U.S. Officials Kept in the Dark About Negotiations with Russia

U.S. officials have not always been aware of the details regarding the negotiations between U.S. presidential envoy Steve Wittecoff and Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. This was reported by The Wall Street Journal, citing its sources.

According to WSJ's interlocutors, the discussions between Kirill Dmitriev and Steve Wittecoff lasted for nine months. Moreover, officials from the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control often learned the details of these meetings from their British counterparts.

On the eve of the summit between Russia and the U.S. in Alaska, Kirill Dmitriev and Steve Wittecoff discussed the potential exchange of prisoners, the sources told WSJ. They indicated that the CIA and the U.S. State Department were not fully informed about the negotiations regarding the exchange.

On November 26, Bloomberg released two transcripts of phone conversations between U.S. and Russian representatives. The agency claims that one of them is a recording of the conversation between Steve Wittecoff and Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov, while the second is between Kirill Dmitriev and Ushakov. In an interview with Kommersant, the Russian presidential aide stated that a leak was unlikely to occur among the participants of the conversation. For his part, Dmitriev labeled the transcript of his conversation with Yuri Ushakov as fake.