Chapter 1: What unusual meeting took place in Miami regarding Ukraine?
Back in October, at a beautiful waterfront home in Florida, three men quietly came together to try and end a war.
It's three businessmen in a Miami Beach condo, hunched over a laptop, redrawing European borders, effectively trying to solve a geopolitical problem. The key protagonists were Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, as well as Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law.
And Steve Witkoff, a real estate tycoon that the president has known since the 80s, who is now Washington's emissary to Moscow, effectively.
These men were trying to draft a plan to end the long and deadly conflict between Russia and Ukraine. A plan that would become the basis of lengthy peace talks that took place this week. But our colleague Drew Hinshaw says when these businessmen met in Miami, peace wasn't the only thing they were negotiating. That's according to people familiar with the talks.
They're not only drafting a peace plan that in their mind is a way to end the war in Ukraine on terms Russia can accept. They're also looking at how do we bring in Russia's $2 trillion economy in from the cold, lowering down sanctions as part of a peace process.
This is highly unorthodox and highly controversial.
That's our colleague Joe Parkinson, who reports with Drew.
They're fusing this idea that business should not be something which follows a peace deal, but something which should be integrated into the negotiation itself.
Over the past few months, Joe and Drew, along with a team of Wall Street Journal reporters, have been investigating the Trump administration's approach to negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. And what they found was a dramatic shift in U.S.
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Chapter 2: How are business interests influencing peace negotiations in Ukraine?
diplomatic strategy, particularly when it comes to relations with the Kremlin.
We spoke to dozens of officials over months. We spoke to diplomats. We spoke to former and current intelligence officers from the US, Russia, Europe. We spoke to lobbyists who are representing the businesses that want to step into a post-peace Russia.
And the picture that they paint is really a remarkable story of business leaders working outside the traditional lines of diplomacy to try and cement a peace agreement with business deals. The Trump administration is approaching this peace process like a chapter out of Art of the Deal.
The thinking is, we're going to come in there, we're going to settle this war and make sure that American companies benefit.
They see the enmeshment of business interests as a way of securing peace, a way of people making money together rather than making war.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Friday, December 5th. Coming up on the show, inside the U.S. 's new Russia strategy, peace through business. Drew, can you talk to me about how this new diplomatic strategy came to be?
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Chapter 3: What dramatic shift is occurring in U.S. diplomatic strategy?
The core of these meetings and of this entire peace process has been a two-man relationship between Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev. The Russians from the very beginning wanted to deal with Witkoff.
Witkoff, Trump's billionaire friend and golfing partner, wasn't the most obvious choice. The president had originally appointed a former lieutenant general to lead the talks with Russia, but the Russians didn't want to work with him.
So in February, they reached out and hosted Steve Witkoff in the Kremlin. Putin sits with him for hours. He flies home with an American prisoner. It's a real moment where Russia is saying, hey, if you work with us, we can do things together. At that moment, Witkoff starts to take over the Russia portfolio.
Following that meeting, Witkoff, whose official title is Special Envoy to the Middle East, became increasingly involved in negotiations with Russia. Witkoff's counterpart, Kirill Dmitriev, is a Russian investment banker with degrees from Harvard and Stanford. Like Witkoff, Dmitriev isn't part of the Foreign Service establishment, but the two spoke the same language, business.
Not long after, Witkoff's office requested to meet with Dmitriev in Washington.
Now, the thing about Dmitriev is he's under sanctions. The Treasury Department sanctioned him in 2022 for leading Russia's sovereign wealth fund, which the Treasury called a slush fund for Vladimir Putin.
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Chapter 4: Who are the key players in the new U.S.-Russia negotiations?
This guy's effectively persona non grata in America. And if he's going to visit, the Treasury Department has to lift sanctions on him effectively.
At first, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant had questions about the unique request. But the president had told Witkoff he wanted the war to end. And so the administration decided that it was worth the risk.
And then from there, Dmitriev comes to the U.S. in April, and he's presenting a fantastic range of opportunities, as he would put it, for U.S. companies.
What kind of opportunities are we talking about here? Joe, do you want to take this one?
Russia, of course, is known across the world for its massive oil and natural gas and mineral wealth. And two things I think that the Trump administration see as key to the U.S. economy, but also key to the next stage of global growth is, of course, energy in the first instance. And the second is minerals in the form particularly of rare earths.
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Chapter 5: What opportunities did Dmitriev present to American companies?
I think Dmitry clearly understood that. And I think because he spoke both Wyckoff and the Trump administration's language of business in a way that other Putin officials didn't, he was able to lay out a buffet of options for how Russia's energy might begin to flow back into Europe particularly and other world markets. And it seems like that pitch resonated from the beginning.
