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🇺🇦 🇺🇲 The confrontation inside Trump's Ukraine peace negotiations is now coming into focus. Le Monde reports that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner spent nearly three hours pitching Ukraine's presidential chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, a postwar economic arrangement built around restoring Russian oil and gas flows to Europe through Ukrainian pipelines. The meeting took place on October 9 at the Shell Bay golf club in Florida. Witkoff presented the proposal as a regional prosperity plan: Ukraine would collect transit revenues, Europe would receive cheaper energy, and Russia would regain access to commercial routes disrupted by the war. Budanov saw something fundamentally different. According to a witness cited by Le Monde, he objected that the arrangement would recreate Ukraine's dependence on Moscow. “Our model is not Belarus, but Poland!” he reportedly replied. The meeting was interrupted, and Budanov called Zelensky. When talks resumed, news arrived that Trump had announced a separate agreement with Putin involving Russian diesel. Le Monde reports that an irritated Witkoff then demanded that the Ukrainians accept the arrangement and stop striking Russian oil refineries, arguing that the attacks endangered the wider world. A source familiar with the Ukrainian delegation described its members as exceptionally distressed by the encounter. The account adds a revealing dimension to the commercial negotiations we have been tracking. The proposed Lukoil asset sale, Novatek's involvement in an Alaska LNG venture, the broader US-Russia list of business opportunities reported by the Financial Times, and now the proposed restoration of Russian energy transit through Ukraine all point to the prominence of energy deals in Washington's diplomatic approach. These are separate proposals, with different participants and legal circumstances. But Le Monde's reporting exposes the strategic disagreement underlying them. For Witkoff, restoring commercial flows appears to be part of the mechanism for producing a peace settlement. For Budanov, according to the account, those same flows threaten to restore Moscow's economic leverage over Ukraine. The reported exchange also raises a question about sequencing: why was Kyiv being pressed to stop attacking Russian refineries while Russia continued striking Ukrainian energy infrastructure? Le Monde's reconstruction relies on accounts of a private meeting. The reported exchanges have not been independently confirmed by the participants. Source: Le Monde