On Wednesday US President Donald Trump announced his negotiating team tasked to mediate an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine on his Truth Social site:
“I have asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of the CIA John Ratcliffe, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, and Ambassador and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, to lead the negotiations which, I feel strongly, will be successful.”
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The apparent sidelining of his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, raised eyebrows among commentators, even though he has been dispatched to Kyiv to get the lay of the land.
According to Bloomberg on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin has selected a team that collectively have decades of experience of high-level negotiating, including some who were involved in the aborted March-April 2022 talks, to sit across the table from Trump’s nominations.
Moscow’s delegation is set to be led by 77-year-old Yuri Ushakov, a 50-year plus diplomat who was Russia’s ambassador to the US from 1998 to 2008, and who has acted as a foreign policy advisor to Putin since 2012, and was involved in the 2022 talks.
Alongside him will be Sergei Naryshkin a KGB contemporary of Putin and director of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), as well as permanent member of Russia’s Security Council. He also took part in the 2022 talks.
A third member of the team is said to be Kyiv-born Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), who is said to have numerous Western business contacts and to have established links with the White House since Trump’s first administration, despite being the recipient of sanctions for being a “Putin ally.”
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Dmitriev is believed to have been involved in the release of the US teacher Mark Fogel earlier in the week – the US negotiator Steve Witkoff, who collected Vogel, said that a “gentleman from Russia named Kirill” played a major role in the swap.
On the face of it, the Russian team would seem to have the edge. It underscores Putin’s determination to secure the outcome that he wants for demands that remain the same as they did since shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
On the other hand, Bloomberg cited Emily Ferris, a senior research fellow at London’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI):
“The Russian team may be on the back foot when dealing with a more unpredictable interlocutor in Trump, whose more out-of-the-box ideas and occasional belligerence are a stark departure from the previous administration’s line,” she said, adding: “This puts Russia in the more uncomfortable position of having to think through scenarios that they might not have considered before.”
Other members of Russia’s 2022 negotiating team, including presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, are expected to participate if the talks are seen to be making progress and there is a need for “fine-tuning” any agreed compromises.
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