Putin Assembles Team of Heavyweights to Negotiate Ukraine Deal with Trump

Vladimir Putin is assembling a heavyweight team with decades of experience in high-stakes negotiations to face off against US President Donald Trump's representatives for a deal to end Russia's war in Ukraine.

- Bloomberg

MOSCOW:

They include Yuri Ushakov, his chief Kremlin foreign-policy adviser who has more than half a century of involvement in diplomacy, and his top spymaster, Sergei Naryshkin, who served with Putin in the Soviet KGB, according to people familiar with the situation, who asked not to be identified discussing internal information.

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 Trump's negotiators, people familiar with the preparations said.

That Putin is opting to rely mostly on highly skilled and experienced negotiators to represent Russia in any talks is hardly a surprise.

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 in relation to Ukraine have changed in the three years since he ordered the full-scale invasion.