US and Russia have been holding peace talks over Ukraine for months | War Ukraine and Russia

The talks were about possibilities to lay a foundation for peace negotiations, according to multiple sources from the NBC news channel. For example, Lavrov is said to have spent hours talking to the group about Ukraine when he visited the United Nations in New York in April. The US government was aware of the activities of the informal “talk group” but did not direct it, according to NBC.

One of the difficult topics was what to do with Ukrainian territory that has fallen into the hands of pro-Russian Ukrainians or the Russian armed forces since 2014. In the eastern region of Donbass, many people have wanted nothing to do with the pro-Western central government in Kiev since 2014. And on the Crimean peninsula, a large majority is ethnically Russian.

Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky says he does not want to negotiate until all Ukrainian territory from early 2014 has been recaptured. But according to NBC, there are more and more military and policymakers in Washington who don’t see that as realistic. They believe there are Ukrainian territories that Zelensky cannot recapture. They hope for negotiations after Zelensky’s counter-offensive, which so far has not yielded much. There should be a ceasefire and a demilitarized zone.

Among the members of the discussion group is said to be former diplomat Richard Haass, who ran the Council on Foreign Relations think tank from 2003 to this month. Two other leaders of the think tank are also said to have belonged to the secret support groups. They previously worked in the White House and the State Department. Their main intention has been to keep communication open with the Russian government, according to NBC sources. The three named individuals from the think tank have declined to comment.

The news channel does not know how often these informal conversations have taken place. In one case, at least one member of the group is said to have gone to Moscow for talks with Russian leaders of think tanks or research institutes, among others. NBC sources declined to name any Russians for security reasons. The White House and the Russian embassy in Washington had no comment.

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There was also contact between Russia and the US about the Wagner Rebellion. Director William Burns of the American intelligence service CIA called Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the Russian intelligence service SVR, about this last week. This is reported by the American newspapers ‘The New York Times’ and ‘The Wall Street Journal’. During the conversation, Burns allegedly assured the Kremlin that the United States played no part in the short-lived mutiny.

This is the highest contact between the US and Russia since the uprising. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the former ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, rebelled against the Russian defense summit a week ago. Prigozhin’s mercenary army, the Wagner Group, was moving towards Moscow. The mutiny was stopped after mediation by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. The Wagner boss is not being prosecuted and has since fled to Belarus.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after the mutiny that his country is investigating whether Western authorities had anything to do with it. US President Joe Biden already emphasized on Monday that the US and its allies were not involved.

According to The Washington Post, Burns also recently traveled to Ukraine for a secret meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It is not known exactly when the visit took place, but it would have been prior to the Wagner Rebellion.