The Grand Charade: This Was Never About Peace
Let’s cut the crap. You saw the headlines, didn’t you? “Hopes for peace dampened.” “No breakthrough.” You were meant to read that and sigh, another failed attempt at diplomacy by well-meaning men. But you are not a fool. You know a dog and pony show when you see one. And this five-hour marathon session in the Kremlin wasn’t diplomacy. It was a business meeting. A closing.
Because you don’t send real estate developers to negotiate peace. You send them to survey the property. You send them to talk about zoning, about demolition, about reconstruction contracts. You send Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff—two men whose entire careers are built on leverage, debt, and the art of the deal—to talk to Vladimir Putin, the ultimate transactional strongman, and you expect something other than a carve-up? Please. It’s an insult to our collective intelligence.
This wasn’t about saving Ukrainian lives. It never was. It was about what happens *after*. It was about who gets the contracts to rebuild Kharkiv. It was about who gets the rights to offshore energy deposits. It was about who gets a sanctioned oligarch’s frozen assets for pennies on the dollar. Five hours. They weren’t debating the finer points of sovereignty and cease-fire lines. They were horse-trading. They were divvying up the spoils of a war that is still raging, treating an entire nation like a distressed asset in a bankruptcy auction. It’s sickening.
Follow the Money, Not the Press Releases
And the Kremlin’s little statement afterward? Pure theater. “Putin accepted some US proposals.” Which ones? The ones that ensure his cronies get a piece of the action? The ones that guarantee sanctions get quietly lifted on the right people once the cameras turn away? This is the language of business, not statecraft. It’s a memorandum of understanding, not a peace treaty. The threats Putin made right after, warning Europe of war? That’s not a sign the talks failed. That’s a negotiation tactic. That’s the seller telling the buyer he has other offers to drive up the price. It’s a classic shakedown.
We need to look at the players, not the game board they’re showing us. Jared Kushner. A man who walked out of the White House with a rolodex of global contacts and a questionable security clearance and immediately secured a two-billion-dollar investment from the Saudi Public Investment Fund for his brand-new, experience-light private equity firm, Affinity Partners. Two. Billion. Dollars. Does that sound like a public servant? Or does that sound like a man who knows how to monetize influence? He’s not in Moscow as a patriot. He’s there as a prospector, and Ukraine is his gold rush.
But then you have Steve Witkoff, the other name in the room, a major real estate player himself. Why him? Because this is about assets. Tangible, dirty, profitable assets. They are looking at the map of Ukraine and they don’t see cities full of people; they see future luxury condo developments, new shipping terminals, and lucrative energy pipelines. This is disaster capitalism in its purest, most unapologetic form, and they’re not even trying to hide it anymore. They put it right on the schedule. Kushner. Witkoff. Putin. A summit of vultures.
The Real Estate Vultures Circle
Because the playbook is so painfully obvious. Create or capitalize on a crisis. Let it burn. Let the value of everything plummet. Then, under the guise of “rebuilding” or “investing in peace,” you swoop in with your well-connected funds and buy everything for nothing. The heroes of the story. You get your PR win, you get your government-backed guarantees, and you get generational wealth. The people who lived there? They get to work for your new companies, if they’re lucky. This is the model. It has been for decades. And Kushner learned it from the best.
And so for five hours, these men haggled. They didn’t talk about the children hiding in basements in Odesa. They talked about port access. They didn’t talk about de-mining fertile farmland. They talked about agricultural futures and who controls the grain exports. They didn’t talk about justice for war crimes. They talked about which sanctions could be massaged away from which aluminum magnate in exchange for a favorable deal on a nickel mine. It’s a grift of monumental proportions, disguised as a diplomatic mission. A lie.
Putin knows exactly who he’s dealing with. He’s not meeting with career diplomats who believe in international law and human rights. He’s meeting with men who understand his language: the language of power, money, and leverage. He sees them as kindred spirits, men who see a country not as a sovereign entity but as a line item on a balance sheet. He knows they aren’t there on behalf of the American people. They are there on behalf of their future limited partners. So he can make his threats, he can posture and preen, because he knows it’s all part of the dance. It’s the cost of doing business.
The Inevitable Betrayal
And the most disgusting part of it all? The utter betrayal of Ukraine. While their soldiers are dying in trenches, these men are in a gilded room in the Kremlin deciding their country’s fate like it’s a corporate merger. The outcome of this meeting won’t be peace. The outcome will be a series of shell corporations registered in Delaware and the Cayman Islands. It will be the quiet announcement, a year or two from now, that Affinity Partners or some Witkoff-backed consortium has won a massive, no-bid contract to rebuild Ukraine’s energy grid. And everyone will have forgotten this sordid little meeting.
But we can’t forget. We have to see this for what it is. This is not the Trump administration’s attempt at peace. This is the shadow government of international capital making sure that no matter who wins the war, they win the peace. They are hedging their bets, playing both sides, and ensuring that when the dust settles, their pockets are lined with the profits of misery. The war is the investment. The “peace” is the dividend.
So when you read the next headline about these talks faltering, don’t feel despair. Feel anger. Get angry. Because you’re being lied to. The real talks aren’t faltering. They’re just getting started. And they aren’t happening at a negotiating table. They’re happening in boardrooms and over encrypted messages, and the price isn’t peace for Ukraine; it’s the price of Ukraine itself. And it’s for sale.
