The US offered Russia access to frozen state assets, a sale of Lukoil's foreign business and freer Belarusian potash exports in return for a limited ceasefire, The New York Times reported on October 10.
US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner put the three incentives to Moscow in late September to win a truce covering energy infrastructure or the sea, the paper said, citing officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. The package was pitched as an upfront inducement to accept a partial halt to the fighting before winter, not as a reward to be paid once a deal was in place, and Ukrainian officials were surprised by how far the Americans had gone.
The offer would hand the Kremlin three economic prizes before any guns fall silent, and it surfaces in the same week that President Donald Trump let Russian diesel back onto world markets with a sanctions licence. It cuts against the line Congress took only weeks ago when it passed the hellish sanctions package to squeeze Russia's oil trade harder.
The first incentive revives talk of releasing up to $100bn of immobilised Russian sovereign reserves held in Western jurisdictions. Washington has so far moved the other way on private Russian money: the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) began rejecting applications from Russian investors to unblock frozen holdings at the end of September.
The second brings back the sale of the international arm of Russia's second-largest oil producer Lukoil (MOEX: LKOH) to a consortium of Middle Eastern investors, some of whom have business ties to Witkoff and Kushner, according to the paper. The business, valued at around $20bn, takes in oil and gas fields from Central Asia to Mexico, around 2,500 filling stations and refineries in Bulgaria and Romania. Private equity group Carlyle agreed a preliminary deal for it in January, and a group assembled by US financier Todd Boehly with UAE and Qatari backing launched a rival bid in September. Any sale needs approval from US authorities.
Third, the two envoys revived a proposal to let Belarus, Moscow's closest ally, export potash to world markets. The US dropped its own sanctions on potash producer Belaruskali in March after Minsk freed 250 prisoners, but EU sanctions still bar the trade and Lithuania has kept its port of Klaipeda, which once handled more than 90% of Belarusian potash exports, closed to the cargo since 2022 despite US pressure to reopen it. Trump has also backed a plan to apply the same sanctions-for-prisoners model to Russia.
Separately there has also been talk of the US taking over the Nord Stream gas pipelines that were largely destroyed by an explosion in the first year of the war and selling Russian gas to the European market. And more generally there is a mooted “Dmitriev package” of deals worth $12 trillion according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of deals that also includes a Musk-backed tunnel linking northeast Russia with Alaska worth a reported $8bn.
Kyiv did not reject the proposals outright but asked for safeguards. Ukrainian negotiators demanded dollar-for-dollar releases from the frozen assets to fund Ukraine's defence and reconstruction, and firm guarantees of faster military aid if Russian forces broke a truce.
Moscow has shown little appetite for a deal. After a phone call between Trump and President Vladimir Putin on October 9, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov said that "Putin made it clear that Moscow will continue hostilities until it achieves all stated goals," the Kyiv Post reported. The Kremlin had already dismissed an energy truce in September.
A six-hour meeting in Miami the same day between Witkoff, Ukrainian negotiators and officials from the UK, France, Germany, the European Commission and Nato ended without a breakthrough and the Ukrainian delegation left a day early.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha warned on October 9, after the diesel licence was issued, that concessions only encourage the Kremlin. "Weakening sanctions neither brings peace closer nor helps global markets. Instead, Putin sees weakness," he wrote on X. "Weak strategies never deliver strong results, just as appeasement never brings peace."
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy repeated Kyiv's own offer of a mutual energy truce on October 11. "Ukraine will be ready to stop strikes on Russian oil refineries if Russia ceases strikes against our energy infrastructure," he wrote on Facebook. "Any de-escalation steps must be mutual and with real guarantees."