Experts are grappling with a dilemma – is Washington or Moscow shaping the peace negotiations?

Kirill Dmitriev is the Kremlin’s long-time emissary and known as Putin’s money man Credit: Contributor

Connor Stringer Washington Correspondent

23 November 2025 10:10pm GMT

When Vladimir Putin’s Harvard-educated right-hand man Kirill Dmitriev stepped off a plane in Miami for talks with Donald Trump’s top negotiator, few knew of the visit.

Weeks later, reports of a “secret” 28-point peace plan to end the war in Ukraine began to surface.

The initial plans appeared to be full of Russian talking points, and shocked Ukraine’s allies – driving a wedge between the US and Europe.

For clues about exactly who drafted the terms of the deal, observers pointed to an accidental tweet by Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, who welcomed Mr Dmitriev to Florida last month.

“He must have got this from K,” he wrote in a quickly-deleted post sharing a report by Axios that a secret proposal to end the war had been drafted.

The “K” in question, critics of the deal believe, was Mr Dmitriev, the Kremlin’s long-time emissary currently under US sanctions and the only figure in the outlet’s report willing to be quoted.

What seemed like high-level peace talks, now appears to have been widely drafted between Mr Dmitriev and Mr Witkoff, with Kyiv and some parts of the White House kept in the dark.

“This hasn’t been a negotiation. This literally is the Russian ideas typed up,” a source close to the administration told The Telegraph.

As officials and the media alike try to retrace the sequence of events, experts have suggested the leak was an intentional campaign designed to sow confusion and normalise Russia’s demands.

“They do this thing, this sort of thing as a shaping operation to establish this outcome in the minds of the Western public and the media, so that everybody else has to fight back from it,” Keir Giles, author of the Handbook of Russian Information Warfare, said.

“We shouldn’t rule out the fact that the United States has been taken by surprise by this, like everybody else. Some factions within the US administration have been blindsided by this.”

A close ally of the Russian president, Mr Dmitriev has taken a leading role in peace talks and has met with Mr Witkoff several times this year.

He is deemed so influential that he and his fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund, were blacklisted by the US in 2022 following Russia’s invasion.

The sanctions effectively bar American citizens and companies from dealing with him.

Yet Mr Dmitriev was granted a special waiver to allow his arrival to Miami, where the 28-point plan for ending the war was thrashed out.

The controversial plan, which would force Ukraine to give up the Donbas and half the size of its army, blindsided US officials in various corners of the administration and stirred confusion in Europe.

Even Mr Trump and Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, were some of the last to hear about the plan, Bloomberg reported. But the US president signed off on the plan once he had been briefed.

The agreement would also ban Nato troops from Ukraine and foreign fighter jets would only be allowed to be stationed in Poland.

In return for peace, Russia will be given the entire Donbas region and Crimea.

All frozen assets will be handed back to Russia and it will be allowed back into the G7, making it the G8.

“Some false articles claimed that Russia leaked the US plan to Axios. Barak Ravid can confirm that Russia did not leak the plan or its existence/details,” Mr Dmitriev wrote on X.

Mr Rubio found himself defending a plan many have speculated he never saw. He denied claims that the draft was written by Russia and then translated clumsily into English.

Despite his protests, it has become increasingly clear that large parts of the White House were left in the dark over the proposal.

“In order not to look like idiots, they [White House] seem willing to pretend that they were in control of the process all along, which means that they endorse all of these impossible demands by Russia,” Mr Giles added.

“So Russia sets a marker for normalising the idea that this is, in fact, a peace plan, and then everybody has to fight back against that normalisation.”

The crisis exploded on Saturday when top senators publicly recounted a private call with Secretary Rubio, who was en route to Geneva for talks on the plan.

Insiders say that Mr Rubio was tasked with delivering the deal to the Senate but he informed them that the document “was not the administration’s plan” and was “essentially the wish list of the Russians”.

“Marco’s mission was to sell it to the Senate. That’s where strength is. He basically coughed up the fact that it was a Russian deal and that they hadn’t negotiated anything,” the source added.

“Trump is angry that the guys have basically told him, the deal is dead.”

On Sunday, Mr Trump’s frustration reached boiling point as he said Ukraine has “zero gratitude” for his efforts to end the war.

“I inherited a war that should have never happened, a war that is a loser for everyone, especially the millions of people who have so needlessly died,” he wrote on Truth Social.

