Three days after Vladimir Putin publicly rejected any mutual halt to long-range strikes with Ukraine, his envoy was in Washington talking business. Kirill Dmitriev — head of Russia's RDIF sovereign wealth fund and Putin's special presidential representative — held what a US official called “constructive” talks with American officials on Monday, September 28, focused on ending the war in Ukraine and on possible US-Russia energy initiatives in the postwar period, Reuters reported.
The choreography is telling. While Dmitriev shopped for a future of sanctions relief and joint energy ventures, Putin himself used the Valdai discussion forum in Moscow to dismiss as “nonsense” the very energy ceasefire proposal that Washington had floated. It is difficult to read the two performances as anything other than a good-cop, bad-cop routine — one Moscow hand offering commerce, the other refusing to stop the missiles.
Treasury and Energy at the table
According to sources familiar with the preparations, cited by Reuters and by Russia's state news agency TASS, Dmitriev met with representatives of the US Treasury and Energy departments during the visit. The choice of interlocutors is itself the message: these are the officials who oversee sanctions and energy policy, not the diplomats who would normally lead peace negotiations.
The visit followed a burst of high-level US-Russian contact. Earlier in September, Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner travelled to Moscow for direct meetings with Putin, and Dmitriev also met Witkoff and Kushner in New York. Last week, President Donald Trump met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, where Zelensky said the two discussed a potential ceasefire on energy-related targets — the proposal Putin later ridiculed.
US reporting adds further layers. The New York Post reported that Trump is interested in a deal under which Russia would release political prisoners in exchange for an easing of US sanctions — an idea attributed to The Atlantic's reporting — and noted that Trump has invited Putin to the G20 summit he plans to host in Miami this December. Zelensky has suggested the summit would be a good moment for a trilateral meeting to discuss a ceasefire. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who huddled with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the UN last week, said Russia and Ukraine had both expressed interest in a limited ceasefire covering grain and energy targets — while acknowledging it “won't be easy.”
Sanctions are the real agenda
Strip away the diplomatic language and the core of Moscow's interest is visible. At Valdai, Putin admitted that Ukraine's drone campaign against Russian refineries had cost his economy the equivalent of one percent of GDP — a rare public concession that the strikes are working — and announced that Russia would withhold its diesel from global markets until Western sanctions are lifted. Dmitriev's trip to Washington reads as the other half of that strategy: dangle the prospect of postwar energy cooperation with American officials in hopes of loosening the sanctions regime that is steadily degrading Russia's war economy.
Ukraine has every reason to treat such overtures with suspicion. The same week Dmitriev sat down in Washington, Russia struck Kyiv and Odesa in overnight attacks, and the Kremlin rejected even a mutual pause in the deep-strike exchanges. Promises of a peaceful resolution cannot be squared with a simultaneous refusal to stop bombing Ukrainian cities.
Kyiv's position
Zelensky's calculus is straightforward. Ukraine is willing to discuss limited arrangements — the grain and energy ceasefire ideas that have circulated through the UN and New York talks — but from a position backed by its own long-range campaign, not by unilateral concessions. The Ukrainian president has repeatedly stressed that any lasting settlement must preserve Ukraine's sovereignty and security, and that sanctions relief for Moscow must be earned by a real end to aggression, not offered in advance for promises.
The danger for Kyiv is that Washington's appetite for a deal could run ahead of Moscow's willingness to stop fighting. Every round of “constructive” talks with Dmitriev buys the Kremlin time while its forces press the front line. The test is simple: if Russia wants postwar energy partnerships, it can begin by stopping its prewar bombing campaign — starting tonight.
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