainian land Russia occupies, in the offer. That is the part of the package that would give US businesses an economic interest in resources seized by force.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant: Bloomberg has reported options involving American participation in or control over the plant, with its output split between the parties. A Ukrainian facility taken by Russia would move from being a question of occupation to being the subject of a commercial agreement.
Aluminium: in February 2025 Putin proposed returning about 2mn tonnes a year of Russian aluminium to the US market, and separately a roughly $15bn project in Krasnoyarsk Krai pairing a hydroelectric plant with new smelting capacity. Access to the American market in exchange for the lifting of restrictions.
Aviation: long-term purchases of American aircraft have been discussed. Delivering them would require aviation sanctions to be lifted, and Moscow has attached a demand for compensation to American companies for losses incurred when they left Russia.
The Bering Strait tunnel: in October 2025 Dmitriev proposed a Putin and Trump tunnel under the strait, 112 km long, costing about $8bn and taking up to eight years, possibly involving Elon Musk's Boring Company. The economics of that estimate do not stand up. The political product does: a monument with Trump's name on it.
Lukoil's international assets: on January 29 2026 Lukoil announced a deal with Carlyle to sell LUKOIL International GmbH, which holds foreign assets with a book value of about $22bn, subject to approval by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control. Reuters reported competing bids from Chevron and Quantum Capital and interest from Exxon and ADNOC. This one cuts the other way: Lukoil is selling those assets because sanctions forced it to, so it shows American capital willing to buy Russian assets, not to invest inside Russia.
Sanctions relief itself: OFAC issued General Licences 133 and 134 in March 2026, followed by 134B and 134C, allowing transactions involving certain shipments of Russian oil including cargoes belonging to Rosneft and Lukoil and sanctioned tankers. The trigger was the US and Israeli war with Iran, the disruption at the Strait of Hormuz and the threat of a shortage. Dmitriev did not engineer it, but it demonstrated that when Russian oil solves an American problem, sanctions become negotiable. Restoring dollar clearing has also been floated as part of the package.
What stands in the way
Congress could block any and all of these deals going through. On August 7 the Senate voted 86 to 11 for the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, the so called “hellish sanctions” package, which would tighten pressure on Russia's energy sector, financial system, shadow fleet and the largest buyers of its energy by imposing up to 100% tariffs on anyone that does business with Russia.
A companion bill from McCaul and Hoyer has gone to the House. A margin of 86 to 11 says that outside the president's immediate circle there is no consensus for a return to business as usual.
Moscow is therefore not working with the American system as a whole but with its most receptive parts. Notably, when CIA boss John Ratcliffe travelled to Moscow about a week earlier, he was rebuffed by Putin, who refused to meet him after he was told Ratcliffe intended to give me a ticking off for threatening military actions against Nato. In general, the US Treasury has proved situational, easing sanctions when a wider American interest called for it. Congress and the security establishment have not. But the US envoys have always sold business deals, deals that Putin remains interested in.
The question of why Russia wants American money at all, when Chinese capital is readily available, answers itself. China buys Russian resources but cannot lift American sanctions, cannot return Russia to dollar clearing and cannot weaken the transatlantic sanctions regime. Moreover, Chinese investment comes with its own dependencies that the Kremlin is keen to manage. American investment offers capital and technology, political legitimacy, less dependence on Beijing and, in time, an American lobby with money at stake in stable relations.
On the results so far, Gerashchenko's assessment is that they are contradictory. Beach and Novatek, the Sakhalin-1 talks, Carlyle and Lukoil's foreign assets, interest from Chevron and Quantum, a series of OFAC exemptions: but Carlyle is buying a distressed sale forced by sanctions, Exxon is trying to recover its own losses, and OFAC moved because of an energy crisis. None of it is yet the systemic normalisation Moscow wants. That begins when American companies put new money into projects inside Russia and acquire an interest in protecting it, and it crosses a further threshold if American capital enters projects connected to occupied Ukrainian territory.
Russia rejected a proposed truce in the air and repeated its demand that Ukraine leave Donbas when US envoys visited Moscow and Kyiv on September 5 and 6.
Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Vladimir Putin for more than three hours in Moscow, then flew to Kyiv the following day for talks with Volodymyr Zelenskiy alongside French, British and German representatives, who asked the US for a “winter package” of ammo, LNG and cash. The single tangible result was an agreement between Ukraine, the US and Russia to resume trilateral negotiations, the Kyiv Independent reported.
As Kyiv braces for a winter bombardment by Russia, Bankova will be disappointed that the talks stopped short of new proposals for peace. The de-escalation measures the US is exploring cover energy infrastructure, grain shipments, electricity facilities and oil and gas exports, Zelenskiy said. Both combatants’ missile and drone campaign has spent the summer destroying power and retail assets on both sides.
What the envoys took to Moscow
The US envoys arrived with revised versions of the earlier proposal 27-point peace plan (27PPP) floated in December, updated to reflect what has changed since talks stalled in February when the US war with Iran began. People familiar with the negotiations told the Kyiv Independent there were few fundamentally new ideas and that Washington was mainly trying to revive earlier proposals and narrow the gap.
One proposal was new: a truce in the air, either confined to energy infrastructure or halting aerial strikes altogether. Russia opposed it, according to reports.
Moscow's public position did not move. "The Russian army's successes were noted; confidence was expressed that the set objectives would be achieved," Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters after the meeting, before repeating the standard Kremlin formulation about eliminating all the “root causes” of the conflict. Russia continues to insist Ukraine withdraw from Donbas, which means surrendering territory its army has not taken.
Ukrainian MP Anna Skorokhod put it more sharply, saying the terms had hardened: "This was not a breakthrough. Previously, there was no requirement to amend the Constitution or recognise the territories, but now they have demanded it."
What was actually agreed in Kyiv
With no breakthrough to announce, the September 6 talks in Kyiv turned to winter. Air defence was the main issue, and Ukraine's shortage of Patriot interceptors, particularly PAC-3 missiles, the main constraint, because they are among the few weapons that can stop the ballistic missiles Russia now uses against the capital.
"If the war continues, and we expect the war will continue, we are counting heavily on the winter aid package, on support for both air defence and the energy sector," Zelenskiy told reporters, adding that the American side would increase production of anti-ballistic missiles. Ukraine has been scouring the world for interceptors for months, and asked the EU on September 5 to fund its first PAC-3 purchase out of the EUR90bn support loan.
Kyrylo Budanov, the presidential chief of staff, welcomed the delegation publicly. "Glad to welcome the American delegation headed by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Kyiv. Ahead lies an eventful day and important negotiations," he said. "Representatives of our European partners, France, Great Britain, and Germany, are also in Kyiv. Together, we are all working to achieve a just and lasting peace for Ukraine."
Why now, and why it failed
The timing was not accidental. Ukrainian and US intelligence increasingly believe Russia is preparing to escalate, possibly with a new mobilisation drive after September’s general election and another attempt to break Ukraine over the winter. One Ukrainian official characterised the envoys' message to Putin as: "Let's wrap this up; we'll lift the sanctions and move your assets somewhere before this goes any further," according to The Kyiv Independent.
The same official was blunt about why it did not work. "Putin still hopes to break us this winter and isn't willing to agree to anything." The envoys, both a Ukrainian and a US official said, "genuinely want" progress towards a ceasefire before winter.
Zelenskiy's own reading, given to Axios and published on September 7, rests on American domestic politics. Asked whether Putin might want to hand Trump a diplomatic win before November’s midterm elections, he replied: "Yeah." "My feeling is that Putin needs Trump," he said, adding that the Russian leader does not want to upset the US president. Budanov has suggested negotiations could gather pace in late September, days after Russia's parliamentary elections and weeks before the midterms.
Ceasefire over
Russia observed a three-day pause on strikes against Kyiv while the envoys were in the country. It ended within hours of their departure, with a combined ballistic, cruise and drone attack that killed two people and damaged warehouses, a business centre, a metro station and shops across seven districts of the capital.
