Vladimir Putin and Sergey Naryshkin. Photo: Creative Commons
Vladimir Putin has assembled a “heavyweight team with decades of experience” to represent Russia in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, Bloomberg reported on Friday.
The team will reportedly include Yury Ushakov, Putin’s longtime foreign policy adviser, Russian spy chief and Putin’s erstwhile KGB colleague Sergey Naryshkin, as well as Kirill Dmitriev, a close Kremlin associate and the head of RDIF, a Russian state-owned wealth fund.
Ushakov, 77, who served as Russia’s ambassador to Washington from 1998 to 2008, has worked as Putin’s key foreign policy adviser since 2012.
Naryshkin, 70, is a long-time Putin confidant who has headed Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service since 2016, and who is also remembered for a tense exchange with Putin shown on live TV during a Security Council meeting convened to discuss the recognition of Russian-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine in 2022, during which Naryshkin appeared to freeze up, causing Putin to lambast him for not speaking plainly enough.
Both Ushakov and Naryshkin were involved in the first round of unsuccessful ceasefire talks held with Ukraine shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The youngest of the potential negotiators at 49, Dmitriev has close ties to the Putin family and could play a key role as an unofficial back channel with Trump’s negotiators, sources told Bloomberg.
Putin’s choice of negotiators underscored “just how determined the Russian leader is to secure a favourable outcome in any negotiations”, Bloomberg wrote, though other commentators have cast doubts on just how serious Putin actually is about achieving peace.
Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre in Berlin, said on Wednesday that Putin was “fully prepared” for peace negotiations to fail, as from the Kremlin’s perspective, there is nothing the West can do to reverse Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine.
The Kremlin has not commented on the reported picks so far, with Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov saying earlier on Friday that Moscow had yet to decide who would head its delegation whenever talks did go ahead.
US President Donald Trump spoke to both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by telephone on Wednesday, announcing afterwards that negotiations to end the war in Ukraine would begin immediately.
EU officials have reiterated throughout the week that Ukraine’s future should not be decided without the involvement of both Europe and Kyiv, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen assured reporters at the Munich Security Conference on Friday that the EU would “absolutely” have a seat at the table during any negotiations.
