December 4, 2025
DIANE FRANCIS
Vladimir Putin used the December 2 talks with American negotiators in Moscow to enhance his international stature, lower Europe’s, threaten NATO, and continue playing the “long game” to wear down Ukraine and its allies. President Donald Trump sent his Special Envoy, Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and both were escorted into Moscow’s ornate offices and waited three hours, according to several sources. At the same time, Putin taped a thinly-veiled nuclear threat to Europe: “If they [Europeans] started a war with Russia, then Moscow would be ready to fight and that the defeat of European powers would be so absolute that there would be no one left to even negotiate a peace deal.” He then joined the “American meeting” with the businessmen and foot-dragged through a five-hour ordeal without conceding anything. It was Kremlin Kabuki, a dramatic and fantasy dance aimed at stretching out a war and fatiguing Ukraine’s benefactors, allies, and people. The strategy, explained the chairman of the Duma’s defense committee, Alexei Zhuravlev, was to restrict negotiations to Russia and the United States, who will present a “fait accompli” to Europe and Ukraine, so they have “no choice but to sign”.
Putin knows his “customer” and understands that greed also motivates the current Washington regime and its donors. A few months ago, he shifted tactics after Ukraine’s President Volodomyr Zelensky offered the US a lucrative mineral rights deal, in the hopes of solidifying its support after their disastrous Oval Office debacle. It worked, their relationship improved, and a deal was struck. That’s when Putin copied the tactic and directed his investment advisors and oligarchs to “gin up” similar resource deals to draw Trump’s attention. The result is that, currently, parallel talks are underway involving “peace” as well as multi-billion-dollar business deals between American enterprises and Putin’s oligarchs. Putin’s Ushakov said that the December 2 meeting explored “huge prospects for economic cooperation” between Russia and the United States. Russians added demands to the 28-point scheme, but the final document has not been disclosed and will be presented to Ukrainians this week. Then, if there are climbdowns, a summit between Putin and Trump will occur.
This questionable process began in October when Witkoff (Trump’s real estate partner and golf buddy) and Kushner secretly met at a Russian oligarch’s hotel in Florida with Putin’s investment guru, Kirill Dmitriev, to launch a process aimed at stopping the war against Ukraine. Instead, they made a list of 28 Russian war aims dressed up as a “peace plan” which allowed Putin to keep territories he had stolen, plus gain the rest of Donetsk; reinstate Russia into the G8; lift all sanctions; and permanently prune Ukraine’s army and ban it from joining NATO. It proposed that the US — not Europe or Ukraine —be given a giant chunk of the frozen Russian assets worth hundreds of billions to pay American contractors to rebuild Ukraine.
After their marathon meeting, Putin aide Yuri Ushakov said the sides discussed “huge prospects” for future US-Russian economic cooperation if progress is made. To translate: Both would make
tons of money as long as the Americans obtained concessions from Ukraine and the Russians came up with lucrative deals. Kirill Dmitriev dangled potential payouts. He’s the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) with $10 billion at hand to co-invest in the Russian economy. So he would presumably be the banker for the American investors, and talks went so swimmingly that he posted a photo with the caption “Productive”. As Poland’s President Donald Tusk declared: “We know this is not about peace. It’s about business”.
Such dual negotiations are conflictual and, given Moscow’s track record, notably naïve. Why would Trump encourage massive investments by American corporations and entrepreneurs in Russia, where there are no property laws or legal remedies for non-compliance or abuses? Russian authorities impose jail sentences without justification, and many businessmen, including the country’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have disappeared or been thrown in gulags for speaking out against injustices. American investor Bill Browder was the largest foreign investor in Russia until he was chased out of the country in 2005 over phony tax claims, and his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was murdered in custody. Despite this and other horror stories, Trump’s team would gleefully enable his followers to go to their slaughter. Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Putin has confiscated hundreds of billions in assets from Western enterprises.
The original 28-point “peace plan” has made the rounds to Ukrainians and Europeans, and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has engaged in separate negotiations with them. The Florida developers’ 28-point nonsense was clearly a non-starter: Ukraine pushed back against giving up more territory and restrictions on its military force. It requested security guarantees from the US and Europe to prevent another invasion in the future. Then the Europeans made a 19-point counterproposal, drafted by Britain, France, and Germany. Their revisions include dropping any forced recognition of new Russian territorial gains, freezing the front lines where they currently stand, and postponing territorial resolution to future negotiations. They also raised the cap on Ukraine’s peacetime military to 800,000 — up from the 600,000 limit in the 28-point draft — and suggested security guarantees through a multilateral “Article-5–style” guarantee from a coalition of willing states, rather than just by the United States. On frozen assets, reconstruction, and reparations, the European plan rejected the US proposal to channel frozen Russian assets to itself and proposed that funds be used to compensate Ukraine for war damages. This was also brushed off by Moscow.
The reality is that only Putin can end the shooting, and he has no intention of doing so for several reasons. He faces absolutely no pushback or consequences inside Russia despite massive military losses and a stalling economy, because he’s created a “reign of terror”. In addition, he’s emboldened by Ukraine’s domestic corruption scandal because it has demoralized Ukrainians and allies, and he’s also encouraged by Trump’s growing impatience to end the conflict and by multi-billion-dollar deals. “The essence of Putin’s war is to weaken Ukraine,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. He believes he will get what he wants “if not now, then in six months, if not in six months, then in a year.”
Secretary of State Rubio voiced cautious optimism about the four-way efforts to broker a Russia-Ukraine peace deal, and admitted that the end is not yet in sight. “We’ve gotten closer, but we’re
still not there. Only Putin can end this war on the Russian side.” He said publicly that the invasion was “illogical” because Russia was losing 7,000 soldiers per week fighting over 20 percent of the Donetsk region that remains. But every day the war continues, and talks become business negotiations. Only Trump can stop this war by piling on more sanctions and by kicking the moneychangers completely out of the process. But he won’t, which means that Putin has no reason to stop because, to him, Trump’s mindless two-track business diplomacy over Ukraine has become a potential “profit center”, not a costly conflict.
