”Make money, not war”. This is the headline in the Wall Street Journal claiming that American President Donald Trump’s real plan for Ukraine is aimed not so much at achieving peace, but at ensuring that the United States, Russia and Ukraine become trading partners. Citing sources close to the talks, the newspaper writes that the Kremlin proposed to the White House to achieve peace through business and, to Europe’s dismay, Washington agreed to the line proposed by Moscow. The sources cited by the WSJ state that during the October meeting in Miami Beach between the American special envoy Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund and negotiator chosen by Vladimir Putin, the two discussed a two trillion dollar plan to bring the Russian economy out of the tunnel. A plan that would see American companies at the forefront of their European competitors.
The WSJ explains that the plan illustrated by Dmitriev would allow US companies to draw on the approximately 300 billion dollars of Russian central bank assets frozen in Europe for Russian-American investment projects and for the reconstruction of post-war Ukraine. US and Russian companies could also team up to exploit the Arctic’s mineral riches, Dmitriev argued. The Kremlin’s goal would therefore be to convince the US to consider Russia as a land of abundant opportunities, not as a military threataccording to Western security officials cited by the WSJ. By proposing multibillion-dollar deals in the rare earth and energy sectors, Moscow could redraw the economic map of Europe, while creating a rift between America and its traditional allies, writes the Wall Street Journal.
Dmitriev, a former Goldman Sachs employee, found receptive partners in Witkoff, Trump’s historic golf partner, and in Jared Kushner, the American president’s son-in-law and whose Affinity Partners investment fund has attracted billions in investments from Arab monarchies. Businessmen share President Trump’s geopolitical approach. If generations of diplomats consider the post-Soviet challenges of Eastern Europe as a knot to be resolved with difficulty, the president imagines an easy solution: borders matter less than business. In the 1980s he offered to personally negotiate a quick end to the Cold War, while building what he told Soviet diplomats would be a Trump Tower across the street from the Kremlin, with the communist regime as a trading partner.
“Russia has so many immense resources, immense tracts of territory,” Witkoff told the Wall Street Journal, describing his hope that Russia, Ukraine and the US would become trading partners. “If we can achieve this, everyone prospers and there is a win-win,” so “this will be a bulwark against future conflicts. Because everyone prospers,” he added. Top presidential advisors see an opportunity for American investors to secure lucrative deals in a new post-war Russia and become the commercial guarantors of peace. Russia made it clear to Witkoff and Kushner that it would prefer US companies, not those of European states whose leaders have “done a lot of nonsense” about peace efforts. A source told the WSJ: “It’s Trump’s deal art to say, ‘Look, I’m solving this issue and there are huge economic benefits for America, right?'”