LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Over the weekend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that his intelligence services had discovered plans for $12 trillion worth of deals between the U.S. and Russia, which he said is being decided without Ukraine. This, while Russia keeps up its missile and drone attacks on Ukraine's cities and energy infrastructure in a brutally cold winter. We turn now to NPR's Eleanor Beardsley, who is in Kyiv, to hear more. Good morning, Eleanor.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Leila.
FADEL: So what is this plan Zelenskyy's talking about?
BEARDSLEY: Well, Zelenskyy says this plan was dangled in front of the Trump administration by one of Russia's key negotiators in these peace talks, Kirill Dmitriev. He's the head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund - fluent English speaker, Harvard-trained. We don't have details. The Trump administration has not commented. Neither has the Kremlin. But I spoke this morning to Pavlo Shkurenko, a specialist on the Russian economy with the think tank KSE, and here's what he said.
PAVLO SHKURENKO: It's the Russian team trying to engage the U.S. team not by talking about political points, but by creating some economic incentives for a small circle of business representatives within the U.S. administration to get the transactional side of the American team on board.
BEARDSLEY: And, you know, he called this idea pie-in-the-sky because he said the whole of Russian GDP for last year was only $2.3 trillion. But he says their negotiators understand what drives the Trump administration.
FADEL: Has there been a lot of reaction to this in Ukraine?
BEARDSLEY: Well, I thought people would be up in arms over it, but there's not much reaction. You know, Ukrainians say they're now getting used to what they call the Trump administration's betrayals. And also, Shkurenko said, it's pretty unrealistic, considering the state of the Russian economy. Here he is again.
SHKURENKO: As of now, the economic situation with Russia is such that there is no money to be made there.
BEARDSLEY: You know, he described massive stagnation, sky-high interest rates. Steelmakers are out of money. They need to be rescued by the government. Even the military-linked sectors are struggling, he said. Russia is blocked from financial markets, technology, and it's using its sovereign wealth fund more and more to plug the gap.
FADEL: OK. So if Ukrainians are not paying much attention to this potential deal between the U.S. and Russia, what are they focusing on?
BEARDSLEY: Well, they're focusing on the nightly strikes - drones and missiles - on Ukraine's cities and especially the energy grid. In this frigid weather, people have little heat and power. It's really brutal. But they're also talking about something new and possibly transformational that's happened really in the last week. At the end of January, Mykhailo Fedorov, who's Ukraine's new defense minister - he was the digital transformation minister. He's a young tech guy - he asked SpaceX and Elon Musk personally to come up with a solution so its technology is not used, quote, "for the terror and destruction of peaceful cities" because the Russian army is using Starlink satellite connections, which operate over Ukraine, to guide their drones and missiles deeper into Ukrainian territory. SpaceX responded positively. Ukrainians, who massively use Starlink - military and civilians - they have to register their terminals on what's known as a whitelist so that illegal users can be cut off. And they are being cut off in the last week.
FADEL: So what are the practical implications of that?
BEARDSLEY: Well, we were actually in the east of Ukraine this weekend, about 18 miles from the front, at a place where they were operating on frontline soldiers. They asked us not to give the location. And they confirmed that they are getting far fewer injured soldiers because the Russians are being cut from Starlink, and two surgeons we spoke with hailed that. And they said the only way to end this war is not with deals with Putin, but by shutting down the economy, tougher sanctions, stopping Russia's shadow oil fleet, tankers, etc. Here are doctors Valerii Savytskyi and Oleksiy Mykolkkiuk.
VALERII SAVYTSKYI: We must stop Russia. Their people and their country must be exhausted about the war. I think it will lead to the end of the war.
OLEKSIY MYKOLIUK: Because war is money. We're seeing it every day.
BEARDSLEY: So they say, you know, cutting Russia off economically, technologically - this is the way to end the war, not by making deals with Putin.
FADEL: That's NPR's Eleanor Beardsley. Thank you, Eleanor.
BEARDSLEY: You're welcome, Leila. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
