Zelenskyy used Abramovich to send message to Putin about peace talks
Former Chelsea FC owner invited to Kyiv last month in failed attempt to broker direct negotiations
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy invited former Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich to Kyiv last month in a failed attempt to convince Vladimir Putin to hold direct peace talks, according to four people familiar with the matter.
Zelenskyy asked Abramovich to pass on a message to the Russian president that he was prepared to meet for what would have been their first bilateral summit more than four years into Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the people said.
Ukraine wanted to demonstrate its seriousness about holding direct peace talks with Russia, even as the US, which has sought to broker a ceasefire, is distracted by the war in the Middle East, they added.
Kyiv hopes its success in halting Russia’s offensive, which has slowed to a crawl in recent months as its forces sustain enormous casualties, and inflicting damage through long-range air strikes deep behind enemy lines will increase the impetus for an immediate ceasefire.
But Putin remains confident that Russia’s superior resources will eventually wear down Ukraine’s resistance and has shown no interest in meeting with Zelenskyy.
The involvement of the sanctioned billionaire has not been previously reported.
Putin said on Friday that he met “one of the representatives of our business circles” and “this, shall we say, colleague” on May 21 after his trip to Kyiv, and told him he did not see any point in meeting Zelenskyy. “The only sense in it is for the Ukrainians to stop the advance of our armed forces,” Putin told an audience at Russia’s flagship economic conference in St Petersburg. The Russian president added that the businessman was not acting in an official capacity.
The Ukrainian president’s office declined to comment.
The Kremlin and a spokesperson for Abramovich did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Abramovich has helped to mediate talks between Russia and Ukraine since the early weeks of the war in 2022.
The oligarch was involved in brokering a round of negotiations in Istanbul in March of that year, though the efforts soon collapsed after Ukraine learned of alleged war crimes by Russia’s occupying forces. Abramovich also helped to secure a deal to ensure exports of Ukraine’s grain through the Black Sea later that year.
Though Abramovich’s role has become less prominent since Russia began negotiating directly with the US last year, he remains involved in prisoner exchanges and other bilateral talks with Ukraine, including on aspects of a stalled US-led peace plan, according to people close to him.
“He is needed because he is the only Russian they will tolerate. He gets along with everyone,” one of the people said.
Zelenskyy has continued to push for a summit with Putin even as US efforts to secure a peace deal have stalled. “I don’t think anything substantial will happen until the end of summer,” said a person close to Zelenskyy, adding that Washington was focused on Iran and Moscow had yet to realise it would not be able to capture the remainder of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region this summer.
The Ukrainian leader, according to Abramovich, “thinks he can solve everything through the magic of his personal charisma at a leadership meeting”, another person close to the oligarch said.
Abramovich refers to Zelenskyy’s push as “the captain’s competition”, a feature from KVN, the comedy show that featured the Ukrainian president before he entered politics. “This is not something Putin goes for at all. And it doesn’t really work on Trump either. But Zelenskyy is totally fixated on it,” the person added.
Two senior Ukrainian officials described the message that Zelenskyy sent via Abramovich as similar to the open letter addressed to Putin that he published on his presidential website on Thursday, which provoked an angry response from Moscow. One of the officials said the tone of the message had been less antagonistic than that of the public note.
In the letter, Zelenskyy offered a ceasefire and to hold direct, one-on-one peace talks while taunting Putin over his battlefield setbacks and Ukraine’s long-range drone strikes on St Petersburg during his annual economic conference in his native city. The Ukrainian leader also mentioned Russia’s reliance on North Korea and its growing dependence on China to sustain the war.
“You will not have enough money or political capital to keep buying the loyalty of Russians the way you have for the past 26 years,” Zelenskyy told Putin in the letter.
But Putin said on Friday that the letter was “somewhat rude” and written “to create a condition under which it is actually impossible to hold any in-person meetings at all”.
Putin also said a Ukrainian drone strike on a teacher-training college in the Russian-held town of Starobilsk, which killed 21 people, a day after the meeting with Abramovich showed that Zelenskyy was not serious about seeking peace.
EU countries are discussing the appointment of an envoy who could hold talks with Putin on the continent’s behalf. But Putin has repeatedly floated the candidacy of former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, whose closeness to Moscow makes him a non-starter for the bloc, and dismissed most other potential candidates out of hand.
“I honestly just don’t see or understand how Russia could trust people who have been talking about the need to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia for years?” Putin said on Thursday. He said Russia remained open to potential talks and said they could be discussed “at the level of foreign ministries or secret services”, appearing to rule out his own involvement.