Kirill Dmitriev has said the transcript of his supposed conversation published by the US media is false
Russia’s investment envoy and negotiator on Ukraine, Kirill Dmitriev, has said the transcript of his alleged phone call published by Bloomberg is false.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg claimed that it obtained a recording of Dmitriev’s short conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aide, Yury Ushakov, on October 29. The publication did not release the audio but posted the transcript in Russian and English.
Commenting on the story on X, Dmitriev wrote “fake.” He previously accused the Western media of spreading disinformation in an attempt to derail US President Donald Trump’s efforts to mediate peace between Russia and Ukraine.
In Bloomberg’s transcript, a person labeled as ‘Dmitriev’ is shown saying he would “make this paper from our position” and “informally pass it along.”
Last week, the White House confirmed that it drafted a peace plan, which critics claim favors Russia. The EU has since presented a counterproposal, while US and Ukrainian officials met on Sunday to further discuss Trump’s draft.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday that the draft was leaked to create “media hype” aimed at undermining US President Donald Trump’s mediation efforts.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the public speculation about the negotiations as “a travesty,” adding that Moscow “does not engage in megaphone diplomacy.”
Why Ukraine won’t be immediately forced to accept the 28 points of the peace plan
The student radicals of Paris in 1968 used to chant: “Be realistic – demand the impossible.” It was a clever slogan for a moment of revolution. But what happens when revolution is not an option and reality can’t be wished away?
Wars end in many ways. Sometimes through the outright destruction of an opponent. Sometimes through negotiated exchanges of gains and losses. And sometimes they simply burn on until the conflict becomes pointless, only to reignite years later. History offers dozens of templates. Yet public consciousness tends to fixate on recent examples, especially those tied to national mythology or modern moral narratives. That habit has led many to mistake the 20th century for a historical norm.
It wasn’t. As the latest Valdai Club report notes, a defining feature of the last century’s strategic thinking was the expectation of total defeat. The idea that systemic contradictions could be resolved only by crushing the adversary. That logic shaped the world wars, reaching its apex in 1945 with the unconditional surrender of the Axis. It lingered in the Cold War as well: both blocs sought not only advantage but the transformation of the other’s political and social system. When the USSR dissolved, it wasn’t a battlefield defeat but an ideological one. However, in Western capitals the outcome was treated as a triumph of historical inevitability.
From this emerged a new type of conflict, centered on “the right side of history.” Those deemed aligned with the liberal world order were morally justified; those who weren’t were expected to submit and be remade. Victory was not just strategic but moral, and therefore assumed to be absolute.
We are now leaving that era behind. International politics is reverting to earlier patterns: less ideological, less orderly, and more dependent on raw balances of power. Outcomes today are shaped by what armies can and cannot do, not by moral claims.
This context explains why Washington’s recent diplomatic push has been greeted with such attention. American officials insist their emerging 28-point peace plan is based on battlefield realities rather than wishful thinking. And the reality, as they see it, is blunt: Ukraine cannot win this war, but it could lose catastrophically. The goal of the plan is to prevent further losses and restore a more stable, if uncomfortable, equilibrium.
This is a standard approach to a conflict that is important for the participants but not existential for the external powers involved. For Ukraine and several European states, however, the framing remains moralistic: a struggle of principles in which only a complete defeat of Russia is acceptable. Because that outcome is unrealistic, they seek time in the hope that Russia changes internally, or America changes politically.
Washington will not force Ukraine or Western Europe to accept the 28 points immediately. There is no full unity inside the White House, and this internal hesitation inevitably weakens the signal Moscow believes it has detected. Another round in this political cycle seems likely. The situation on the front should, in theory, push Kiev toward realism. So far, the shift has been slower than circumstances would suggest.
For Russia, the real question is what outcomes are both acceptable and achievable. Historically, the conflict resembles not the ideological showdowns of the 20th century but the territorial contests of the 17th and 18th. Russia then was defining itself through its borders: administrative, cultural, and civilizational. It was a long process with setbacks and recoveries, not a quest for a single crushing, irreversible victory.
Today, Russia’s objectives are similar in spirit: secure reliable borders, determine which lines are realistically attainable, ensure effective control, and unlock the economic potential of its territory. Whether one likes it or not, the primary instrument for reaching these goals is military force. As long as fighting continues, that leverage exists. Once it stops, Russia will face coordinated diplomatic pressure from the same Western powers that defined victory in ideological terms for decades. No illusions about this are necessary.
If Russia defines clear, realistic goals aligned with its capabilities, diplomacy can then support the military component. Nevertheless, it can’t replace it, and the country’s leadership understands this dynamic well.
