Mike Benter

🇺🇲 🇷🇺 SCOOP: Putin personally raised a multibillion-dollar Lukoil asset sale with Trump's own negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, at the Kremlin on September 5, as part of the same talks meant to end the Ukraine war. The NYT reports the deal is now moving forward, and the buyer group reads like a map of everyone with financial proximity to Trump's inner circle. The lead investor is Todd Boehly, a $2 million Trump donor with no oil industry background. Alongside him: Qatar's Al-Khayyat brothers, who are simultaneously partnering with Kushner and Ivanka Trump on a luxury resort in Albania, and an Abu Dhabi fund controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the UAE's national security adviser, who separately made a $2 billion crypto purchase into World Liberty Financial, Trump's own crypto company co-founded by Witkoff, that generated Trump $799 million last year. Sheikh Tahnoon is also a major stakeholder in Kushner's post-White House private equity firm. The same handful of people are buyers, business partners, and crypto investors with the Trump family, simultaneously, across three unrelated deals. Witkoff's spokeswoman says he "has no conflict of interest and no financial stake in this matter." That may be technically true of Witkoff personally. It doesn't address why the people sitting across the table from him in these Ukraine negotiations are the same people building luxury resorts and buying crypto stakes with his son and his negotiating partner's son-in-law. The strategic logic the administration is citing isn't fabricated, Lukoil's European refineries produce diesel and jet fuel that have been scarce since the Iran war drove up prices, the same shortage we've tracked affecting gas prices and midterm politics for weeks. U.S. approval would also instantly increase the assets' value by lifting sanctions, a direct financial windfall for whichever buyer group wins, timed to the exact administration deciding whether to grant that approval. The bidding history shows how contested this prize already was before politics entered it. Treasury rejected Gunvor's bid outright in November specifically over its Russia ties. Carlyle had a "nonexclusive" deal since January that simply stalled, administration approval never came, until Boehly's group, with its web of Trump-adjacent investors, emerged as the frontrunner instead. Hui Chen, a former DOJ prosecutor, called the entanglement "alarming," asking the question that actually matters: whether personal interests are shaping which bidder wins, not whether the deal itself has legitimate strategic value. @anneapplebaum 's framing is sharper than "conflict of interest" because it names the mechanism rather than just the appearance: Putin raising a deal that personally enriches people in Trump's orbit, during active negotiations over a war Russia is still waging, with US policy response visibly muted while Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure escalate. Whether or not any law is broken, Applebaum's point is that the incentive structure itself, a Russian president offering access to wealth to the exact people negotiating peace terms, doesn't require explicit payment to function as leverage. It only requires the other side to have something to gain from staying quiet. This is also the fourth story in a month tracing wealthy, Russia-or-Gulf-linked figures into Trump's immediate orbit, after Kremlev's wedding gift, the A7 sanctions-evasion network, and Sokolov's Armenia mine deal. The pattern isn't one scandal, but a recurring structure.