Vladimir Putin's Ukraine negotiators: A sanctioned financier, a top spy and a diplomat
By : Sandhya
Vladimir Putin’s heavyweight team for negotiations to end Russia’s war in Ukraine has decades of experience in high-stakes negotiations. It also includes a prominent member who has been under US sanctions.
Kirill Dmitriev, a financier educated at Stanford and Harvard with ties to the Russian president’s own family, may play a key role as an unofficial back-channel with Donald Trump’s negotiators, people familiar with the preparations told Bloomberg. Others in the team include Yuri Ushakov, Putin's chief Kremlin foreign-policy advisor, who has more than half a century of involvement in diplomacy, and Sergei Naryshkin, who served with Putin in the Soviet KGB, the report added.
The Russian President seems to be opting to rely mostly on highly skilled and experienced negotiators to represent Russia. The personnel choices underscore just how determined the Russian leader is to secure a favorable outcome in any negotiations and potentially how little his demands about Ukraine have changed in the three years since he ordered the full-scale invasion.
