Bloomberg scored a major scoop yesterday, publishing transcripts of conversations between US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s top foreign policy advisor, and another one between Ushakov and head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev a few days later.

Before I go on, for me the main question is not the content of the conversations, albeit interesting, but who the hell leaked these conversations? Surely, there is little doubt that it was Kremlin-ordered? Then to what end? Well, it seems to me the upshot is that it's now crystal clear the Kremlin wants the 28-point peace plan (28PPP) version of the plan and will not contemplate the European versions.

There has been a lot of manipulation going on with these deals. The Dmitriev-Ushakov conversation makes it clear that Dmitriev played a central role in drawing up the deal. It also confirms that he was the source of the leak of the original story, despite his own and Axios’ denial. Dmitriev himself denied the veracity of the transcript with a one-word social media post: “Fake.”

It highlights that the Kremlin wanted the 28PPP deal released and in play to get the show moving. It also highlights that this is THE deal they want to do – and are willing to do. That is key. Both Ushakov and yesterday Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov came out and confirmed that the 28PPP deal is “very close” to something the Kremlin can accept and that the other versions (the Geneva 19-point peace plan (19PPP) and the EU’s 24-point peace plan (24PPP)) are unacceptable.

The Witkoff leak was also very interesting. The White House has come out in his defence for coaching Ushakov on how to deal with US President Donald Trump. Commentators have slammed him for sounding more like a “partner” of the Russians than a – I don’t know what he should be; the implication is “adversary”. The White House has correctly pointed out that he was negotiating a deal that both sides want ,and in the course of those talks, you do end up as a partner if you want to get the deal over the line.

Having good and friendly relations with your counterpart interlocutor, even if the country relations are poor, is not only perfectly normal, it's desirable. A great example of this is Nikki Haley, who served as US ambassador to the UN from 2017 to 2018 under President Donald Trump’s first term. She is noted for having a very cordial relationship with Vitaly Churkin, the long-serving Russian Ambassador to the UN, who died suddenly in February 2017 while still in office. After his death she wrote a glowing obituary and said they would sit for hours dreaming up solutions to problems that both would then run by their leaders, trying to find compromise solutions. This is how diplomacy is done. In exemplifying how Putin could sell an idea to Trump, Witkoff didn’t do anything unusual at all.

What also emerged is a very clear timeline of how this deal came about.

August 15: The process started at the Alaska summit between Putin and Trump. Clearly the outline of a deal was thrashed out there, that included mineral deals (of course) and how to use the frozen Russian money, as well as a bunch of other business deals we don’t know about but were going to be plonked in to the $200bn joint US-Russia investment fund mentioned in the original list.

October 14: Witkoff spoke to Ushakov, the subject of the first Bloomberg transcript,  and advised him on how to sell the peace plan deal to Putin in the wake of his triumph on a Gaza deal a few days later. The full plan was not worked out at this point, but clearly both the White House and the Kremlin had a very clear idea that they were going to put a plan together and the White House was already selling this idea to the Kremlin, not the other way round.

October 24-27: Witkoff and Dmitriev then met in Miami, of all places, for three days to thrash out the details. Interestingly, another downplayed detail is that Ukraine’s Defence Minister Rustam Umerov apparently was present at some of these meetings. He was in the US at the time (where his family lives) and was also reportedly in Miami, but the exact timing of his presence and what he contributed remains unclear. The one point that has been reported is that the idea of a 600,000 men cap on the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) was his idea.

October 29: As soon as Dmitriev got home to Moscow he called Ushakov to discuss leaking the details of the plan, the subject of the second Bloomberg transcript.

November 1: Since the start of November, the Kremlin has thrown everything its got into the battle for Pokrovsk and made real progress. Putin has moved a reported 150,000 troops to the region and 11,000 Russian soldiers are reportedly directly engaged in the battle for the city itself. Pokrovsk looked close to falling two weeks ago after nearly a year of fighting, but the AFU has put up a heroic defence with reportedly some successful counterattacks. But the slow attrition of Ukraine’s defences is another pressure point that the Kremlin is exploiting as the ceasefire talks gather momentum and the situation on the battlefront is “critical” according to military blogger reports.

November 11: The $100mn Energoatom corruption scandal has been a bonus for the Kremlin as it piles new unexpected pressure on Zelenskiy to end the war. The scandal is by far the worst since he came to power in 2019 and significantly improves the prospects for reaching a peace deal, as it undermines the already wobbly support for Kyiv in the EU.

November 18: Axios published its report, “Scoop: US secretly drafting new plan to end Ukraine war” setting the cat amongst the pigeons. Within 24 hours the text of the entire list was leaked by Ukrainian politician Oleksiy Honcharenko, a member of former president Petro Poroshenko’s European Solidarity party.

The list has been sold as a “Russian wish list” and to back that idea up, The Guardian’s Luke Harding wrote a textual analysis of the list shows the original was very likely written in Russian, and not English, so that it had to come from the Kremlin. Except it came from Ukraine where Russian is one of the diplomatic working languages.

November 23: The circus of amending the proposals began, culminating with the Geneva meeting on November 23 and is still going on. Geneva produced the 19-point alternative peace plan (19PPP) and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has also issued a 24-point EU version (24PPP) that will be completely unacceptable to the Kremlin.

Why would the Kremlin go to all this effort and leak key conversations to the Western press? One explanation could be that it is trying to refocus everyone back on the original 28PPP list as that is the deal it wants to do. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov complained yesterday that the story was descending into an “information frenzy”, but the two transcripts clear up a lot of points and also make it clear that the original proposal was thrashed out by the three parties of the US, Russia and Ukraine. The leak is an attempt to undermine all the other iterations and refocus Trump at least on the need to stick to the original deal he has been working on for almost two months.

A negotiated deal would provide a clean end to the war that not only ties off the multiple loose ends, but would be a step towards starting talks on a new post-Cold War pan-European security deal that the Kremlin has wanted since 2008. (Ukraine’s neutrality and no-NAto status is only part of this wider goal.) It would also allow a restart of talks on renewing the Cold War-era missile agreements which the Kremlin also wants very badly. Both of these are real leverage the West has over Russia that have been almost completely ignored in the talks so far.

Doing business deals with Trump will also appeal to Putin as improved relations with the US would act as a useful counterbalance to his current dependency on Beijing. For the US, business deals would allow Washington to drive a wedge in between Beijing and Moscow in a “reverse Nixon”, which is not a stupid long-term strategy at all. The role of business in adversarial geopolitics is underscored by the presence of a Pepsi factory in Russia since 1972 that Nixon set up; bizarrely even today, most older Russians think that Pepsi is a Russian drink as they know it from their childhood.

The other option for Putin, a military victory, is much messier. He would get his buffer zone on his border and Ukraine would de facto be excluded from Nato for as long as Russia occupies Ukrainian land, but sanctions would remain on Russia for generations and a new post Trump administration could well restart supplying Ukraine. Russia’s investment into securing the territory it already holds would have to be massive and the rebuilding costs of its part of the country would be a significant drain on Russia’s resources.

Zelenskiy has a very nasty choice now. The Kremlin is making it clear that it is finally ready to reach a negotiated

 

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