On November 25, Bloomberg published an explosive report containing transcripts of two phone calls: one between top Kremlin advisers Yuri Ushakov and Kirill Dmitriev, and another between Ushakov and U.S. presidential special envoy Steve Witkoff. The leak revealed that Witkoff coached Ushakov on how to communicate with Trump, while Dmitriev provided Washington with a list of Russia’s conditions for initiating a peace settlement with Ukraine. Meduza tackles the two biggest questions in this story: What did we learn from the transcripts? And who could have leaked them?

What did we learn from these leaked transcripts?

Witkoff coached the Kremlin on how to speak with Trump

In his conversation with Yuri Ushakov, Steve Witkoff, on his own initiative, offered his interlocutor a “recommendation.”

• Witkoff urged Ushakov to tell Putin to congratulate Trump on achieving a peace agreement between Israel and Hamas. He also suggested that Putin express his respect for Trump “as a man of peace” and convey Moscow’s support for the Gaza settlement.
• Witkoff then shared with Ushakov the idea that an agreement based on the same model could be developed to resolve the Russian–Ukrainian war. He recommended that Putin tell Trump: “You know, Steve and Yuri discussed a very similar 20-point plan to peace and that could be something that we think might move the needle a little bit, we’re open to those sorts of things — to explore what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done.” Witkoff acknowledged that the negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv still face disagreements about control over the entire Donetsk region and “maybe a land swap somewhere,” but he urged a “more hopeful” dialogue going forward.
• At the end of the call, Witkoff proposed a phone call directly with Putin before Volodymyr Zelensky’s upcoming visit to the White House. Two days later, Trump and Putin spoke on the phone — a conversation that reportedly influenced the U.S. president’s decision to abandon plans to supply Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Witkoff’s cordial, even friendly demeanor in a phone call with a senior Kremlin official is not, in itself, anything new. Trump’s special envoy has made similar gestures of respect toward Putin throughout this year’s negotiations, and he hasn’t concealed his close contacts with Kirill Dmitriev. In May, Witkoff even attended negotiations at the Kremlin without an interpreter, drawing sharp criticism for breaching diplomatic protocols. His advice on speaking to Donald Trump, moreover, wasn’t surprising and was likely obvious to Ushakov anyway. After the Gaza settlement, foreign leaders, including Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Emmanuel Macron, and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, all praised Trump for his diplomatic feat.

The more problematic moment in the Witkoff–Ushakov transcript is Witkoff’s facilitation of a Trump–Putin phone call just ahead of Zelensky’s White House visit. Speaking to Ushakov, Witkoff didn’t explain the urgency for a conversation between the presidents, making it impossible to assert with any certainty that he deliberately intended to undermine a rapprochement between Washington and Kyiv. It’s also unclear whether the recommendation was Witkoff’s own initiative or a coordinated signal from the Trump administration to the Kremlin.

At the time of Witkoff’s call with Ushakov, Trump was publicly wavering over whether to supply Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine and was unusually harsh in his criticism of Putin. But we don’t know whether Trump had truly shifted his position or was merely provoking the Russian leader to soften his negotiating demands. In the first scenario, Witkoff’s involvement in arranging the call could be seen as “tripping up Ukraine” (more on that below). On the other hand, even such a move is consistent with Witkoff’s bureaucratic profile: from the very beginning of the negotiating process, he has advocated a more dovish approach toward Moscow, rejecting escalations of arms deliveries to Kyiv aimed at forcing the Kremlin into peace on the battlefield.

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The Kremlin shared its version of a peace plan with the White House

This follows directly from Bloomberg’s transcript of the conversation between Yuri Ushakov and Kirill Dmitriev.

• Ushakov tells his interlocutor that he has “sent everything there” and will discuss it further the next day. Dmitriev calls this “a really good way forward.”
• Ushakov then asks Dmitriev whether the Russian side needs to state “the maximum,” otherwise, “what’s the point of passing anything on?” In response, Dmitriev proposes drafting “this paper from our position” and promises to share it “informally, making it clear that it’s all informal.” “And let them do like their own,” he added. “I don’t think they’ll take exactly our version, but at least it’ll be as close to it as possible.”
• Ushakov, in turn, expresses concern that Washington “might not take [it] and say that it was agreed with us.” Dmitriev tries to reassure him, but Ushakov repeats: “They might twist it later, that’s all. There is that risk.”
• In conclusion, Dmitriev says that Ushakov can “talk later with Steve about this paper.”

The final line of that exchange strongly suggests that Putin’s advisers were discussing the Russian version of a peace plan. It’s unclear what proposals it contained or how closely it resembled the 28-point plan drafted by the White House that later leaked to the press. However, there is indirect evidence that Trump’s team (most likely Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner) relied heavily on the Kremlin’s “informal paper”:

