Earlier this month, a familiar name re-entered the ongoing push for a negotiated settlement to Russia’s war in Ukraine: sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, Abramovich approached his office with a message that the Kremlin wants “to understand what [Kyiv is] ready to do.” Zelensky said that he then told Abramovich to tell Putin he is ready to meet to discuss the war “at any time.” 

At first glance, the sudden emergence of this Abramovich backchannel is bizarre. The oligarch is, after all, hardly a disinterested mediator. For years, Abramovich served as one of the key members of Putin’s network of Russian oligarchs, known best for his purchase of Chelsea Football Club in Britain. All the while, as London said when it sanctioned Abramovich in 2022, the billionaire maintained “close links to Putin” — so much so that, after the expanded invasion of Ukraine, then-Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the “blood of the Ukrainian people is on their hands.” 

As Elisabeth Schimpfössl, an academic who has studied Russian oligarchs, told France 24, Abramovich has “never done anything that would make him look disloyal in the eyes of the Kremlin.” Leading Russian anti-corruption researcher Maria Pevchikh commented similarly, calling him “the most faithful and devoted of Putin’s oligarchs.”  

Yet if you look past the history of Abramovich’s pro-Kremlin efforts, his presence as a potential backchannel makes a certain sense. The opportunity to end the war is one that he can’t afford to pass up – perhaps quite literally. After all, at the beginning of the war, Abramovich was worth nearly $15 billion. Following the expanded invasion, however, he faced successive sanctions and asset seizures........

© The Moscow Times