Europe
Document prepared for Kremlin outlines hard-line negotiating stance
By
The Washington Post March 12, 2025
Catherine Belton and Robyn Dixon
The Washington Post March 12, 2025
President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, on June 28, 2019. (Susan Walsh)
Russia should work to weaken the U.S. negotiating position on Ukraine by helping stoke tensions between the Trump administration and other countries while pushing ahead with Moscow’s efforts to dismantle the Ukrainian state, according to a document prepared for the Kremlin.
The document, written in February by an influential Moscow-based think-tank close to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), lays out Russia’s maximalist demands for any end to the conflict in Ukraine. It dismisses President Donald Trump’s preliminary plans for a peace deal within 100 days as “impossible to realize” and says “a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine crisis cannot happen before 2026.”
The document also rejects any proposal to dispatch peacekeepers to Ukraine, as some in Europe have proposed, and insists on recognition of Russian sovereignty over the Ukrainian territories it has seized. It also calls for a further carve-up of Ukrainian territory through the creation of a buffer zone in Ukraine’s northeastern territory on the border with Russian regions such as Bryansk and Belgorod, as well as a demilitarized zone in southern Ukrainian regions near Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, including in the Odessa region.
In addition, the document discusses the need for “the complete dismantling” of the current Ukrainian government.
The document, which was obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post, highlights the challenges still facing Trump in reaching any agreement with Russia over a peace deal on Ukraine, now that Kyiv has endorsed Washington’s proposal for a 30-day ceasefire, appearing to bridge a divide between the two countries.
While Russia has yet to signal it would sign up to any ceasefire, analysts warned that Moscow still had a multitude of ways it could drag out agreeing to even a temporary pause in hostilities and said the road to any long term peace agreement was still treacherous.
Russia is “not interested in an early resolution of the Ukraine crisis,” said Thomas Graham, former senior director for Russia for the White House’s National Security Council under George W. Bush, now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “They consistently talk about the root causes, which as you know are about the domestic politics in Ukraine, and even more important than that, the European security architecture which would be the role of NATO. And a simple ceasefire which doesn’t take that into account is of no interest to Russia. And Trump doesn’t appear to understand.”
Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin “was not aware of such recommendations,” calling them “extremely contradictory,” and adding, “we are working with more considered options.”
The document was prepared by a think tank working closely with the FSB’s Fifth Service, the division that oversees operations in Ukraine, in the week ahead of talks between Russia and the United States in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Feb. 18. A Russian academic close to senior Russian diplomats said that the main thrust of the recommendations in the proposal reflect the broad consensus in Moscow, but added it is never clear to what degree the Kremlin leadership reacts to documents being prepared for it.
While hawkish members of the Russian elite were pressing the Kremlin to continue the war and “use the current situation to advance further,” other groups were pressing for a speedier resolution of the conflict and “for a ceasefire at least,” he said.
The FSB-linked document lays out ways in which Russia can boost its negotiating position by exacerbating tensions between the United States and both China and the European Union, and by proposing U.S. access to Russian minerals including in the territories it occupies in Ukraine, such as the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas, where it says there are reserves of rare earth metals.
In an interview on Feb. 24 Russian President Vladimir Putin said much the same when he suggested Moscow could invite U.S. companies to develop Russian mineral deposits, including in the occupied territories in Ukraine. That appeared to be an effort to undermine a proposed accord on mineral resources development between Ukraine and the United States.
The document says Russia’s efforts should first be focused on normalizing relations between Washington and Moscow, through the restoration of full diplomatic staffing levels at both countries’ embassies and the appointment of Alexander Darchiev as Russia’s ambassador to the United States — suggestions that emerged publicly following talks between Russian and U.S. officials in Istanbul on Feb. 27, which apparently focused on the operations of their respective diplomatic missions.
The document proposed that Russia agree not to station its Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Belarus, on the border with Europe, while in return the United States would agree not to place new missile systems on the continent. It suggests too that Russia stop weapons supplies to countries considered “unfriendly” to the United States, while in return the United States would stop arming Ukraine — but adds that ending Russian arms supplies to Moscow’s allies would be “difficult to realize.”
The document dismisses what it says are initial proposals made by Trump’s special envoy on Ukraine, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, for a peace agreement in which one suggested element would be Ukraine’s ceding of territories taken by Russia and Kyiv’s agreement not to attempt to regain them in the future through military or diplomatic means.
The FSB-linked document says however even this type of settlement does not go far enough and without official recognition of Russian sovereignty over the seized region, it is “fairly likely” the armed conflict will resume in the medium term, “for example after the next change of administration in the U.S.”
The document also dismisses any potential political concessions by Ukraine such as Kyiv’s rejection of NATO membership and the holding of elections in which pro-Russian parties are allowed to participate as not being far-reaching enough. “In reality, the current Kyiv regime cannot be changed from inside the country. Its complete dismantling is needed,” it says.
The presence of any peacekeeping contingent in Ukraine is also dismissed as “absolutely unnecessary” since any force would be under “serious Western influence,” while U.S. plans to continue arming Ukraine following any peace deal are “absolutely unacceptable” as is maintaining the Ukrainian army at its current 1 million strong level.
Efforts to entice Russia into a peace deal by offering to partially lift sanctions were also dismissed in the document. “It’s not clear what would be the benefit for Russia,” it says, since “the importance of the factor of sanctions against our country has been clearly exaggerated.”
Boris Bondarev, a Geneva-based former Russian diplomat, said Russia was trying to lure Trump into talks by demonstrating its “openness and flexibility” while Putin would try to drag out the negotiations by positioning himself as “a real, true friend to Donald Trump, who understands him completely, who wants to help him, who wants to help him achieve his goals in United States. But of course he would need something from him because he cannot do it just free.”
Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a national security think tank, said that it could now be difficult for Putin to reject the ceasefire proposal outright as otherwise he could risk Moscow’s potential realignment with Washington. “The stakes now (in his view) are much more than just Ukraine - the bigger prize is the US-Russia diplomatic normalization, dropping of sanctions, driving a wedge within NATO,” Alperovitch said in a post on X.