“Ukraine ‘leadership’ has expressed zero gratitude for our efforts, and Europe continues to buy oil from Russia. The USA continues to sell massive amounts of weapons to Nato, for distribution to Ukraine.”

In the end, it may have been an active measures operation that worked exactly as intended, sowing confusion in the White House and driving a wedge between the US and Europe.

It has left many experts grappling with a similar dilemma – is it Mr Trump or Putin shaping negotiations?

………

• David Blair

Steve Witkoff shows the dangers of a bamboozled peace envoy

The billionaire’s solution to end the war appears to be giving Putin almost everything on his wishlist

Apparently not even the mass abduction of children is enough to convince Witkoff that Putin is a ‘bad guy’ Credit: Ammar Awad/REUTERS

David Blair Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator

20 November 2025

There is nothing so lethal as a bamboozled peace envoy. The latest plan for ending the war in Ukraine appears to be the handiwork of Steve Witkoff, the billionaire New York real estate developer turned presidential envoy extraordinaire.

During three days of hard bargaining with Vladimir Putin’s man, a former Goldman Sachs banker called Kirill Dmitriev, it seems that Witkoff hit upon a brilliant solution.

Judging by what has been reported of the 28-point peace plan, Witkoff concluded that the quickest way to end the war – and secure a Nobel Peace Prize for his old friend, Donald Trump – is to give the aggressor most of what he wants.

Putin yearns for the whole of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, including the areas that his forces have failed to capture. This plan gives him exactly that.

Putin wants Ukraine to disarm and become helpless. So the plan has Ukraine sacrificing half of its army, while of course leaving Russia armed to the teeth.

Putin wants to be sure that no foreign troops will be allowed into Ukraine. That’s in the plan too, just to make certain that Ukraine would be left defenceless.

And if the Ukrainians object to relinquishing territory that their soldiers have bled white to defend, the plan says that Russia would provide compensation by paying rent, buying them off as if they were schmucks who had believed the brochure and signed up for New York apartments that never existed.

For Ukraine to give up territory might sound like an act of necessary realism. But remember that real people live on the land that would be sacrificed, specifically the 2,500 square miles of the Donbas that remain under Ukraine’s control.

The towns and villages of that landscape are inhabited by about 250,000 men, women and children. Under this plan, they would be handed over to an enemy that massacres the men, rapes the women and abducts the children. Wherever the Russians have captured territory, that has been the fate of the Ukrainian civilians who fall into their hands. The mass graves of Bucha and the list of 19,500 kidnapped Ukrainian children are visible proof.

Ukraine’s forces have doggedly resisted this invasion because they know what happens to civilians under Russia’s occupation. They stand between their wives and children and oncoming hordes of rapists and kidnappers.

So it takes a peculiar moral blindness to suggest that the defenders should get out of the way and hand over another 250,000 people to this invader.

And you do not have to be a field marshal to grasp what would else follow if this plan were to be implemented. The territory that Ukraine would yield also holds fortified cities protecting the rest of the country.

If Putin could deprive Ukraine of these strongholds – and half of its army – he would be ideally positioned to launch a third invasion to seize the rest of his neighbour and achieve what he really wants, which is to dominate all of its territory in a restored Russian empire.

Some peace plans are deadly, and the Witkoff production may rank among the most dangerous of the lot.

Is this amiable 68-year-old, with no experience of diplomacy, capable of realising this? Witkoff’s public descriptions of the aggressor suggest otherwise. “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy,” he said in March. “I thought it was gracious of him to see me.”

If the mass abduction of children isn’t enough to convince Witkoff that Putin is a “bad guy”, then the envoy is almost certainly beyond redemption.

In fairness, Witkoff follows in a long tradition. In 1938 the British government dispatched a high-minded Liberal former cabinet minister, Lord Runciman, to mediate between Czechoslovakia and the Sudeten Germans.

Runciman came up with the brilliant plan to hand over the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany because it was all very unfortunate but that was obviously the only realistic solution. The British envoy had plenty of meetings with the charming and plausible leader of the Sudeten Germans, Konrad Henlein (who went on to become a Nazi Gauleiter).

Runciman, long forgotten in his homeland, has escaped the posthumous obloquy he richly deserves, though he is bitterly remembered in today’s Czech Republic. Now Witkoff seems to be marching in his footsteps. So beware the peacemongers, for they shall be called sons of Runciman.