Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said after Tuesday’s meeting that “there was great interest” in the room “in removing artificial barriers to the development of mutually beneficial economic cooperation” – an apparent reference to lifting US sanctions.
Remarkably, the Trump administration appears to be engaging with Russia’s message without demanding payment upfront. After Ukraine suggested the possibility of natural resource deals to Trump, his Treasury Secretary pushed to have the country sign away half its mineral wealth. And Trump continues to portray US allies as freeloaders, threatening more tariffs and demanding they pay more for their own defence.
With Russia, by contrast, the administration seems to be signalling that the one thing Putin has to do to pave the way for a full reset in Moscow’s relationship with Washington is end the war in Ukraine. Many Europeans and Ukrainians fear Trump will seek a peace deal on Russia’s terms, especially after the US President suggested Tuesday that Ukraine was to blame for the Russian invasion.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday that an end to the war would be “the key that unlocks the door” for “potentially historic economic partnerships”. He echoed Lavrov in hinting that the United States could drop sanctions against Russia as part of such a deal.
“There are sanctions that were imposed as a result of this conflict,” Rubio said. “I would say to you that in order to bring an end to any conflict there has to be concessions made by all sides.”
For the Kremlin, a key emissary to Trump’s pecuniary mindset has been Dmitriev, a youthful Putin ally and former banker who has specialised in developing Russian business ventures around the world. He has close ties to Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and he pushed the development and global distribution of Russia’s Covid-19 vaccine, Sputnik V.
In 2016, Dmitriev tried to use business contacts to build a back channel to Trump in the name of “reconciliation” between the United States and Russia, according to the report into Russian interference in that year’s election by special counsel Robert Mueller.
In Trump’s first term, that reconciliation never came. This time around, Dmitriev has already had better luck.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, praised Dmitriev and Crown Prince Mohammed for their role in helping secure Russia’s release last week of Marc Vogel, an American schoolteacher imprisoned in Moscow. In Tuesday’s talks, Dmitriev was part of Russia’s delegation, using interviews with Western media outlets to promote business opportunities in Russia’s oil sector and in the Arctic.
“The economic track allows diplomacy, allows communication, allows joint wins, allows joint success,” Dmitriev said. “And we saw that President Trump is focused on having success.”
He said that US oil companies had “really benefited from the Russian oil sector,” adding, “we believe at some point they will be coming back”. The document that he brought into Tuesday’s meeting with the United States showed that the industries with the greatest purported losses among American companies that left Russia were “IT and Media,” at US$123b, and “Consumer and Healthcare,” at US$94 b.
While American trade with Russia before Ukraine-related sanctions began in 2014 was tiny compared with trade with China or the European Union, big energy companies made huge investments, and American consumer goods and tech companies saw Russia as a significant market.
Dmitriev said the calculation took into account not only fire sales and write-downs, but also “forgone profits”. Western companies that left Russia have officially declared more than US$100b in losses since the start of the war, with many of their prized assets sold under onerous terms dictated by the Russian state.
Many world leaders have shifted to a business-focused message to cater to a US President whose foreign policy has little in common with his predecessors’ emphasis on democracy, human rights and the trans-Atlantic alliance. But among the governments scrambling to influence Trump’s view of the war in Ukraine, Moscow stands alone in its success in getting him to bite.
Ukrainian officials made the possibility of lucrative US energy and mineral deals after the war’s end a centrepiece of a charm offensive with Trump that began last fall. Rather than take the invitation to cooperate, Trump appeared to decide that Ukraine’s natural resources should serve as payback for past US support.
In Kyiv, Ukraine, last week, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine rejected a proposal from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent under which the United States would take a 50% interest in all of Ukraine’s mineral resources.
Europeans have also tried to use talk of deals to get Trump’s attention. During the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in late January, Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte said Europe would be willing to foot the bill for the United States to continue supplying arms to Ukraine using its defence industrial base.
Such entreaties did little to shift Trump’s view of Europe as taking advantage of US security assistance, nor did they stop him from excluding the Europeans from his administration’s talks with Russia.
Russia, on the other hand, has got the Trump administration’s attention – both with the prospect of business deals and with the prospect of Trump being seen as a peacemaker by ending the war in Ukraine.
“Trump doesn’t care much about long-term strategic goals,” said Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who resigned over the war in Ukraine. “Putin is trying to play on this feeling and get him interested in very quick material gains that are immediately clear to Trump.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Anton Troianovski
Photographs by: Finbarr O’Reilly and Al Drago
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