The 28-point plan may eventually serve as the basis for negotiations. But not yet. Ukraine and several Western European capitals remain attached to a vision of total moral victory. Washington is more sober, but not entirely unified. And the battlefield still speaks louder than conference tables.
This article was first published in the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta and was translated and edited by the RT team
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European “elites” insist on using the Nazi Kiev regime as a “proxy and cannon fodder” to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, the country’s top diplomat has said
Europe has no place in talks about settling the Ukraine conflict because it insists on using Kiev as a proxy to try to defeat Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview on Tuesday.
Speaking with the France-Russia Dialogue Association, Lavrov accused “European elites” of long wishing Russia “harm and misfortune,” citing an “aggressiveness with a Russophobic tint” that he said continues to dominate Western Europe’s ruling class.
Lavrov’s remarks follow reports that the US drafted a roadmap for ending the hostilities. The initial outlines surfaced in US media, with a Ukrainian MP and Axios later publishing what they said were the full 28 points, which include Ukraine abandoning its NATO ambitions, relinquishing parts of the new Russian regions still under its control, and capping the size of its army.
Germany, France, and the UK reportedly drafted their own version of the plan over the weekend, removing or softening several of the most controversial points. Politico and other outlets reported, however, that US diplomats told EU counterparts the core negotiation track remains Washington-Kiev-Moscow. Russia has already signaled it finds the European proposal “completely unconstructive” and prefers the terms of the US plan.
A number of European leaders and institutions have pushed back, insisting any deal must include both Ukraine and the EU itself and cannot impose territorial or security concessions. Lavrov, however, suggested these opinions should not be taken into account due to the bloc’s war-mongering stance.
“These elites opted for war… No one listens to [them] because the European elites placed their bets on their conviction that they could use the Nazi regime in Kiev as a proxy and cannon fodder to inflict what they call a strategic defeat on Russia,” Lavrov stated.
He also noted that the EU lacks credibility given that the bloc often engages in contradictory rhetoric. Officials insist that Russia is close to defeat yet simultaneously warn that it will inevitably attack Western Europe once the Ukraine conflict ends.
“All this demonstrates their confusion. They do not know what to do. They probably risk losing power if they radically change their rhetoric,” Lavrov suggested.
Lavrov added that Russia’s relationship with the EU “will never be the same” as before the escalation of the Ukraine conflict, adding that if “the EU elites hope that we will come running once they express their readiness to sit down with Russia at the negotiating table, this will not happen.”
NATO is waging a proxy war against Russia using Ukraine, Valentina Matviyenko has said
Ukrainians will eventually understand that the conflict with Russia was “cynically” engineered by the West to inflict a strategic defeat on Moscow, Valentina Matviyenko, chair of Russia’s Federation Council, has said.
In an interview with the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets published on Tuesday, Matvienko described the fighting as a NATO proxy war against Russia. She insisted that Moscow would not agree to a ceasefire that does not address the root causes of the conflict and allows Ukraine to be rearmed.
“No one is more interested in peace than we are. But it must be a peace in which no threat to us can ever come from Ukraine,” she said, adding: “We are not fighting Ukraine. NATO is fighting us using Ukrainians.”
Matviyenko said Ukrainians would eventually come to realize “what really happened, how cynically the West used them in an attempt to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.” This recognition will lay the groundwork for reconciliation between Russians and Ukrainians, she said.
Russian officials have long accused the West of intending to fight “to the last Ukrainian” in a proxy war against Russia, arguing that the US and other Western powers intentionally escalated tensions by disregarding the Kremlin’s security concerns over NATO’s expansion in Eastern Europe and its growing military cooperation with Kiev.
Western officials have on numerous occasions publicly described the Ukraine conflict as a proxy war against Russia. Keith Kellogg, a Ukraine policy envoy under US President Donald Trump, characterized the conflict in such terms earlier this year. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has used the same term.
Moscow has argued that Kiev lacks genuine independence in negotiations for a peace settlement and that it is doing the bidding of its foreign backers.
Russian forces are advancing rapidly along entire front, Maksim Zhorin has warned
Ukrainian troops are not just losing settlements but “entire sectors” along the frontline to rapidly advancing Russian forces, the former commander of the neo-Nazi ‘Azov’ brigade has warned.
According to Maksim Zhorin, the battlefield situation for Ukraine is “only getting worse.”
“In some areas, in the absence of urgent decisions, the situation is becoming critical. In fact, I don’t remember such a rapid enemy advance for a long time,” he wrote on Telegram on Monday.