The winter that both sides are planning around is the same one Ukraine has already survived twice. Last winter's strikes knocked out 9 GW of generating capacity nationwide and left thousands of Kyiv residents without reliable heat or power in temperatures as low as minus 25 Celsius. The campaign to freeze Ukraine into submission has been the shape of the last two heating seasons, and Zelenskiy's warning is that Putin may prefer to force capitulation through it rather than take a deal.
Set against the pattern of the past year, this week changed less than the diplomatic traffic suggests. The proposals that reached Kyiv in February were rejected then on much the same grounds, the channel between Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev has been carrying commercial as much as political traffic throughout, and the trip to Moscow and then Kyiv ended where the last one did. What is different is the calendar: two sets of elections, a heating season, and an air defence stockpile that will not stretch across all three.
North Korea exploited Russia's isolation to improve its own economic and military position while giving away little, Riddle Russia argued in a note by the political scientist Roman Chernikov published on August 25.
The war in Ukraine has removed the constraints that had kept Moscow at arm's length from Pyongyang. Before 2022 Russia played bridge between the Kim regime and an alarmed international community, and large joint projects were considered too toxic to attempt. Once Russian oil started reaching world markets the same way North Korean oil did, through the shadow fleet, and the front needed shells in quantities only a country that had spent its whole history preparing for a major war could supply, the objection disappeared.
Two visits, 24 years apart
Chernikov frames the change through Putin's two trips to Pyongyang. In July 2000 he went to persuade Kim Jong-il to abandon the missile programme, which would have made Moscow the negotiator the West could not be and removed Washington's stated rationale for missile defence in Alaska. Putin emerged claiming Kim had said North Korea was prepared to use only other states' rocket technology for peaceful space exploration, and took the success to the G8 summit in Okinawa. On August 12 Kim told a visiting delegation of 56 South Korean media editors that he had promised nothing of the sort and had spoken "in passing, as a joke".
The 2024 visit was between equals. The Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership that replaced the 2000 agreement provides that "if either party is subjected to armed attack by any state or several states and thus finds itself in a state of war, the other party shall immediately provide military and other assistance". Putin was still saying at that point that North Korean soldiers were not in question: "We are not asking anyone for this, no one has offered it to us, so there is no need."
From approval to complicity
Pyongyang moved early. On March 2 2022 it voted against the UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia, one of only five no votes with Russia, Belarus, Eritrea and Syria, and in July it became the second country after Syria to recognise the so-called DPR and LPR.
The Korea specialist Andrei Lankov is quoted on why that cost Pyongyang nothing: "The war with Ukraine has created a situation in which North Korea can easily give Russia diplomatic gifts in the expectation of reciprocity. Pyongyang is ready to become one of those voices, especially since it costs it nothing."
The reciprocity came on the missile programme. North Korea had observed a moratorium on nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests since April 2018. On January 30 2022, with the invasion still in preparation, it launched its largest rocket in five years, a medium-range system. In March it launched the Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile, and three more in May, one assessed as intercontinental. When Washington moved to tighten UN sanctions, Russia and China vetoed the resolution.
Trade grew off a very low base. It was $3.78mn in 2022, held down by North Korea's slow post-pandemic reopening, then rose almost ninefold to $34.4mn in 2023 and stayed at about $34mn in 2024. Official 2025 data has not been published; new categories have appeared, including beer, cigarettes and rapeseed oil, and Moscow has acknowledged that the second major block after consumer goods is hydrocarbons.
MEPs push to use frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine
A letter signed by 122 EU lawmakers from across the political spectrum calls for the controversial debate over immobilised assets to be reopened, as Ukraine faces a budget crunch.
More than 100 MEPs have called on European Union leaders to reopen talks on using Russia’s frozen assets to support Ukraine, as Kyiv flags a €23 billion shortfall in defence funding and EU countries remain reluctant to commit more money from their national budgets.
A letter sent on Wednesday and seen by Euronews argues that Moscow should pay for the damage caused by its war, backing a renewed push started by four EU countries at the end of August to unlock the immobilised assets.
The EU holds more than €200 billion in Russian assets, most of it in Belgium. The European Commission put forward a plan last December to convert them into a zero-interest loan to finance Ukraine’s defence against Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
But EU countries failed to agree to unlock the funds amid fears over the legal risks, and the plan fell apart at a leaders’ summit in Brussels.
