INTREP360 - THE HILL
The Hill: Putin’s man tries a power move against Team Trump
In the waning weeks of World War II in Europe, SS leader Heinrich Himmler made peace overtures to President Harry Truman and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower via emissaries in Sweden.
Himmler’s aim was to establish a separate peace with the U.S. while Nazi Germany fought on against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union.
Truman and Eisenhower wisely refused to deal with the Nazi war criminal, a principal actor in perpetrating the Holocaust. Like President Franklin Roosevelt before them, their terms were clear and direct: The U.S. would only accept Nazi Germany’s complete and unconditional surrender.
Fast forward to today, and another envoy of a modern war criminal is making peace overtures to a U.S. president, plotting to obtain at the negotiating table what his country’s army cannot on the battlefields of Ukraine.
His aim is to divide Washington from Brussels, so that Moscow can destroy and subjugate Ukraine in the short run, while enabling Russian President Vladimir Putin’s long-term war against the West.
President Trump must not be fooled by Putin’s emissary, Kirill Dmitriev. His appointment by Putin to lead these discussions is a clear sign that Putin believes Trump can be fooled into a disadvantageous 1938-like peace agreement — in other words, a bad deal — by dangling future trade deals in front of him.
Alarmingly, Team Trump might be listening to Dmitriev. Axios reported this week that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to Russia and the Middle East, is hammering out a 28-point peace plan to end the war in Ukraine. Politico reported that “the mood inside the White House is bullish,” and that the resulting deal may simply be foisted upon Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has been weakened by a domestic corruption scandal. As for Europe, Dasha Burns quoted a senior White House official saying bluntly, “We don’t really care about the Europeans. It’s about Ukraine accepting.”
If so, then Dmitriev could be accomplishing his primary goal of alienating our NATO allies from Trump.
Trump needs to slow down. Yes, Ukraine is under pressure on the battlefields in Kupiansk and Pokrovsk, but that pressure is measured in meters and single-digit kilometers, not tens or hundreds of kilometers. As the Institute for the Study of War notes, “Russian forces are struggling to focus on a single decisive objective” in both the Kupiansk and Pokrovsk regions.
Further, Kyiv is not going to cave to maximalist Russian demands over a $100 million dollar corruption scandal. Yes, the Energoatom nuclear energy kickback scandal is deeply embarrassing to Zelensky, but he won’t react by committing national suicide with a bad peace deal.
There could be another explanation to all of this — that Dmitriev is leaking and spinning to pressure Ukraine into capitulating.
Intriguingly, Witkoff appears to have reacted to the Axios report by inadvertently posting on X, “He must have got this from K.” It is highly likely that this was intended as a direct message and that “K” stands for “Kirill,” Dmitriev’s first name. Witkoff quickly deleted his post.
Why would Dmitriev leak? Russia is still struggling on the battlefield in Pokrovsk, having failed after year-long battle to take it by mid-November as Putin had demanded.
Putin’s stooge could also be misjudging the Energoatom scandal and its impact on Ukraine’s willingness to capitulate to Putin. Dmitriev has been tweet-storming the scandal on X, citing one Western media article after another about how the crisis could topple Zelensky. He even gloated: “The irony: exposed Zelensky team corruption makes peace in Ukraine much more likely.”
Nothing about this peace plan makes sense so far. The U.S. should not be negotiating any long-term business deals with a Russia wherein Putin remains in power. Trump cannot on the one hand warn of Moscow’s near-term military threat to Europe, while on the other hand negotiating post-war business deals that will only fund future Russian attacks against NATO member-states such as Poland, Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania.
In September, Trump dressed down Europe at the United Nations for foolishly “financing a war against themselves” by continuing to purchase Russian oil and gas. So why would Trump agree to a peace plan that potentially finances a future war against NATO?
Dmitriev may have more than one motive here. Notably, he is also head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, charged with attracting foreign investment into Russia. Neither Team Trump nor NATO should fall for whatever golden carrots he dangles.
Early reports indicated Dmitriev’s peace proposal is more of the same. Christopher Miller at the Financial Times posted on X that it outrageously requires the Ukrainian army to be halved in size, to give up weaponry and to withdraw entirely from the Donbas. Dmitriev is living in fantasyland — these are non-starters for Zelensky and his generals.
The Ukrainians know from the Minsk and Budapest agreements that Russia and Putin cannot be trusted to keep its end of any bargain — as evinced by the Russian invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Trump must channel his inner Truman and give Putin hell, because he will only stop if he is beaten in Ukraine.
Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer and led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012 to 2014.