Ukrainian President Zelensky invited former Chelsea FC football club owner Roman Abramovich to Kiev last month in a failed attempt to persuade Vladimir Putin to hold direct peace talks, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.
Zelensky asked Abramovich on May 21 to convey a message to the Russian president that he was willing to meet for what would be their first bilateral summit, more than four years after Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the people said.
Ukraine wanted to show its seriousness about holding direct peace talks with Russia, even at a time when the US, which has sought to broker a ceasefire, is distracted by the war in the Middle East, they added.
Kiev hopes that its success in halting Russia's offensive - which has slowed significantly in recent months as its forces suffer casualties - will
– and inflicting damage through long-range airstrikes deep behind enemy lines will increase the momentum for an immediate ceasefire.
But Putin remains confident that Russia's superior resources will eventually consume Ukraine's resistance and has shown no interest in meeting with Zelensky.
The involvement of the sanctioned billionaire has not been previously reported.
Putin said last Friday that he met with "one of the representatives of our business circles" and "this, let's call him, colleague" after his trip to Kiev, and told him that he saw no point in meeting with Zelensky.
"The only sense in this is for the Ukrainians to stop the advance of our armed forces," Putin told an audience at Russia's main economic conference in St. Petersburg.
The Ukrainian president's office declined to comment.
The Kremlin and a spokesman for Abramovich did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Abramovich, who Putin said was not acting in any official capacity, has helped mediate talks between Russia and Ukraine since the early weeks of the war in 2022.
The oligarch was involved in brokering a round of negotiations in Istanbul in March of that year, although the efforts failed. Abramovich also helped secure a deal to guarantee Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea later that year.
Although Abramovich's role has become less prominent since Russia began negotiating directly with the US last year, he remains involved in prisoner exchanges and other bilateral talks with Ukraine, including aspects of a stalled US-led peace plan last year, according to people close to him.
"He is needed because he is the only Russian they tolerate. He gets along with everyone," one of the people said.
Zelensky has continued to push for a summit with Putin, even as US efforts to secure a peace deal have stalled.
"I don't think anything substantial will happen until the end of the summer," said a person close to Zelensky, adding that Washington was focused on Iran and that Moscow had not yet realized that it would not be able to occupy the remainder of Ukraine's eastern Donbas region this summer.
The Ukrainian leader, according to Abramovich, "thinks he can solve everything through the magic of his personal charisma at a leaders' meeting," said another person close to the oligarch.
Two senior Ukrainian officials described the message Zelensky sent through Abramovich as similar to the open letter to Putin, which he published on his presidential website on Thursday, which provoked an angry response from Moscow. One of the officials said the tone of the message had been less antagonistic than that of the public note.
In the letter, Zelensky offered a ceasefire and direct, one-on-one peace talks, while mocking Putin for his battlefield failures and Ukraine's long-range drone attacks on St. Petersburg during his annual economic conference in his hometown. The Ukrainian leader also cited Russia's dependence on North Korea and its growing reliance on China to sustain the war.
"You won't have enough money or political capital to continue buying the loyalty of Russians as you have done for the past 26 years," Zelensky told Putin in the letter.
But Putin said on Friday that the letter was "somewhat rude" and written "to create a condition under which it is practically impossible to hold any kind of personal meeting."
Putin also said that a Ukrainian drone attack on a teachers' college in the Russian-controlled town of Starobilsk, which killed 21 people a day after the meeting with Abramovich, showed that Zelensky was not serious about seeking peace.
EU countries are discussing the appointment of an envoy who could hold talks with Putin on behalf of the continent. But Putin has repeatedly played down the candidacy of former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, whose closeness to Moscow makes him unacceptable to the bloc from the start, and has promptly rejected most other potential candidates.
"Honestly, I just don't see and don't understand how Russia can trust people who have been talking about the need to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia for years?" Putin said on Thursday. He said Russia remains open to potential talks and said they could be discussed “at the level of foreign ministries or secret services,” appearing to rule out his personal involvement, writes FT.
