The Putin whisperers

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In the early hours of March 3 2022, Richard Conn, a lawyer in Weston, Connecticut, took a call from Moscow warning that the world was on the brink of nuclear war.

Conn had only spoken to the person at the end of the phone once since leaving Russia 15 years earlier. But these, the man yelled down the encrypted line, were desperate times. It was a week since Vladimir Putin had ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the Russian president’s war was not going according to plan.

“This is an existential threat for us,” the caller told Conn. “We know that the United States is trying to destroy us.” Putin was ready to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine to win the war, he insisted. The US needed to realise that. “You guys are bumbling your way into World War III,” he said.

Conn knew the Russian had top-level connections in the Kremlin and had never heard him so agitated. The businessman said he was taking great risks simply by speaking to Conn.

Conn tried to calm the caller down. He said that, over the past few months, he had discussed his ideas for a back channel to Moscow with Eric Green, the senior director for Russia on the US National Security Council. Conn and the businessman began to brainstorm ways to reach figures close to Putin who could convince him not to escalate the war. The Russian promised to see Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, for lunch.

When Conn hung up it was nearly four in the morning. He barely slept for the next two days. Once he had composed himself, he wrote a message on Signal to Green. Green called him back within an hour. This was not the first time the US had heard Putin was considering a nuclear strike, he said. Conn knew he had to act. “I just felt a tremendous responsibility to do everything I possibly could,” he says.

Conn has been drawn to Russia ever since spending a summer in Leningrad as a student in the late 1970s. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he moved his family to Moscow, eager to do his part to help President Boris Yeltsin steward Russia’s transition to democracy and capitalism. He returned during Putin’s first term, as corporate Russia was taking global markets by storm. “I felt that there were opportunities to be effective again in helping Russia at that point,” he says. “One of my weaknesses, I guess, is I like to feel that my life has some meaning.”

A sprightly 68-year-old, Conn prides himself on possessing “a combination of things that come together pretty well”. He had first pitched his idea of a back channel in 2021, shortly after Green, a career US diplomat, took over the NSC’s Russia file under the new US president Joe Biden. Conn explained his idea to get former US expats in Russia to help mend fences with Moscow. By engaging Americans with senior Russian contacts to work quietly on sensitive issues, Conn explained, the US could explore ideas that would never otherwise emerge in formal diplomatic dialogue. Green encouraged him to write up his pitch and send a memo.

By April 2022, peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul had collapsed. Putin, who had not told most of his senior officials about his plans for war in advance, pressed on with his offensive and withdrew deeper into isolation. Conn says Green told him the US had no substantive conversations with Russia at the government level or even behind the scenes. Green disputes this. The lawyer thought he spied an opening. He tried to figure out how to appeal to Putin — and who could deliver that message.

Conn, a former equity partner at white-shoe law firm Latham & Watkins, has always felt he had more to offer. At 19, while he was working on a Soviet cruise ship, the KGB told him he might be president of the US one day and tried to recruit him; Conn politely said no. Years later, he turned down a similar proposal from the CIA, impressed by his work helping draft legal reforms for Yeltsin’s government. He’s a chess player of some prowess and a committed atheist who has written a book about ethically raising children free from “religious indoctrination”.

To get his pitch to Putin, however, Conn needed an in. The plan for his Russian contact to reach out to Ushakov had come to nothing. So Conn got in touch with Bob Foresman, an American investment banker. Foresman is an excitable 58-year-old with bright blue eyes and curly black hair who grew up during the tensest period of the cold war. Aged 15, he watched a television film, The Day After, that portrayed the impact of a nuclear holocaust in middle America after the US and Soviet Union went to war. “I remember watching that movie and thinking, I don’t know what career that is, but making sure that that doesn’t happen — there can be no higher calling,” he says.

Foresman seems an unlikely partner for Conn. In the early 1990s, he underwent what he describes as a born-again religious experience. “Why does God have me on this planet?” he asked himself. Believing that the answer involved defeating communism, he spent the summer of 1991 as an intern in Moscow and met his future wife when he walked into a flower shop on a trip to Kyiv. When the Soviet Union collapsed later that year, Foresman sought a new outlet for his calling. He got a job as a consultant on a World Bank project advising on privatisation in Ukraine, moved to Kyiv and got married.

In the early 2000s, Foresman took a job running Dresdner Bank’s investment arm in Moscow. It gave him a window into how the US and Russia could speak quietly through business circles. When Donald Trump emerged as the Republican Party frontrunner in 2016, Foresman passed on a Kremlin invitation for Trump to speak at Russia’s flagship conference in St Petersburg. After Trump’s election win, Foresman reached out to his transition team, seeking a role working on Russia. The administration didn’t tap him for a job then, but he remained on the lookout for ways he could help. “I’m always more interested in this stuff,” Foresman says. “Investment banking just sort of pays the bills.”

The two men had not met before. But in September 2022, when Conn outlined his idea for reaching out to Putin over lunch at the Rye Grill and Bar near Foresman’s home in suburban New York, the banker nearly jumped out of their booth. Conn found himself struck by Foresman’s boyish excitement about being a peacemaker. It was hard to get a word in edgeways. Foresman said he had made a similar pitch to Green. He shared Conn’s fear that Putin’s invasion could turn nuclear and spill over into a hot war with the US. That spring, he had shifted some financial assets into cash and started looking for property in Uruguay, which he thought would be safe from the atomic fallout.

Foresman said he knew someone who could stop that from happening. Matthias Warnig, a former East German spy who had worked with him at Dresdner Bank, was one of the few people close enough to Putin to have access to him in person. As Foresman spoke about his peacekeeping mission in religious terms, Conn, the devout atheist, felt his prayers had been answered.

Warnig agreed to hear Conn out in person in Zurich on October 4 2022. Before the meeting, Conn felt the weight of the world on him. US media had just reported that the White House was concerned Putin could use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine and had begun gaming out potential responses. In the shower, Conn sang REM’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” to calm his nerves. When he descended to the airport Hilton’s restaurant, Warnig and Foresman were waiting in an empty dining room with views of the Hardwald forest. The three walked to a back table.

Warnig, who is built like a rugby prop forward, speaks quietly and chooses his words carefully. He has the commanding gravitas of a big man, like Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon. He told Conn about his work for the Stasi and his relationship with Putin, whom he referred to as “my friend”. The two had spent many long evenings in the 1990s drinking in St Petersburg with Putin’s colleagues, who now occupied most of the top posts in Moscow.

Warnig said Putin had not told him about his plans to invade Ukraine. His friend was deeply resentful of perceived past humiliations by the west and felt they had forced his hand. Now Putin had responded to battlefield setbacks by annexing the Donbas in the east and two other partly occupied Ukrainian regions. Publicly, he said he would “use all the means at our disposal” to protect his conquests. It was a barely veiled threat of nuclear war.

Recently returned from Moscow, Warnig was concerned the war could escalate. Two years of near-total isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic had taken a heavy toll on the president. He required all visitors, including his chief of staff, to quarantine for long periods. Those who did so sat at the other end of a long table. Warnig said he had met with several of Putin’s top lieutenants. They cautiously felt him out before realising he shared their fears. One hugged him as they parted. Warnig chose not to quarantine and spoke to his friend by phone from his chief of staff’s office. The pair reflected on their decades of friendship.

Despite the German’s avuncular manner, Conn was struck by Warnig’s obvious concern at the current situation. His description of Putin’s living conditions reminded Conn of Hitler’s bunker; Conn worried that Putin saw nuclear war as a form of suicide. He explained his relationship with Green, stressed repeatedly that he did not work for the US government and outlined a potential pitch to Putin. “We have to do this,” Warnig told them. “There’s no one else doing anything. There’s no communication. We have to come up with a solution.”

The three men immediately began sketching out how to build a channel. Warnig said he could speak to his friend honestly, challenge him and deliver a message accurately. When Warnig went to the bathroom, Conn and Foresman shared a look. “Oh, shit,” Foresman thought. “This is really dangerous.”

When he started work at Dresdner in 2001, Foresman’s bosses warned him the head of its Russian commercial banking operations had connections to the new president. Sensing a potential clash, Foresman reached out to his new colleague. Early one morning that January, in the dining room of the Metropol, a Tsarist-era hotel across from the Bolshoi Theatre, Matthias Warnig appeared.

Warnig and Foresman quickly discovered a shared purpose. At a colleague’s birthday party, Foresman cornered Warnig and suggested they set up a private channel between Putin and the incoming US president, George W Bush. The American feared that holdovers from Yeltsin’s regime in the Kremlin could be gatekeeping information from Putin to protect their own personal interests.

A few days later, Warnig popped into Foresman’s office: “I’m ready,” he said. Foresman helped set up a meeting for Warnig with three former US senators who flew to Moscow, praised Putin’s efforts at reform, then conveyed the German’s pointers back to Bush. He believes Warnig’s insight was crucial in helping Bush to establish a warm relationship with Putin at their first meeting that summer. “I just felt like God was putting me in this situation, like Forrest Gump,” says Foresman.

As the two men grew Dresdner’s business in Russia, it became clear that talk of Warnig’s connections had been grossly understated. In 2005, The Wall Street Journal published an article reporting that Warnig had previously served as a major in the Stasi, East Germany’s intelligence service, and befriended Putin when the future president was working in Dresden in the 1980s. Frank Weigelt, his former boss in the Stasi, told the paper: “Warnig’s genius was to use personal friendship, rather than ideology, as the motivation for co-operation.”

Warnig claims to have only met Putin in the early 1990s, after both had left the intelligence world and Putin was working in the St Petersburg mayor’s office. By 1993, however, the men were so close that Putin sent his two eldest daughters to live with Warnig in Germany after his wife Lyudmila was seriously injured in a car accident.

The revelations about his Stasi past didn’t stop Warnig’s ascent through the Russian business world, which was increasingly dominated by former KGB spies and Putin’s confidants. He joined the boards of state companies like Rosneft, Russia’s oil giant, and Bank Rossiya, later described by the US Treasury as “the personal bank for senior officials”. Nor did they deter Foresman, whose star continued to rise after he left Dresdner in the mid-2000s. “Jesus says, ‘Be innocent as doves and as shrewd as a serpent.’ Or, trust but verify,” says Foresman, parsing a cold war maxim.

At the bank, Foresman was meant to be Warnig’s boss. After a few weeks, he asked Dresdner to make him report to Warnig instead. He found the German a source of valuable advice. On one occasion, Warnig asked Foresman if his wife had met his new secretary, a “flirtatious, attractive woman”. When Foresman said no, Warnig gave him a knowing look and said, simply, “Bob”. “He was looking out for me and my marriage, and just didn’t want me to be compromised in that situation,” says Foresman. The secretary was let go.

Gradually, Warnig took on a greater role building bridges between Russia and the west. He headed up Nord Stream, the project to build gas pipelines to Germany that bypassed Ukraine, and became a fixture at the Munich Security Conference, where he charmed western officials. “He’s a big, warm, fuzzy bear,” says Fiona Hill, a former senior US national security official for Russia who studied alongside Foresman at Harvard. “Part of his power is the fact that he looks so genial.” Warnig leans into this image, she says. “It’s meant to lull people into a false sense of no-strings-attached camaraderie, and it works to his advantage when some people don’t take it seriously. But he’s deadly serious.”

US officials saw Warnig as a way to reach Putin directly. “I remember us having a conversation about who has regular contact with Putin that we have regular contact with, and the list was very short,” says Michael McFaul, a US ambassador to Russia during Barack Obama’s presidency. “It was Henry Kissinger, [then-Exxon chief executive] Rex Tillerson and Steven Seagal. Matthias would be at the top of that list.”

In the days that followed the meeting in Zurich, alarm that Russia could use a nuclear weapon grew more intense. Biden told a fundraiser that Putin was “not joking” and warned: “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

Conn wrote to Green with an extended summary of the meeting with Warnig. Green then called Conn on Signal. “I have some messages that I want you to convey for Matthias to convey to Putin from the White House,” he said. Conn was on a business trip in Moldova. He had ducked outside from a dinner meeting and didn’t have anything to write Green’s messages down. So he committed them to memory.

Conn was stunned. “This had all gotten to a very high degree of concreteness quite quickly,” he says. But there was no time to reflect. He flew to meet Warnig at the Tuniberg golf club near the German’s home in the Black Forest. Over an omelette, Conn said: “As I told you, I don’t speak for the US. But on this one occasion, I do. And I have some particular sentences that I’m going to give to you that are from the White House designed to be conveyed by you to your friend.”

Conn read out the messages. “The US is not pursuing regime change. We’re not trying to destroy Russia. There is no existential threat. We’re trying to support international order and the UN. We want peace.”

Warnig and Conn discussed how to deliver the message to Putin. The German said he felt free to tell his friend anything, but Putin would disregard it if Warnig did not have a mandate to work on the issue. Warnig believed the war was a terrible mistake and had already told Putin there would be no winner from Russia’s invasion. But Putin lived in an information bubble, fed cherry-picked good news from the battlefield. The men hugged as Conn departed. “We were still nowhere near out of the woods,” he says.

On October 11, G7 leaders warned Putin of “severe consequences” if Russia used nuclear weapons. But fears over Russia’s nuclear use kept rising. Ukraine was forcing Russia’s army into more humiliating retreats in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, the two other territories Putin had just claimed for Moscow. Russia’s defence minister abruptly called his US, UK and French counterparts to claim Ukraine was preparing a “dirty bomb”. The claims only fuelled concerns that Putin himself was about to push the button.

When Warnig returned from Russia, he invited Conn and Foresman to meet him in Frankfurt airport on October 26. The Americans were running late and almost missed Warnig before he flew for a cruise holiday with his family off the coast of Africa. They made it to the airport just in time but Conn told Foresman he needed a few moments alone with Warnig. Foresman fetched drinks and sat at a separate table chatting with Warnig’s wife, Elena.

Warnig told Conn he had spent the previous evening alone with his friend. He read out Putin’s response from his notebook. “I have no choice but to conduct military operations.” But, read Warnig, “I am very open to negotiations. I want to talk about solutions. I want peace for Ukraine.” The Istanbul talks that collapsed in April could be the starting point for negotiations.

“We need this solved. I want the solution to last a hundred years,” Warnig read out. “If [there is] no other choice, I will continue on, knowing it will be painful. But I can’t go back and am ready to fight.” Putin wanted the US to open negotiations at a high level: Jake Sullivan, US national security adviser, should call Ushakov, his Russian counterpart.

Foresman came over with another glass of wine for Warnig. “You know, I didn’t come all this way just to be serving drinks to Matthias,” he said. They invited him to join them. Conn asked Warnig: “Do you feel that the nuclear threat is still out there?” He had noticed Warnig seemed more relaxed than at previous meetings. “We’re good,” Warnig said.

Conn marvelled to himself at how quickly the threat appeared to have dissipated. Later, as he drove home from the airport, Chicago’s soft-rock cover of “Let It Snow” came on the car radio. As he heard the horn section play the introduction, Conn felt like he was flying. “I had never been happier in my life,” he says. The nuclear crisis was over. Foresman had fulfilled the calling he first felt when he saw The Day After as a teenager. “It’s a shame you don’t believe in God, because God chose you, and God raised you up for this purpose,” he told Conn.

The next day, Putin was asked about the possibility of nuclear war at a foreign policy conference. This time he gave a notably more conciliatory response. He claimed Russia had never considered using nuclear weapons and said: “We don’t need to do it. There’s no political or military sense in it for us.” In the ensuing weeks, the Journal reported that Sullivan had been speaking confidentially to Ushakov and another top Russian official as part of US attempts to avoid a nuclear war.

Conn and Foresman took the Journal article as a sign Warnig’s message had the intended effect.

“Looks like things are de-escalating. Very possible our efforts played a role,” Conn wrote in a Signal message.

“Uh, I think they are actually referring to our efforts first and foremost, thankfully without any reference to any details or names,” Foresman replied.

“Agreed. I was just being uncharacteristically modest,” Conn wrote.

“I didn’t know you had it in you,” Foresman replied.

Conn proposed the next steps. “It’s passed now, whew! Shall we talk or meet soon to continue our efforts to save the world?”

Back in the US, Conn and Foresman met at the Delamar, a waterfront hotel in Greenwich, Connecticut, to celebrate. Over beers (Conn, who doesn’t drink, stuck to ginger beer), they brainstormed ways that their channel, which they had come to call “the Platform”, could help find a way to end Russia’s invasion. Conn spoke to psychiatrists to better understand Putin’s bunker mentality. Foresman studied a collection of antique Ukrainian maps he had acquired while at Harvard.

The two men began speaking almost every day. Foresman would tell Conn that he was praying for him. Conn came to understand Warnig, and by extension Putin, better through Foresman’s stories. Foresman called himself the “Matthias whisperer”. Warnig struck Conn like Foresman’s favourite uncle. “They are clearly good drinking buddies, and they have a long history. You can tell there’s great trust,” Conn says.

Thrashing out a peace deal would require a channel to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “We wanted the Ukrainian Matthias, in so far as one existed,” Foresman says. He reached out to an American friend, Michael Calvey. Once the biggest private equity investor in Russia, Calvey saw its dark side when he was arrested on Kafkaesque fraud charges. Warnig had been among those who convinced Putin to release him from prison three years earlier. The pro-Ukrainian Calvey knew the man for the job: Alexander Rodnyansky, a Ukrainian film producer who had helped set up the peace talks in Istanbul. Rodnyansky immediately agreed. But the expanded group was about to find out just how difficult ending the war would be.

Warnig seemed committed to helping Putin out of a corner. But the US had sanctioned him the day before the invasion over his role at Nord Stream, causing him significant personal difficulties in Germany. Commerzbank closed his account. His tax adviser dropped him. The golf club rescinded his membership.

Warnig and Putin had met again. This time they sat at opposite ends of a 20-foot table in the Kremlin, drawing ever closer at Putin’s suggestion until they were almost directly facing each other. Putin was sympathetic to Warnig’s struggles under the sanctions and invited the German to move his family to Russia. Warnig declined. He said Putin’s personal touch had once been his strength. But isolation had taken it from him. “Power is a drug,” Putin told him. He told Putin that each side was losing on the battlefield, financially, and in terms of human lives.

In early January, the group flew to Gran Canaria, where Warnig owns a condominium, to discuss the outlines of a peace proposal they could take to Putin and Zelenskyy. Warnig had hired a captain to take them out on to the ocean in his boat, a modest 38-foot cruiser he co-owned with a friend. “This is not the yacht I was thinking of,” a surprised Rodnyansky told Foresman.

The group began to shape their peace proposal. Russia would withdraw from much of the regions Putin had just annexed, setting the border at the territory it controlled in Crimea and parts of the Donbas before the war. Ukraine would recognise Russian control over Crimea and give Russia free passage over a “land bridge” to the peninsula. To ensure the ceasefire held, Ukraine would get protection from Nato states, and Russia would begin discussing a separate agreement on security guarantees with the US; Conn called this “Dr Strangelove in reverse”. During a break, Warnig insisted the group go swimming. The participants all put on their bathing suits and jumped into the ocean.

Warnig and Rodnyansky agreed to take a draft document to Moscow and Kyiv for the leaders’ input. When they reconvened on February 1 2023, Warnig told the group that Putin had gone through the document line by line, circling passages and scribbling comments. Putin agreed with their proposal on the front line, Warnig said. He said that he could not allow Ukraine to join Nato, but was open to EU membership and a different security arrangement like the one discussed at the Istanbul talks. “If we can agree on the border and on Nato, then we can discuss everything else,” Putin told Warnig.

But Ukraine’s success on the battlefield had changed the equation. Rodnyansky could barely get Zelenskyy and his powerful head of the president’s office Andriy Yermak to look at the documents on his phone. They told him they would make no concession to Putin on Ukraine’s borders and felt they could secure much of the rest of the group’s plan without giving up territory. Rodnyansky, who felt the US needed to pressure Ukraine to accept a deal, said they were acting as if Russia’s army would suddenly disintegrate like Sauron’s at the end of The Lord of the Rings. The Ukrainians, laughing, agreed. The Ukrainian presidential office and Yermak did not respond to a request for comment.

Conn and Foresman had hopes of agreeing an end to the war by its first anniversary on February 24. Instead, the prospects for peace crumbled before their eyes. On February 18, the two Americans met Warnig in the Zurich hotel restaurant where they had first gathered. This time the message was very different. Putin had disclosed the channel’s existence to his foreign policy adviser Ushakov and three other top officials, and discussed the group’s peace proposal with them in detail. Putin had told Ushakov to confirm the Americans’ mandate when he next spoke with Sullivan. According to Putin, Sullivan told Ushakov the US had not approved the channel and thought its existing lines of official communication were sufficient.

Foresman, watching in horror, needed a nicotine pouch. “Richard,” he thought. “You’ve got some explaining to do!” Conn had struggled to define his ties to the National Security Council but he thought the channel had proved its value in defusing the nuclear issue. He reached out to the NSC to ask for Sullivan to send the Kremlin the right message. But when Warnig updated Putin at their next meeting, he was cut short. Sullivan had spoken to Ushakov again, Putin said, and made it clear that the US saw no need for their channel. As Warnig recounted this to the group, he learnt that Ukraine had placed him on its sanctions list, potentially creating more difficulties for him. Ushakov then sent him sarcastic congratulations about the reward Ukraine had given him for his efforts at peace.

