Last month, says The Wall Street Journal, three powerful businessmen “hunched over a laptop” in Miami Beach in a bid to end the Ukraine war. Steve Witkoff, the billionaire developer-turned-special envoy, was hosting Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, at his waterfront estate. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had come from his nearby home on an island known as “billionaire bunker”. But the trio weren’t just talking about peace. They were secretly charting a path to bringing Russia’s $2trn economy “in from the cold” – with US businesses reaping the dividends. Dmitriev wanted American firms to tap the $300bn of Russian central bank assets frozen in Europe for joint investment projects, and to join forces with Russian rivals to mine minerals in the Arctic and travel to Mars. In Dmitriev’s telling, there were “no limits to what two longtime adversaries could achieve”.

For the Kremlin, the Miami meeting was the culmination of a years-long strategy: to convince the White House to view Russia not as a threat, but as a “land of bountiful opportunity”. Dmitriev, formerly of Goldman Sachs, found receptive partners in Witkoff and Kushner because the two men share Donald Trump’s approach to geopolitics: that “borders matter less than business”. (The US president has felt this way for decades: in the 1980s he thought he could end the Cold War by building a Trump Tower across the street from the Kremlin.) For Ukraine, the idea is that American investors would become the “commercial guarantors of peace”. A college friend of Donald Trump Jr has been in talks to buy a stake in a Russian Arctic gas project; another Trump donor is trying to buy a licence for Russia’s sabotaged Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The plan drawn up in Miami has so far come to nought. But Trump’s mantra remains the same: “make money, not war”.

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