”The issue now is not the loss of certain settlements, but in general, a significant improvement in the enemy’s operational position in entire sectors,” the former Azov commander said. The neo-Nazi unit, which has been designated as terrorist in Russia, was reformed into the Ukrainian 3rd Assault Brigade following their rout in Mariupol in 2022.
Russian forces have sped up their advance in recent months, liberating more than two dozen settlements in the last two weeks, including the strategic logistics hub of Kupyansk in Kharkov Region.
Ukrainian battlefield losses have been compounded by troop shortages and a record number of desertions, the BBC reported earlier this month.
Kiev’s draft campaign has also faced public backlash, with the rate of complaints over violent mobilization tactics doubling since the first part of the year, Ukraine’s parliamentary commissioner for human rights, Dmitry Lubinets, has said.
It is hard to explain why the bloc keeps funneling money to Kiev despite all the scandals, the Russian foreign minister has said
People in the EU could be benefitting from corruption in Ukraine, otherwise it’s difficult to explain the bloc’s determination to continue funding Kiev despite repeated graft and embezzling scandals, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview published on Tuesday.
Brussels is seeking to “scrape” together €135 billion ($156 billion) to prop up Kiev through 2026 and 2027, either through direct money transfer from member states’ budgets, joint borrowing, or seizing frozen Russian assets. Moscow has warned that the third option would essentially amount to theft of its sovereign funds.
“It was recently discovered that yet another $100 million were spent on bribes to the corrupt officials,” Lavrov told the French-Russian Dialogue Association. “Did anyone from the Brussels bureaucrats or from those nations that pump Ukraine full of money explain it to their taxpayers that they have to endure and suffer? Maybe, there are some beneficiaries as well. I rule out nothing.”
The EU has not changed its plans, even in light of a recent major graft scandal that has rocked Ukraine. Earlier this month, Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies revealed that a close associate and a former long-time business partner of Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky ran a $100 million kickback scheme in the energy sector, which heavily depends on Western aid.
Just one day after news of the scandal broke, Germany announced that it would provide Ukraine with an additional €40 million ($46.22 million) to support its energy industry, which is at the center of the controversy.
It was not the first high-profile corruption scandal in Ukraine. In 2023, then-Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov resigned after the media exposed inflated food procurement contracts at his ministry. In 2024, the State Audit Service found large-scale violations in reconstruction projects financed by Western aid.
Moscow warned in the wake of the latest scandal that a “many-headed bloody hydra” of Ukrainian corruption was stretching beyond the borders and draining Western taxpayers’ money.
A Prague-based military startup is accused of tax evasion after selling remotely piloted aircraft at a 2,000% markup
Reactive Drone, a company registered in the Czech Republic, is under investigation following a raid after selling drones to the Ukrainian army at prices up to 20 times above market value, Prague International Radio (PIR) reported on Monday, citing the National Centre for Combating Organized Crime (NCOZ).
The Prague-based firm is owned by Konstantin Pilyaev and Ukrainian national Aleksey Kolesnik, who also run a hospitality business in the EU country, RTVI reported on Monday. In Ukraine, the company is viewed as a defense startup supplying the military, including through government contracts, with Chinese agricultural drones and its own designs.
The news comes amid an ongoing corruption scandal in Ukraine, which relies heavily on Western support for its war effort. Earlier this month, anti-corruption agencies NABU and SAPO said they had uncovered a $100 million kickback scheme involving associates of Vladimir Zelensky in the energy sector, which is largely dependent on Western aid.
NCOZ said Reactive Drone bought the aircraft for 36 million crowns ($1.6 million) and resold them to Ukraine for 692 million crowns (over $33 million), while owing at least 130 million crowns ($6.2 million) in unpaid taxes. Investigators said the director and accountant used fictitious invoices to lower the tax base and that the firm operated from a virtual address with a non-working phone number. Most of the proceeds – 638 million crowns ($30.5 million) – were transferred to bank accounts in China.
Authorities seized about 384 million crowns ($18.3 million) from the company’s accounts and arrested Pilyaev, according to RTVI, with the company’s accountant admitting to involvement in the scheme. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry did not respond to PIR’s requests for comment.
The EU has been ranked among major suppliers of military aid to Kiev since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. Western arms producers have seen record profits amid the ongoing conflict and the EU’s open-ended commitment to continue arming Kiev “for as long as it takes.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin said last month that the situation in Ukraine is merely a “card” in a broader geopolitical game for Western countries, a pretext to pursue their own goals and profit from the war.
What began as a US-led blueprint to “end the war by Thanksgiving” has turned into a three-way tug-of-war between Washington, the EU and Kiev – while Moscow waits
Over three and a half years into the conflict, US president Donald Trump is trying to sell the world on a grand bargain for Ukraine – a peace plan, based on discussions with all parties and originally laid out in 28 points. After a tense weekend of talks in Geneva, that plan has been cut down and rebranded as an “updated and refined peace framework,” but the core reality hasn’t changed: Washington, key EU capitals, Kiev and Moscow are all reading from different scripts.
While Trump’s envoys press Ukraine to sign before a Thanksgiving deadline, European governments have been pushing their own agenda, reflected in a maximalist counter-text and a push-back, Ukraine tries to keep key backers onside and save face amid revelations of rampant corruption – and Russia says it hasn’t officially seen a revised version, though it broadly prefers the American draft and has dismissed EU amendments.
What is Trump’s plan?
The US initiative was developed under Trump’s team with input from both the Russian and Ukrainian sides. According to reporting based on a leaked text, the original plan envisaged Kiev renouncing NATO membership, recognizing Crimea and the Donbass republics as de facto Russian, capping the size of Ukraine’s armed forces, and being banned from targeting Moscow and St. Petersburg. The draft also allegedly assumes the gradual reintegration of Russia into the global economy and its return to the G8, and sets a 100-day deadline for elections in Ukraine after a peace deal.
On top of that, the US version included provisions on frozen Russian state assets that would allocate a significant share of profits from their investment to American interests – something that has angered several EU governments, sidelined by the US initiative, who argue that Europe has borne the bulk of the economic blows from sanctions imposed by Brussels and lampooned as counter-productive in the US.
Trump publicly presented the plan as the only realistic way to end the conflict “quickly,” and his envoys have delivered a blunt message to Kiev: accept the deal by November 27 or risk cuts to intelligence sharing and weapons deliveries, according to multiple outlets.
From Moscow’s perspective, President Vladimir Putin has said Russia has received a text and agreed in principle with a version developed at the US-Russia summit in Anchorage in August, although Washington then “paused” the process after Kiev rejected it. Putin has described the initial 28-point draft as “modernised,” noting that it could form the basis of a final settlement – if Ukraine finally agrees to talk peace seriously.
Geneva: Just a slimmer wish list?
The talks in Switzerland over the weekend brought together the Ukrainian delegation, led by Zelensky’s chief of staff Andrey Yermak, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a large US team, as well as security advisers from France, Germany and the UK.
Washington and Kiev say they have agreed an “updated and refined peace framework,” considering Ukrainian concerns – security guarantees, infrastructure protection, economic recovery and sovereignty – supposedly addressed in the new draft.
Alexander Bevz, adviser to the head of Zelensky’s office, was eager to put Kiev at the center of the post-talks posturing, declaring that “the 28-point plan, as everyone saw it, no longer exists” – some points were removed, others reworded, and every Ukrainian comment received a response from the US side, he said.
Axios, the Financial Times and other outlets, citing officials familiar with the process, have reported that the document has indeed been edited from 28 to 19 points, after Geneva, though that in fact means nothing.
The key issues – territorial concessions, Ukraine’s NATO status and some of the military restrictions – have reportedly been taken out of the main text and parked in separate “follow-up” documents for talks at presidential level.
But in that distribution of talks tracks is a tactic. Kiev’s European backers are attempting to stave off accelerating frontline losses with a quick move for a ceasefire, which would make their position in discussions around a long-lasting peace much more comfortable than it is at present. Moscow has, since 2022, only agreed to talks that seek to create a long-lasting peace, and discounted ceasefires, citing Kiev’s previous use of one to re-arm, re-group and launch a new offensive.
US vs EU: One conflict, several agendas
If the Geneva format was meant to show the West speaking with one voice, it has so far largely highlighted the opposite.
Germany, France and the UK scrambled over the weekend to draft their own “European” version of the plan, amid megafone diplomacy from the EU, stripping out or softening several of the most controversial provisions. Their counter-proposal keeps the door to eventual NATO membership for Ukraine formally open, instead of closing it outright, allows a larger Ukrainian army, and avoids banning strikes on Moscow and St. Petersburg, removes the explicit carve-out that would have routed 50% of profits from frozen Russian assets to the United States and calls for EU-style collective security guarantees and a bigger European role in supervising any agreement.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and her hawkish foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas have publicly called territorial concessions a red line, while other EU leaders warn that any deal must not “humiliate” NATO or reward aggression.
