Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has stated that the Russian businessman who came to Kyiv to meet him was Roman Abramovich. He said this in an interview with Sky News.
“He came to Kyiv. He said: ‘I have a message directly for you, and I want to receive a message from you to pass on to Putin.’ But he said it had to be done quietly, without any publicity. I replied: ‘That’s your choice. For us it makes no difference, whether it’s public or not,'” the Ukrainian president recounted. According to Zelensky, Abramovich wanted to understand what concessions Kyiv was prepared to make in the peace negotiations. In response, the Ukrainian president made clear that Ukraine has no intention of ceding the Donbas to Russia.
“That was the key message. I said we would not leave, that we would not hand you victory in that way,” Zelensky said. The two sides also discussed the compromises they would, in principle, be willing to make. According to the president, for Kyiv compromises are possible only after a ceasefire.
The fact that it was specifically Abramovich who travelled to Kyiv, and that Zelensky had asked him to convey a proposal for a meeting to Putin, had previously been reported by the Financial Times, citing four well-informed sources. The businessman has acted as an intermediary between Kyiv and Moscow since the very start of the full-scale war. In 2022, the FT described him as a “trusted figure” of Putin’s, and Zelensky at the time asked the United States to delay imposing sanctions on him. According to the paper’s sources from the entrepreneur’s circle, he remains involved in the negotiation process, although his role has become less visible.
Two senior Ukrainian officials told the FT that the proposal for a meeting conveyed in May through Abramovich resembled, in its content, the open letter Zelensky addressed to Putin that was published on the evening of 4 June. The tone of the May message, however, was, in their words, “less hostile.”
It was Putin himself who first publicly mentioned the visit of this unnamed businessman to Zelensky — on 5 June, during the plenary session of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum. He did not name the entrepreneur. According to the Russian president, about three weeks earlier the businessman had informed him that he had received an invitation to visit Kyiv. He then went to a meeting with Zelensky at his residence and, upon returning, conveyed that the Ukrainian side was proposing talks between the leaders. Putin, by his own account, replied that he had never refused a meeting but saw no point in “going round in circles.”
“It was, I believe, 21 May. And on 22 May Ukrainian forces carried out a terrible terrorist strike on a college dormitory in the Luhansk People’s Republic, where children, teenagers, perished,” Putin said. According to him, he asked the businessman what such a combination meant — a request for a meeting and, at the same time, acts of this kind. The man replied that he had no explanation, but that Kyiv was “calling him right now,” and promised to get back in touch later. After that, Putin claims, there were no further exchanges between them.
Later, an aide to the Russian president, Yuri Ushakov, confirmed that the person who had travelled to Kyiv was “a fairly major businessman” whom “many people know,” though he too declined to give a name. And on 6 June the Verkhovna Rada deputy Oleksiy Goncharenko, citing his own sources, was the first to state explicitly that it was Abramovich. Now Zelensky himself has confirmed it.
