No US-Russia deal for now, as Ukraine suffers reversals

​Neither the Russians nor the Americans have revealed much about the December 2 meeting in Moscow. The meeting went on for five hours.

In parallel, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov was meeting with Wang Yi, member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China’s Central Committee and foreign minister of China. The China meeting served the purpose of reinforcing Russia’s partnership with China, something that deeply worries Washington.

Represented by special envoy Steve Witkoff and presidential son in law Jared Kushner, the US had no other delegation members other than a translator. Neither side had military experts at the meeting.

The Russian delegation included President Putin, presidential aide Yury Ushakov and his special representative for investment and eonomic cooperation with foreign countries, Kirill Dmitriev.

According to both sides, no deals or compromises were made. The US presented four papers, including the original so-called 21 points, and three others. No papers were released.

Ushakov is a professional diplomat who served for ten years as the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Dmitriev is a Harvard graduate, an investment banker by trade, and currently heads the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund. He has done investment deals in Saudi Arabia, UAE, China, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Italy and France. Dmitriev since 2022 has been under US Treasury Department foreign assets control sanctions as is the Direct Investment Fund. That was part of the Biden attempt to bring down the Putin government.

The Moscow meeting took place as Russia was making significant and strategic battlefield gains including the fall of Pokrovsk (also known as Krasnoarmeisk, the Russian name for the town). Many analysts think the process of the disintegration of Ukraine’s army is taking place today as Ukrainian forces keep yielding territory and lack any observable fall back strategy.

While the Moscow meeting was underway, Zelensky was in Europe. In France he met with Macron, seeking funds and troops to save Ukraine. No hard promises followed. Zelensky asked for a meeting in Europe, either Ireland or Brussels, with Witkoff and Kushner on their return from Moscow. The planned meeting was canceled. Zelensky hustled back to Kyiv.

Valerii Zaluzhny, the former commander of Ukraine’s army, and now Ukrainian ambassador to the UK, appears to be planning a return to Kyiv. He unleashed an op-ed to the London Telegraph entitled“How to Defeat Putin and Build a Better Ukraine.”In his article Zaluzhny said Ukraine needed to strengthen “the foundations of justice through the fight against corruption and the creation of an honest court system.”

He claimed that “Ukraine’s war effort lacked a defined political goal, which made military strategy ineffective.” He said “Perhaps the main political goal for Ukraine is to deprive Russia of the opportunity to carry out acts of aggression against Ukraine in the foreseeable future.”

How this could be done is unexplained and the entire pitch, obviously intended to promote Zaluzhny as a replacement for Zelensky, seemed based on a fantasy about the war situation and wishful thinking that Ukraine’s allies will send in forces to win the war.

Meanwhile the Russians will keep the military offensive going, and Moscow may be anticipating that Washington will, sooner or later, accept a Russia-led solution to the Ukraine war (with appropriate window dressing).

It is clear with China looming as a significant security threat to US interests in the Pacific, and with NATO increasingly unhinged, the Trump administration wants a way out, and certainly does not want a wider conflict in Europe (something some in NATO, including, perhaps especially, the UK, obviously prefer, in part because it would deflect attention from worsening economic and social conditions).

Ukraine’s recent drone attacks on Black Sea shipping, including strikinga Russian flagged commercial vesselcarrying sunflower oil) has alarmed the Turks and Romanians, who depend upon Black Sea commercial shipping.

The Ukrainian strikes may have been brewed up without coordination with NATO advisors, but it is almost as likely that Ukraine was assisted by one or more NATO players.

Putin has said thatRussia is ready to deprive Ukraine of the use of any of its portsas a consequence of these attacks.

It looks like there will not be a meeting between Trump and Putin, at least in the near term, because there is nothing to meet about yet. But if Ukraine continues its now rapid decline, and the Russians prepare to impose terms on a defeated regime, Washington will want to salvage what it can and try and ameliorate as much as possible the final result.

The Europeans (and NATO) will not likely have any role in a settlement, because Washington considers them obstructionists and reckless. The US already is taking steps to cut them out, even in the sharing of sensitive intelligence information.

Stephen Bryen is a former US deputy under secretary of defense. This article was originally published on his Substack newsletter Weapons and Strategy. It is republished with permission.