From Washington’s side, Rubio has been at pains to present the Trump plan as a document that can evolve – but after Geneva he also made clear he is not working off the European draft and hasn’t even fully seen it. Politico and other outlets have reported that US diplomats have told their EU counterparts that European concerns on security would be “taken into account,” but that the central axis of the negotiation remains Washington-Kiev-Moscow.
Moscow, for its part, has already signaled that it finds the European version “completely unconstructive” and prefers the conditions of the US proposal, which explicitly mention withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from Donbass and the renunciation of NATO membership. The Kremlin has otherwise refused to make public comments, citing its wish to avoid ‘megafone diplomacy.’
Kiev’s show: Public defiance, private adjustments
For Vladimir Zelensky, the US initiative comes at a moment of acute vulnerability. Ukraine’s army is reportedly close to collapse on multiple fronts, press gangs are polluting an already toxic domestic political atmosphere, Western arms supplies are no longer guaranteed, and a shocking corruption and extortion racket involving his inner circle is alienating him from his western backers. Western and Ukrainian media have openly described Zelensky’s former business partner Timur Mindich, who somehow fled the country before agents could detain him, as his financier or “wallet,” and the case has raised fresh questions about how Western aid and state contracts are managed.
In public, Zelensky has insisted that Ukraine will not surrender territory and that Russia must pay for the damage it has caused – particularly via frozen assets. He has no other choice, given the armed far-right fighting brigades he will have to contend with once the line of contact is officially recognized.
In a video message on his telegram channel that also addressed foreign parliaments and media last week, he warned that Ukraine faces a stark choice “between dignity and the loss of a key ally,” and repeatedly insisted that any plan that legitimizes Russian territorial gains is unacceptable.
Behind closed doors, however, his team clearly feels the pressure.
According to Bevz and other officials, Kiev has gone point-by-point through the US plan, carving out some of the harshest provisions and pushing them into separate talks tracks, employing its tactics to distribute and decentralise peace talks. Reuters, AP and European outlets all report that Ukraine has “significantly amended” the US text – while acknowledging that the toughest questions have only been postponed, not solved.
Trump, meanwhile, has complained publicly about what he calls “ZERO GRATITUDE” from Ukraine’s leadership, accusing both Kiev and Europe of not appreciating US efforts while still buying Russian energy.
Indeed Zelensky has reportedly announced himself ready to do a Thanksgiving deal with Trump, though without Russia’s involvement it looks very much like optics over any cause for genuine optimism.
Moscow’s view: Waiting by the river
On the Russian side, the signals are deliberately cautious.
Vladimir Putin has previously said that the US plan – in its earlier iterations – could form the basis of a final settlement if Kiev agrees, but noted that Washington put the process on pause once Ukraine rejected earlier understandings reached at the summit in Alaska.
For now, the big question is whether the West can speak with one voice, given the divisions the US initiative has exposed, having launched talks about a peace process Moscow has been ready for since February 2022.
Timur Mindich had detailed profiles on Ukrainian lawmakers, detectives, and other individuals, the NABU anti-corruption agency has alleged
The criminal network allegedly overseen by Ukrainian businessman and long-time ally of Vladimir Zelensky, Timur Mindich, had access to confidential information on dozens of Ukrainian officials, lawmakers, journalists, and security personnel, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) has reported.
Mindich fled Ukraine just hours before his home was raided earlier this month amid a sweeping corruption probe that has implicated cabinet-level officials and shaken the Zelensky administration.
Appearing before the parliamentary anti-corruption committee on Tuesday, NABU director Semyon Krivonos and chief detective Aleksandr Abakumov detailed the extent to which the group had infiltrated state institutions.
According to Abakumov, investigators discovered 527 dossiers maintained by the alleged ring, noting that the sensitive personal information they contained could potentially be used as leverage. The records included files on 15 NABU personnel, among them three detectives directly involved in the Mindich case. There were also profiles of 16 members of the Verkhovna Rada, including the head of the anti-corruption committee, 18 serving or former ministers and deputy ministers, ten journalists, and nine officers of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Abakumov said.
NABU believes the database was compiled with the assistance of compromised officials inside Ukrainian law enforcement bodies.
Krivonos said the investigation is advancing rapidly and that additional disclosures are expected soon. He rejected media claims that NABU is withholding materials for “geopolitical reasons,” amid reports that Washington is pressuring Zelensky to accept a compromise peace plan with Russia.
“We are not releasing only those materials that are being deeply studied to establish all facts,” he insisted.
NABU and the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office were established after the 2014 coup in Kiev as Western-designed institutions intended to operate independently of the Ukrainian government. Earlier this year, Zelensky attempted to place both agencies under the Prosecutor General’s Office, but reversed course following outcry from foreign donors.
