Here’s how oligarchs play their game of geopolitical three-card monte. They attract attention by promising the moon. Then they hide their real motivations in a duplicitous shuffle of the cards. The ensuing action is a razzle-dazzle of distraction. In the end, the oligarchs win, and everyone else loses.On the Russian side, oligarch-in-chief Vladimir Putin talks about this territory and that territory. Sure, he wants Russia to colonise more land in Ukraine. But the territory is less important than his conception of an enlarged Russian ethno-space that crowds out the European Union and NATO by asserting an illiberal politics, a petrostate oligarchy, and superpower ambitions. The land is but a means to another end.On the American side, Donald Trump talks about this peace and that ceasefire. Sure, he wants to get his much-coveted Nobel Peace Prize. But what he and his grifter-negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, really want to secure is a piece of the billions of dollars in Russian assets frozen in accounts in Europe and a cut of the profits from U.S.-Russian commercial deals once Russia has been welcomed back into the global economy. Any peace deal is but a means to that lucrative end.On the Ukrainian side, Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration talks about defending this territory and that territory. Sure, they’ve wanted to kick out the Russian occupiers ever since 2014. But in a situation where the war has clipped the wings of so many oligarchs, a group of high-level officials has also been involved in a $100 million kickback scheme that shovelled money into their own pockets at the expense of the Ukrainian energy sector and the war effort more generally. Collective sacrifice was but a means to achieve their personal ends.For some observers, the war in Ukraine is not so much a battle over territory but an opportunity for the military-industrial complex to make money. It’s certainly useful to root around beneath the rhetoric of the leaders to uncover institutional motivations. However much contractors are indeed profiting, the conflict can’t be explained with such simplistic cynicism.So, for instance, the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to advance a kind of global Putinism. Ukraine fought back to avoid the fate of the colonised: death, imprisonment, forced assimilation. In the United States, military assistance for Ukraine was a substitute for direct intervention, which, under Trump, has given way to an all-out effort to walk the United States back from even this limited support.To understand Trump’s latest “peace proposal,” meanwhile, a more sophisticated cynicism is required, beginning with a focus on the negotiators. The deal was initially worked out not by diplomats, like Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, but through a set of conversations between billionaire envoy Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, an economist in charge of Putin’s slush fund, which masquerades as a sovereign wealth account.The initial 28-point plan that emerged from these discussions looked like a set of Kremlin talking points whose sharpest edges have been subsequently filed down through negotiations with Ukraine. Beneath the back-and-forth over territorial considerations and security guarantees, the proposal offers an opportunity for oligarchs in Russia and the United States to engage in large-scale profiteering. Ukraine, meanwhile, is the patsy that keeps trying to avoid losing at this high-level game of three-card monte.Why now?The Trump administration timed its current deal to coincide with a political scandal upending the Ukrainian government. Ten days before Trump’s 28-point plan was unveiled, Ukraine’s anti-corruption bureaus revealed one of the largest cases of graft in the country’s history.In on the deal were former Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov and two energy ministers, German Halushchenko and Svitlana Hrynchuk, along with Timur Mindich, a friend and former business associate of Zelensky. Together, they rigged contracts with the state’s nuclear energy company to skim off 10-15 percent for themselves. That amounted to at least $100 million, some of which might even have ended up in Russia. (The most recent casualty of what has been called Mindichgate is Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, who was fired over the weekend after his house was raided.)With Ukraine weakened by this scandal, the White House perhaps thought that it was the perfect time to force Zelensky to accept Russia’s terms. But there were other reasons for the timing of the proposal.For the last several months, the European Union has been readying a large economic assistance package for Ukraine totalling $140 billion. This “reparation loan” is designed to send Ukraine money from the Russian funds frozen in Europe, mostly in Belgium. Ukraine wouldn’t have to pay the loan back unless it received a commensurate sum in reparations from Russia after the conclusion of the conflict.There’s only one problem with this plan: Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever. The Flemish nationalist has refused to greenlight the proposal, citing concerns about Russian retaliation. The EU is scrambling to identify ways of assuaging De Wever, but it hasn’t been easy. The European Central Bank this week announced that it won’t act as a lender of last resort.Enter Donald Trump. Point 14 of his 28-point proposal states:$100 billion in frozen Russian assets will be invested in US-led efforts to rebuild and invest in Ukraine; The US will receive 50% of the profits from this venture. Europe will add $100 billion to increase the amount of investment available for Ukraine’s reconstruction. Frozen European funds will be unfrozen. The remainder of the frozen Russian funds will be invested in a separate US-Russian investment vehicle that will implement joint projects in specific areas. This fund will be aimed at strengthening relations and increasing common interests to create a strong incentive not to return to conflict.In other words, Trump is angling to steal those funds from the Europeans under the guise of peacemaking. And the United States gets 50 percent of the profits from the reconstruction of Ukraine? Talk about carpetbagging…On top of that, Trump wants to pull a Kissinger. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was the key player in opening up China to the West during the Nixon years. Once out of the office, he and his fellow consultants traded on their contacts and experience to make millions in facilitating business with China. Bringing Russia back into the global economy, as Trump wants to do, would produce a similar windfall for well-placed American oligarchs.Another reason for the timing of the proposal was the incremental territorial advances Russia has been making in the Donbas, particularly around the city of Pokrovsk. Ukraine is already giving up land on the battlefield, so the negotiators reasoned that the country would likely be more amenable to getting something for that territory at the bargaining table. But according to the logic of war, the more amenable Ukraine becomes, the less Russia wants to compromise.Why not PutinVladimir Putin is convinced—or, at least, he is busy convincing the Russian public—that his military is going from success to success in the Donbas and that the Ukrainian army is on the verge of collapse. This week, Russia announced that it had finally seized Pokrovsk, a key node in the Ukrainian system of defences in the Donbas. If they take Pokrovsk, the Russian military could have an easier time going after other “fortress cities” in the near vicinity.On the other hand, if it loses Pokrovsk, Ukraine will simply fall back and set up another defensive perimeter. At their current pace, Russian forces wouldn’t take over all of the Donbas before August 2027. That’s nearly two years of Russian casualties, lost or destroyed Russian weaponry, and money expended.Putin nevertheless feels that he has time on his side. Compared to Ukraine, he has more troops, more weapons, and a larger economy. He also has a sophisticated authoritarian political apparatus that quashes dissent, controls the flow of information, and mobilises the billions of petrodollars coming in from oil and gas sales to maintain the war effort and a threadbare social welfare state.Putin, in other words, is in no rush to negotiate. The inconclusive end to the latest five-hour discussions in Moscow between the Russian team and the Witkoff-Kushner combo underscores that point.Among the many sticking points in the current “peace” proposal, Russia has been fixated on the size of the Ukrainian army. Although he was the one to invade Ukraine, Putin somehow worries that Ukraine is the country that will defy international law in the future to invade Russia. Of course, Ukraine already did invade Russia—the August 2024 incursion into Kursk—but it couldn’t even hold onto that modest amount of territory. Nevertheless, Putin wants to substantially reduce the Ukrainian army to one-tenth its current size. The initial Trump proposal put this number at 600,000, but Ukraine has reportedly managed to negotiate this up to 800,000, not far from Ukraine’s current troop strength but very distant from Putin’s preferred figure.Another sticking point is NATO membership for Ukraine. Putin wants it off the table, but the Ukrainian constitution compels the country to pursue membership. According to one potential workaround, Ukraine wouldn’t have to renounce its NATO ambitions, but its way would be blocked by negotiations among other parties.Since actual membership in NATO for Ukraine would not be an immediate prospect in any event, a more important question revolves around security guarantees. Russia obviously rips up paper assurances, so the best security guarantee would be a sufficient Ukrainian deterrent against future Russian aggression. But Russia doesn’t want an angry neighbour with a large army, long-range missiles, and powerful countries committed to coming to its defence.The current state of the Russian economy would push any reasonable leader to the negotiating table. The combination of international sanctions, Ukrainian drone strikes on energy infrastructure, and the drain of the war on the workforce has pushed the Russian economy into stagnation, with high inflation and interest rates. But Putin believes that a little economic pain—endured by the Russian masses, not the Russian oligarchs—is a small price to pay to achieve his maximalist aims of turning Ukraine into a fractured and defenseless entity that poses no threat to Russia, has no likelihood of joining NATO or the EU, and is ripe for a pro-Russian swing, like the one that has happened in Georgia.Grand Theft AutoSteal small, and you end up in jail. Steal big, and you end up at the top of the stock exchange.The amount of money involved in the Ukrainian corruption scandal, $100 million split at least eight ways, is peanuts compared to the looting associated with Russian and American oligarchs. Putin, for instance, has a mega-yacht that alone is reportedly worth $100 million, part of a fortune that could go as high as $200 billion. Steve Witkoff has a personal fortune of around $2 billion, while Jared Kushner is now a billionaire thanks to the Gulf interests he cultivated during Trump’s first term. Donald Trump, who was facing economic ruin before his nomination to run again for president in 2024, has spent his first year in office grabbing money left and right to the tune of at least $3.4 billion.Compared to this “official corruption” of Russia and the United States, Ukraine looks like a model of rectitude and transparency. Not only does the country have effective anti-corruption bureaus, but it has a public that will come out onto the streets to defend those institutions.The war has certainly increased the flow of money to certain U.S. defence contractors. But the real beneficiaries of the war have been Russian oligarchs. According to the Centre for Economic Policy Research, “the number of Russian billionaires went up since the start of the war, while billionaires under Western sanctions got wealthier on average too”—through the takeover of foreign assets, the substitution of domestic production for imports, and the profits made in key industries like fertiliser and oil.Ukrainian oligarchs, meanwhile, have lost out. For example, the country’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, lost his multi-billion-dollar steel plant in Mariupol thanks to the Russian bombing and occupation of that city. In 2024, the number of billionaires in the country dropped from 10 to two.It is the golden rule of oligarchy that the rich are in a position to get richer during any major shift in politics, economics, or war. Any peace deal will mean enormous profits for Russian oligarchs freed from sanctions and once again able to surf the global economy. Kushner imagines that he can get from Russia what he has already gotten from his Middle East deals. And Trump wants his own cut as well, a payout for befriending a war criminal who pretends to be a world leader.Oligarchs on the Russian and U.S. side are orchestrating this diktat of a “peace” deal. But don’t let all the money involved—or the intensity of the diplomatic shuffle—distract from the essential issue at play: Russia projecting its suzerainty and Ukraine protecting its sovereignty.This piece was originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus.