For the past 18 months, Vladimir Putin's efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine have been led by a man with no diplomatic background or expertise. Kirill Dmitriev, a banker who is under sanctions for his role in financing the war, has been shuttling from Moscow to Florida to meet with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in and around the exclusive island known as Billionaire Bunker. His pitch during these rendezvous is that the United States should sell out Ukraine's sovereignty in exchange for glittering billion-dollar projects for Russian and American companies'digging for precious minerals in the Arctic, say, or joint missions to Mars. These fantasies are rooted in the idea that the Americans can be talked into ignoring some of the most salient facts about contemporary Russia. What sane investor would put long-term money into a country where the law is a facade, where the intelligence services can expropriate your business as soon as it looks profitable, and where another...
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