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.