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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 striking a Russian flagged commercial vessel carrying sunflower oil) has alarmed the Turks and Romanians, who depend upon Black Sea commercial shipping.