Earlier this year, the bloc gave the final green light to a €90 billion support loan for Ukraine. Still, MEPs warn that it will not be enough, with the estimated cost of Russian destruction already exceeding €600 billion.
Lawmakers from the European People's Party, Renew Europe, the Socialists and Democrats, the Greens/EFA, the European Conservatives and Reformists and The Left signed the letter, which was launched by liberal MEPs Karin Karlsbro, Nathalie Loiseau and Petras Auštrevičius.
It is addressed to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, Commissioner for Economy Valdis Dombrovskis, European Council President António Costa and Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin, who holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union.
The signatories are urging the European Commission to come forward with a new proposal to overcome the objections raised by some member states, in particular Belgium, which opposed the plan from the outset.
The Belgian government led by Prime Minister Bart De Wever feared being left exposed to Russian litigation since Belgium is the host of Euroclear, the assets’ main custodian. Other countries, including Italy, Bulgaria and Malta, also expressed concerns.
The MEPs’ letter suggests transferring the assets into a new EU instrument that would assume the legal obligations towards Russia’s central bank. This would provide financial support to Ukraine while maintaining economic pressure on Moscow.
“Russia should bear the financial consequences of its war of aggression,” reads the letter, in a blunt political message shared by most of the Parliament’s political groups.
Oil above the cap, and no panel to count it
The logistics were built out in 2024: a road bridge at Hasan and Tumangang across the Tumen, recently completed, alongside the Hasan to Rason railway, on which in 2021 Russian diplomats and their families had to leave the country by handcar. North Korea reopened to Russian tourists.
The Nakhodka to Rason sea line matters more. UN Security Council sanctions imposed in 2017 cap North Korean oil imports at 525,000 tonnes, or 4mn barrels, a year. A joint investigation by iStories and the Open Source Center found at least 50 tankers shuttling between Russia and North Korea in 2024, delivering approximately 1.3mn barrels. Britain sanctioned the Fuel Bunker Company servicing the Nakhodka terminal in May 2024.
The mechanism that would have documented this no longer exists. In 2024 Russia vetoed the renewal of the UN Security Council panel of experts monitoring the sanctions, calling the regime "divorced from reality". China abstained.
Shells, then soldiers
The bulk of arms deliveries came in 2023, after a visit to Pyongyang by Sergei Shoigu, then Russia's defence minister. UN experts confirmed in spring 2024 that the Russian army had struck Kharkiv with a North Korean Hwasong-11 missile, and deliveries that year became the basis for US sanctions on individuals and companies.
Almost nobody expected troops, and Chernikov quotes the sceptical case from Konstantin Asmolov, a Korea specialist who publishes in pro-government Russian media: "First, purely technical problems will arise with logistics and the availability of military interpreters. Second, it is a reputational blow to the Kremlin. Can Russia really not cope with Ukraine without North Korea's help? And third, as soon as we have this kind of foreign specialist, it will open the door to analogous actions by the West."
It happened anyway, under secrecy and only on internationally recognised Russian territory, in Kursk region. Putin stopped denying foreign troops there in October 2024; official confirmation came in April 2025, timed so North Korean generals could attend the May 9 parade as brothers-in-arms.
Contact has stayed dense since. Shoigu, now secretary of the Security Council rather than defence minister, flew to North Korea three times in 2025 and met the North Korean minister of state security Ri Chang-dae in Moscow in May. State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin visited in April 2026. Lavrov went in July 2025, and North Korean foreign minister Choe Son-hui came to Moscow in July 2026, declaring that "Pyongyang's full support for the domestic and foreign policy of the Russian Federation is unshakeable".
Chernikov's conclusion is that the balance of the relationship runs the other way from the one Moscow presents. Pyongyang restored tourist flows, secured goods and oil, and acquired combat experience in Kursk that becomes an argument in its dealings with Seoul. Zelenskiy says a larger North Korean deployment is being prepared, and Reuters has reported North Korean missile units moving to Voronezh region, which would let Pyongyang keep to its practice of fighting the war without crossing Russia's borders.
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