Kushner Witkoff Lukoil Deal: Inside Putin’s Business Bait

Julia Ioffe
Updated Thu, October 8, 2026 


Jared Kusher, Steve Witkoff

Last week ushered in yet another revelation that might have unleashed a firestorm back in the comparatively innocent days of the first Trump administration: Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, his buddy and envoy, have reportedly been talking to the Kremlin about a multibillion-dollar deal that would sell Lukoil's assets, currently frozen by U.S. sanctions, to a consortium of investors including Trump family donors and business partners. The potential deal, which Vladimir Putin apparently raised at his September 5 meeting with Kushner and Witkoff, is part of a larger Kremlin strategy since Trump first took office: dangle future business opportunities in front of the Americans in the hope of getting them to discard Ukraine.

Various proposals, most in their early stages, have trickled out over the past 18 months, like an American investor buying what's left of Nord Stream. Putin has been quite open about what he is offering. "We have a lot of dimensions for joint work," he announced at his joint press conference with Trump in Anchorage last year. "It is clear that U.S. and Russian business cooperation has tremendous potential. We can offer each other so much in trade, digital, high-tech, and space exploration." On the very first day of the summit, he signed a decree allowing the very Western oil companies he had expropriated, such as ExxonMobil, to possibly regain their shares in the Sakhalin-1 oil and gas project.

On his way home from Alaska, Trump echoed the sentiment that Putin expressed both at the podium and behind closed doors. "I noticed [Putin's] bringing a lot of businesspeople from Russia, and that's good," Trump said on Air Force One. "I like that, because they want to do business, but they're not doing business until we get the war solved." After Witkoff and Kushner's latest meeting with Putin, in September, his foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov reiterated the Kremlin approach. In addition to ending the war, he said, "Economic issues and potential major, mutually beneficial Russian-American projects were discussed in some detail."

Putin's strategy is rooted in a simple logic: Americans, the Russian president believes, have no real values; we're crass and mercantile, and we care only about our own material comfort. And for Putin, Ukraine is existential. Yes, his political—and personal—survival is at grave risk if he loses the war he started. But reunion of the Slavic lands under one crown has become a personal quest for defining his world-historical legacy. Putin also knows that Trump doesn't really care about Ukraine so much as his own legacy, which he seemingly measures in ballrooms, arches, and money.

The money, of course, is a mirage. Russia has a notoriously brutal business climate. The longer Putin has been in power, the more he and his cronies—especially the siloviki, the strongmen of the security services—have come to dominate the landscape. Foreign investors, who once had to carefully navigate a web of corruption that flows through the Kremlin, are now mostly gone. And local billionaires have been even more constrained by demands that they play by Putin's rules.

Those rules, all unwritten, change quickly. During Putin's first two terms, it meant staying out of politics. Then, when he returned to the throne, it meant acting as a kind of piggy bank for the state and bankrolling his pet projects: the Sochi Olympics, the bridge across the Kerch Strait, judo gyms across the country. And, fundamentally, it has meant accepting that their money belongs to Putin and his state, and can be expropriated at any point and for any reason, often under the guise of a bogus criminal case.

But after an intense sugar high driven by military spending, the economy is now slowly collapsing under the weight of the war. The siloviki, who have been granted extraordinary power during the conflict and the militarization of society, are feeling even more empowered to expropriate businesses. In 2023, Putin signed a decree that essentially expropriated Rolf, the largest national chain of car dealerships, from founder Sergey Petrov, a former member of parliament. The next year, the company was handed over to Umar Kremlev, the "dear friend" who recently financed the private-island afterparty for Don Jr.'s wedding. More recently, Sergey Shishkarev suddenly sold his stake in his main company—about $900 million worth—to a state corporation and pledged a large chunk of the proceeds to "the needs of national security"—i.e., the war.

It's the kind of tribute Putin demanded of Russian companies in March. By August, however, the Kremlin had extracted some $4.5 billion for the war from Russian companies. And lest you think Western companies are exempt, the idea for this tax originally came from penalizing Western businesses fleeing Russia after the full-scale invasion. In fact, some of the same energy projects the Kremlin has been dangling before the Trump clan are the seized or abandoned projects of American and British oil companies that came before them.

A Sanctions Windfall

I've asked Moscow insiders how American companies can operate in a business climate completely devoid of any rule of law, independent courts, and basic property rights. In Russia, they say, everything is negotiable. "If American companies are interested, they can come here and be guaranteed a first-rate investment climate that's guaranteed at the highest levels," said Igor Korotchenko, a Russian military expert who is a regular on Kremlin TV. "We're not waiting for Coca-Cola and McDonald's"—two brands that were replaced by domestic knock-offs after they fled the country—"but the big energy companies, or Boeing, can all find their niches and make a profit."

But it's hard to imagine what those niches could be, when so much of Russia's economy has already been nationalized and the siloviki are fighting over a rapidly shrinking pie. Who will give up their spot for the sake of… Chevron? And will an ExxonMobil feel comfortable working alongside a Russian oil company in an unequal partnership drilling an oil field in the Arctic? After all, the risk isn't just getting into business with Russian counterparties. What happens if Democrats retake Congress and launch investigations into Trump? Or a new Democratic administration in 2028 reimposes sanctions? Or simply starts enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which Trump announced he would pause less than a month into his second term?

So perhaps the Lukoil deal could be an appealing workaround: For now, the Russian company's foreign assets, frozen by sanctions, have already been written off. If the U.S. lifts those sanctions to allow the sale to go through, their value will immediately skyrocket, generating an instant windfall for Todd Boehly, who has donated $2 million to Trump causes, and a group of Gulf investors who have invested in Affinity Partners, Kushner's private equity fund, and in World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture helmed by the Trump and Witkoff sons. Other assets that fit this criteria include the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which Trump-friendly investor Stephen Lynch is hoping to snap up.

The gambit is to take advantage of this window and the détente between Trump and Putin, get assets outside of Russia for a song, and deal with the regulatory—and political—consequences later. But it's telling just how few takers there are, and how few of the proposed projects are on Russian soil, where the business climate has never been worse.