“Meduza” told about the role of Voloshyn and Kapkov in the negotiations with Ukraine
In addition to businessman Roman Abramovich, former head of the administration of the President of Russia Alexander Voloshin and former deputy of the State Duma and head of the Department of Culture of the Government of Moscow Sergey Kapkov took part in the negotiation process between Russia and Ukraine, which began after the Russian large-scale invasion, but is now actually frozen. “Meduza” writes about this with reference to sources.
The publication contains a number of new details about the Russian-Ukrainian negotiations, several rounds of which were held in February and March last year in Belarus and Turkey. Thus, three interlocutors of Meduza, who participated in the negotiation process, claim that both delegations initially hoped that the negotiations could stop a full-scale war. At the same time, according to another source, the Russian delegation was not authorized to conduct dialogue on its own and came to the negotiations with “ready-made pieces of paper”. “The guys who came to the negotiations (like, in principle, any Russian delegation) are considered exclusively a propaganda wagon, and not people who have the right to independently evaluate the negotiation process, change positions, conduct a dialogue,” one of the participants in the negotiations told “Meduza” groups from the Ukrainian side Mikhail Podolyak.
As a result, the official meetings of the delegations of the two countries ended, only informal contacts and private questions such as the exchange of prisoners remained.
Roman Abramovich’s participation in the negotiations, as “Meduza” writes, was the initiative of the businessman himself, who, however, secured the approval of Vladimir Putin. Acquaintances of Abramovich told the publication that the businessman entered the negotiation process not in order to achieve the lifting of sanctions – which many media outlets wrote about – but because he really hoped to help achieve peace. “Meduza” did not speak with Abramovich himself.
The negotiation process was also attended by people whom “Meduza” describes as old acquaintances of Abramovich. This is his business partner Davyd Davydovych, a Ukrainian film producer who has implemented a number of projects in Russia, Alexander Rodnyansky, as well as Alexander Voloshyn and Sergey Kapkov. Voloshin, who headed the presidential administration in 1999-2003, “talked with the Ukrainian authorities by phone”, in particular, according to sources of “Meduza”, called David Arahamia, the head of the Ukrainian delegation at the negotiations. Kapkov, known as the former director of the Moscow Gorky Park and the person responsible for the transformation of the urban environment in Moscow, as it is said, joined the negotiation process recently. He visited Kyiv and Istanbul as, as “Meduza” writes, a “proxy” of Abramovich. It is claimed that he acts as an intermediary, for example, during contacts between the Russian and Ukrainian military on the issue of prisoner exchange. Kapkov himself did not comment on the statement.
At the same time, it is emphasized that in 2023 there will be no substantive negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, even informally, only exchanges and private issues such as the so-called grain deal will be discussed.