Without the official US backing Putin had asked for, the channel’s momentum dwindled. The US-backed Ukrainian counteroffensive later that year failed to recapture significant territory. Putin’s demands from Ukraine have ballooned. This month, Donald Trump pressured Ukraine to stop its drone strikes against Russian refineries while striking a diesel deal with the Kremlin and rolling back sanctions.

I asked those involved with the platform where they thought everything went wrong. Their recollections varied and weren’t always conclusive. “We’re all touching the elephant,” one former senior US official said. The platform’s participants believe the US and Ukraine missed a potential opportunity to secure peace on far more favourable terms than Putin is now willing to entertain.

Conn doesn’t want to give the impression he was confident of success, but thinks the US and Ukraine could have done more to test Putin’s readiness for an acceptable compromise. “There’s value in saying, ‘Hey, let’s deal with the position on the chessboard now and come up with some solution that results in an amiable draw that we can all accept.’”

Putin and Ushakov both told Warnig that Sullivan had dismissed the need for the channel. But former US officials told me that Ushakov had never raised the topic of Warnig’s channel, or any others, during the time it was active. That would make Ushakov, not Sullivan, the one who doomed Warnig’s efforts in some kind of territorial Kremlin power play. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, did not respond to a request for comment. Ushakov did not respond to a request for comment.

The former US officials also had different views of how useful Conn’s efforts were and what White House backing he actually had. They said they saw the platform as just one entry in a vast sea of murky, confusing and often conflicting data points on Putin’s true intentions. Green likens the US intelligence and policy apparatus to “a giant sucking sound” that tries to accumulate as much information as possible.

I put it to them that Putin could have taken the message that Green had given Conn as a sign the US wanted to talk. But Warnig was only one of many channels used to defuse the nuclear issue, they said. Biden wrote a letter to Putin. The Chinese and Indian governments warned Russia against using nuclear weapons.

Green denies telling Conn the US and Russia were not seriously talking during this period. “There’s a perception that we didn’t have any communications with the Russians, and that’s not the case. So, if Putin really was interested in something like this, his people could have conveyed that to us in any number of ways,” he says. “It would seem to be a real bass-ackwards approach if you’re Putin and you’re really interested in a deal that the way you would do it is via a former GDR spy talking to a New York lawyer.”

In June this year, I went to Staufen, a bucolic village of 8,000 at the foot of a large hill with a ruined castle at the top. The town is best known as the residence of the medieval German alchemist who served as a model for Dr Faust, the folk legend who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge, power and worldly pleasures.

At precisely one o’clock, Matthias Warnig appeared from a side street and joined me for lunch on the terrace of a small hotel restaurant. The war with Ukraine was dragging on through its fifth year. Putin’s summit in Alaska with Donald Trump last year failed to deliver peace.

Warnig, dressed smartly in a checked jacket, shared his thoughts in a sotto voce baritone. Halfway through our conversation, he noticed the second phone that I had placed in front of him as a backup recording device; I assured him it had not been slipped there by a malevolent eavesdropper.

The former senior US officials I had spoken to had concluded Putin was determined to win the war outright, with no serious intentions to pursue peace. Warnig argued that Putin had always been open to a reasonable settlement. “He agreed in [Istanbul], he agreed in the Richard project, and he agreed in Alaska with the proposal of the Americans.” He said: “I had the feeling that my friend has taken this very seriously, because I immediately got meetings and access.”

The fears of escalation Warnig described at their first meetings had felt all too real to Conn and Foresman; former officials also told me that the US intelligence community had put the chances of nuclear weapons being used at 50:50. But Warnig insisted that he never told the Americans he was worried the escalation would be nuclear, or that Putin would be the one doing it. “I never, ever have seen that he was thinking like this,” he said. “I wouldn’t believe that a human being today would be able to make such a decision.” As Putin’s determination to crush Ukraine hardened, some former officials wondered if the nuclear threats had been a bluff to ward off increased US military support. “Who was deterring whom?” one says.

At the start of the war, Warnig had found resuming contact with his friend emotionally difficult. “It took some time for me before I was mentally able to meet him again,” he said. “We have known each other for more than 35 years.” Then, over my protests, Warnig paid for our lunch with a crisp €100 note and disappeared back down the same side street.

Max Seddon is the FT’s Moscow bureau chief, based in Berlin

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