On Tuesday, Bloomberg leaked a series of phone calls between US President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov, in which Witkoff coached Ushakov on how to secure Trump’s support for a 28-point plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. On Wednesday, the Kremlin accused Bloomberg of hybrid warfare.
As per Reuters, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said “some media organizations were being used as part of a hybrid information war waged by European countries against Russia.”
Ushakov did not initially dispute the authenticity of the recordings, telling Russian state media that “someone leaks, someone listens in. But not us.” However, he later said that some of the leaks “were fake,” according to Politico.
Ushakov admitted holding some conversations with Witkoff over WhatsApp (which is banned as “extremist” in Russia), suggesting that it must have been hacked – a claim which its parent company denies.
His account clashes with that of Kirill Dmitriev, who the recordings confirm was involved in drafting the 28-point plan, and who dismissed all of the recordings as “fake” in a one-word post on X.
Also on Wednesday, Russian newspaper Kommersant ran an article under the title “Who Framed Steve Witkoff?”, in which Ushakov likens Witkoff to former US Special Representative Michael Flynn, who resigned after the content of his phone calls with the then Russian ambassador to the US leaked in the US media.
“Witkoff certainly wasn’t interested [in leaking their phone calls],” he told Kommersant. “Remember the case with Michael Flynn? The same thing could have happened here. When someone wants to do something.”
“That is, Yuri Ushakov made it clear that Steve Witkoff may have ill-wishers in the White House,” the Kommersant journalist writes of this part of their interview.
In the recordings, Witkoff can be heard telling Ushakov that he knows what it will take to get a deal done – “Donetsk” – and that he believes Trump will give him “a lot of space and discretion to get to the deal.” Trump has defended him, despite outrage from some within his own Republican party.
The Kremlin’s immediate response to the events of the last 24 hours was to show it has not been shaken by the scandal – rejecting any significant revisions to the original 28-point plan, which would see Ukraine forswear NATO membership, concede its occupied territories, and limit the size of its armed forces.
“There can be no question of any concessions or any surrender of our approaches to those key moments of solving the tasks facing us,” Ryabkov told Russian state media outlet TASS on Wednesday afternoon.
Ryabkov’s claim that European countries are waging a “hybrid information war” against Russia is the latest of many comments from the Kremlin which portray Ukraine’s European allies, who sent diplomats to Geneva to help revise the 28-point plan over the weekend, as seeking to prevent peace.
However, Vice-President of the European Commission Kaja Kallas said on Wednesday that “the threat posed by Russia extends beyond Ukraine,” which means that Europe and NATO must be included in negotiations.
“Decisions concerning the EU and NATO can be made only by the members of the European Union and NATO, and nobody else,” she added.