Dmitriev even says that Russia and the United States, who competed to get to the moon, this time we can cooperate together and help Elon Musk reach Mars.
And I think from Dmitriev's perspective, what he told us is we can take this relationship of business trust and move it to a relationship of political trust, of solving this geopolitical problem of Ukraine, where you've got so many people dying every day.
As Witkoff and Dmitriev continued to meet, business leaders in both the U.S. and Russia, many of whom had ties to Trump and Putin, were taking note, and they were quietly positioning their companies to profit if a peace deal came through.
This is not the 1990s where McDonald's can't wait to get into Moscow. There's a really relatively small pool of people who are looking very closely at some pretty huge assets in the energy world. And a lot of them are close to the Trump family or are big Trump donors. A really good example is you have Gentry Beach.
Gentry Beach is an investor from Texas. He was also a groomsman at Donald Trump Jr. 's wedding, and he was a donor to President Trump's campaign.
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Chapter 6: How did the 28-point peace plan impact U.S.-Europe relations?
Beach has been in talks to acquire a stake in a Russian Arctic gas project with a company called Novatek.
Novatek is partly owned by a Russian billionaire who's very, very close to Putin. And that deal is dependent on the U.S. and U.K. removing sanctions on it, according to drafts of contracts that the journal reviewed. That's the kind of business that's interested in going back into Russia right now.
In a statement, Beach said that partnering with Novatec would, quote, strongly benefit any company committed to advancing American energy leadership. Trump Jr. has told people he isn't doing business with Beach.
But you're seeing different categories. So on the one hand, you've got these individuals that are definitely not household names. Gentry Beach, who has business interests in a lot of sectors. On the other hand, you have some of the biggest names in corporate America.
ExxonMobil, our journal colleagues revealed earlier this year, had had secret meetings with Rosneft, which is the biggest Russian state oil and gas company. The opportunity is so potentially lucrative.
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Chapter 7: What were the European leaders' reactions to the leaked peace proposal?
that I think these companies are obviously still interested in seeing what kind of options are available. Now, this is entirely a play that is dependent on there being a peace deal. At the moment, these assets don't make a huge amount of financial sense for the potential buyers. But if there was to be a peace deal, Europe still needs energy. Russia can provide the cheapest energy.
And if American companies were somehow in the middle, it could be a bonanza, frankly.
There's no evidence that Witkoff or the White House have been briefed on these companies' efforts or that they're coordinating them. A person familiar with Witkoff's thinking said Witkoff is confident that any settlement with Russia would benefit America broadly, not just a handful of investors.
According to our reporting, these conversations are happening regardless of the extent that the Trump administration knows about them. The Trump administration sees it as, well, that's capitalism. Go forth and make money. We'll make the peace. You make the money.
But this peace through business approach hasn't been an easy sell to America's traditional allies. That's next.
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Chapter 8: What challenges does the U.S. face in implementing its business-first approach?
As spring turned into summer, Dmitriev and Witkow's relationship grew. Through one-on-one conversations, they charted their own course to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Witkow went to Moscow multiple times. Meanwhile, the U.S. 's European allies struggled to get a meeting with Witkow, and Witkow never once visited Ukraine.
It's become an issue for the Europeans. There was a group of European heads of state who wanted to talk to Witkoff and were trying to get him to use the kind of fixed line that they use to conduct sensitive diplomatic conversations. Witkoff demurred. He didn't want to use that line. He traveled too much to use it.
So instead, he talks regularly with Dmitriev by phone about what are really increasingly ambitious proposals to make peace and have the U.S. and Russia go into business together.
One place where we saw Europe really having to scramble was after Alaska.
Back in August, Trump invited Putin to a summit in Anchorage. It was a turning point in U.S.-Russia relations. Putin hadn't stepped foot on American soil in a decade.
— Wyckoff and Dmitriev had believed that the time was right for a bilateral summit, had believed that there was a landing space where Putin and Trump could agree something in Alaska. And in Alaska, what our reporting found is that there was conversation about some of these shared business interests and shared business opportunities.
It wasn't just a conversation about what was happening on the front line. Ultimately, Putin wasn't ready to do a deal and there wasn't a deal that the Ukrainians would have accepted. And that summit ended early.
There were many, many points that we agreed on. Most of them, I would say a couple of big ones that we haven't quite got there, but we've made some headway.
What the Europeans had to do after that summit was quickly try to reach out to Trump himself beyond Wyckoff in order to be able to convince him of their talking points. And you'll remember that spectacle of the European leaders sat in the Oval Office facing Trump as they tried to argue their case.
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