• On November 20, Witkoff posted — and then immediately deleted — a cryptic tweet: “He must have gotten this from K.” Journalists speculate that Witkoff was referring to Axios reporter Barak Ravid (who first disclosed the White House’s 28-point peace plan) and that “K.” stood for Kirill Dmitriev. The very act of orchestrating such a leak would strongly suggest that the Kremlin was intent on pushing through a version of the agreement favorable to its own interests. If the leak were orchestrated, it would presumably indicate that the Kremlin was trying to force through a deal that benefits Moscow.
• On November 21, Guardian journalist Luke Harding noted that the peace plan’s text contains “clunky passive constructions in English” that “appear to have been originally written in Russian.”
• On November 22, Michael Rounds, a Republican senator from South Dakota, stated at a briefing that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had told members of Congress in a phone conversation that the 28 points were not a U.S. plan but a proposal that the White House had received from negotiators. Rubio immediately refuted the senator’s claims, insisting that Washington wrote the peace plan “based on input from the Russian side” and “previous and ongoing input from Ukraine.”
• On November 26, three separate Reuters sources confirmed that the 28-point peace plan was based on proposals from Moscow received in October, after Trump’s meeting with Zelensky at the White House. Reuters also confirmed The Wall Street Journal’s reporting that the plan was drafted by Kushner and Witkoff with Dmitriev’s participation.

Phrases from Ushakov’s conversation with Dmitriev fit easily into this context. It seems likely that the Trump administration used the Kremlin’s “informal paper” as a lodestar for the U.S. plan, modeling it as closely as possible on Russian demands. Still, this has not prevented Washington in recent days from claiming progress in negotiations with Kyiv on acceptable conditions for ending the war.

Related reading

• Leaked calls between Steve Witkoff and Putin’s advisers raise new questions about Trump’s ‘peace plan.’ Here’s how the world is reacting.

Who could have leaked Ushakov’s conversations to journalists, and how were these recordings possible at all?

We don’t know. Bloomberg hasn’t said peep about its sources.

Yuri Ushakov has suggested that someone might have “listened in” on his WhatsApp conversations. (The Kremlin’s own spokesman has evaded questions about WhatsApp’s use in Russia.) This theory raises mainly technical questions. As investigative journalist Andrei Zakharov reminded readers on his Telegram channel, WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption by default, which should prevent anyone from eavesdropping on two-way conversations. There is no clear evidence that intelligence agencies or hackers have managed to bypass this protection. Zakharov proposed that Ushakov’s phone might have been infected with spyware similar to Pegasus, or that Putin’s adviser was, in fact, speaking on a regular cellular line: “In the latter case, the wiretap could have been conducted either by the FSB through the interception interface SORM or by any other powerful intelligence agency in the world.”

It’s hard to say who could be behind the leak, given that motives exist on all sides of the Russian–Ukrainian war.

Maybe the U.S. did it?

The leak clearly disadvantages Witkoff and members of his camp, dealing a serious blow to the special envoy’s reputation. If the recordings came from within the White House, suspicion would fall on Witkoff’s adversaries in the Trump administration, namely, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is generally more hostile to the Kremlin. It’s possible that this White House faction engineered the leak to sabotage the 28-point peace plan because it was too pro-Russian.

Speaking to the newspaper Kommersant, Ushakov appeared to hint at this, as well, recalling the Michael Flynn case. Flynn is the retired American general who, in 2017, served just two weeks as Trump’s national security advisor before resigning after the U.S. Justice Department accused him of secretly discussing anti-Russian sanctions with Russia’s then-ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak. The contents of those conversations were revealed by U.S. intelligence services. At that time, however, U.S. intelligence agencies were considerably less loyal to President Trump than they are today — and the United States was engulfed in scandal over suspicions that the Kremlin had interfered in the 2016 presidential election and helped Trump win.

Maybe Russia did it?

Just a few hours before Bloomberg published its report, Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s powerful chief of staff, confirmed to Axios that Washington and Kyiv had “agreed in principle on most aspects of the plan” and that Zelensky might visit the United States as soon as Thanksgiving to sign the document. Such a development would have narrowed Putin’s room for maneuver in the negotiations and risked isolating Moscow as the deal’s lone opponent. That, in turn, could have prompted yet another mood swing from Trump, possibly leading to even tougher sanctions, increased arms deliveries to Kyiv, and other outcomes unpleasant for Moscow.

However, if Moscow did initiate the leak, hoping to kill the 28-point plan, the effort has failed — at least so far. Trump has stood by Witkoff, and the negotiation process continues.

It could have been Ukraine.

Publicly, Kyiv has said it’s made progress on developing the U.S. peace plan, condensing its original 28 points to just 22, and claimed that a compromise text is imminent. If these reports are true, it would make little sense for Ukraine to leak recordings that might damage the negotiations. On the other hand, it’s plausible that the Zelensky administration is privately unhappy with the White House’s accommodating stance toward Moscow and seeks to undermine officials like Witkoff. Additionally, if the negotiations with the Trump administration are not going as well as Kyiv advertises, this would also create incentives to sabotage the process.

Still, despite the growing capabilities of Ukraine’s intelligence services since February 24, 2022, it is unclear whether Kyiv has the technical capacity to intercept conversations between Kremlin officials and U.S. special envoys.

Or maybe it was the Europeans?

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s European allies had the motive and means to leak the Ushakov calls. E.U. leaders have denounced several of the plan’s original 28 points and signaled dissatisfaction at being excluded from Washington’s negotiations. Additionally, European intelligence services most likely possess the toolkit needed to eavesdrop on sensitive conversations. However, the E.U. has unwaveringly backed Ukraine’s position, and Kyiv reported productive talks with the White House in the days before Bloomberg published the transcripts. Ultimately, given these commitments, there’s little reason to believe that Europe would torpedo this process for its own interests.