While Russia Continues its Genocidal War Against Ukraine, Trump’s Inner Circle Cuts Deals With the Kremlin

While Russia wages a genocidal war against Ukraine—bombing residential neighborhoods, killing civilians, and deliberately destroying energy infrastructure to freeze Ukrainians into submission—Trump’s circle is moving ahead with business deals dangled by the Kremlin. As Russian missiles and drones destroy power stations, heating plants, and water systems, leaving millions without electricity, heat, or running water in subzero temperatures, the United States is no longer holding the sanctions line. As with the many other gifts Trump has already delivered to Putin, sanctions are being weakened or ignored while Trump’s associates pursue private deals.

And the first deal—at least the first one we know about—is already underway. Yesterday, The New York Times reported that, last fall, Gentry Beach, a longtime friend and business associate of Donald Trump Jr., quietly signed an agreement with Novatek to pursue a natural gas project in Alaska—a deal that would have been unthinkable prior to Trump’s return to power.

Gentry Beach did not appear out of nowhere, and this is not his first time dealing with the Trump family and sanctions-sensitive business. In 2018, reporting revealed that Donald Trump Jr. had failed to disclose longstanding business ties with Beach, despite repeated public claims that their relationship was strictly personal. Court records showed the two men had engaged in multiple business deals dating back to the mid-2000s, including shared investments in oil and mining ventures, and later formed a company together even as Trump Jr. publicly denied any financial connection.

During the same period, Beach leveraged his proximity to Trump Jr. to gain access to senior National Security Council officials, where he pushed proposals involving sanctioned countries, including plans that would have curtailed U.S. sanctions on Venezuela and opened energy opportunities for private firms. Career officials raised ethics concerns, warning that Beach’s access appeared inseparable from Trump family influence. Although those proposals were ultimately rejected, the episode established a clear pattern: personal access used to test whether sanctions could be softened through proximity to power rather than law. And this time around, any remaining guardrails are long gone.

On the Russian side of this deal, the counterpart is equally revealing. At the center is Leonid Mikhelson, Novatek’s chief executive and a longstanding member of Putin’s inner circle. Mikhelson is key in the Kremlin’s energy strategy and has long operated within the system of state-aligned oligarchs used to advance Russia’s geopolitical objectives abroad. He has also maintained long-term business ties with Len Blavatnik, whose fortune was built through extensive holdings in Russia’s energy and petrochemical sectors before being shifted into Western assets.

Those connections matter because Blavatnik was also a business partner of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s shady businessman, involved in talks with Moscow. Blavatnik built his fortune in Russia’s energy and petrochemical sectors and has long served as a conduit through which Kremlin-linked money and influence have flowed into Western institutions and elite networks. That overlap ties Trump’s principal emissary to the same financial ecosystem positioned to benefit from sanctions erosion and links the negotiation channel directly to Russian elites advancing Moscow’s interests.

This alignment did not happen by accident. Last April, I reported that Putin instructed senior Russian businessmen and companies to identify lucrative, high-profile commercial opportunities to dangle in front of Trump and his inner circle. Those instructions included renewed efforts to revive Trump Tower Moscow alongside energy, rare-earth, and Arctic development projects. The goal was straightforward: use personal financial incentives to accelerate sanctions erosion without requiring Russia to halt its genocidal war.

Following that directive, Witkoff began traveling to Russia with unusual frequency, often on a near-monthly basis, outside traditional diplomatic channels. These visits coincided with the rollout of Kremlin-drafted frameworks aimed at securing U.S. acceptance of Russia’s territorial gains while offering future economic access as an inducement.

Bloomberg later published transcripts of intercepted calls between Witkoff, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov, and Kirill Dmitriev—Putin’s money bag, messenger, and the central coordinator of Russia’s financial outreach to Trump’s orbit. In those conversations, Witkoff discussed how Moscow should present its proposals to appeal to Trump personally and treat Russian demands as the starting point for discussion. This resulted in a 28-point Ukraine surrender plan written in Moscow and pitched by Trump as his own.

Then there is Dmitriev’s laughable $14 trillion pitch for joint projects. The figure bears no relationship to reality or Russia’s actual economic capacity—it exceeds the country’s annual GDP many times over and eclipses all foreign investment Russia has attracted in decades. It’s a spectacle meant to flatter Trump, entice early movers, and normalize sanctions relief while Russia continues its genocidal war.

The Beach–Novatek agreement fits squarely into this sequence. Whether the project ultimately proceeds is beside the point. Its existence alone signals that actors close to Trump believe enforcement no longer poses a serious obstacle—and that moving early on sanctioned Russian energy assets now carries very limited risk.

That belief was reinforced publicly last year when Trump shamefully rolled out a red carpet in Alaska for Putin—a war criminal under an international arrest warrant for the mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children. Despite how legacy media mischaracterized the meeting, it had nothing to do with diplomacy or ending Russia’s genocidal war. It was Trump’s signal to Moscow and to markets that isolation was ending and business was back on the table. The exact details of what was discussed behind closed doors remain unknown, but what is clear is that the meeting provided political cover for precisely the kind of deal now coming to light.

And this raises unavoidable questions. How many more business deals are already in the works but not yet public? How many intermediaries are testing the same boundaries? And critically important, is Gentry Beach acting as a front for the Trump family?