In the fall of 2022, as Washington feared that Vladimir Putin might use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, two private American citizens believed they had helped pull the world back from the brink. Connecticut lawyer Richard Conn and investment banker Bob Foresman had opened a back channel to the Kremlin through Matthias Warnig, a former Stasi officer and one of Putin’s oldest friends. Months later, the same group drafted a peace plan that Warnig says Putin read line by line. Within weeks, however, the channel was dead. Who killed it, and whether Putin ever meant a word of it, remain disputed.
To make sense of the revelations and the debate they’ve set off, The Naked Pravda spoke to Max Seddon, the Financial Times’ Moscow bureau chief, who exposed the channel last month in “The Putin Whisperers,” a cover story for FT Weekend Magazine.
Seddon explains why he sees the episode as a “wrong man” thriller and how Biden officials judged the channel against everything else crossing their desks. He discusses the dispute over whether Jake Sullivan, then the U.S. national security adviser, or Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy aide, sank it. He also covers what he has seen of the group’s draft peace plan, and why everything Putin supposedly offered rests on Warnig’s word. He takes on the camps that have claimed the story since publication. And he compares Warnig with Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy, as U.S.-mediated talks resume in Abu Dhabi.
Timestamps for this episode:
- (6:37) Why Seddon calls it a “wrong man” thriller
- (8:12) How former Biden officials judged the back channel and Matthias Warnig
- (16:40) Who killed the Platform: Sullivan or Ushakov?
- (19:50) The Gran Canaria plan and Putin’s “line by line” markup
- (23:06) Warnig’s track record as a Kremlin messenger
- (27:24) What the story does and doesn’t claim
- (31:14) Kyiv’s response and the case for negotiating in late 2022
- (34:26) Is Steve Witkoff America’s Matthias Warnig?
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