A key element of the Trump administration’s peace drive in Ukraine is a belief that revived trade ties between the United States and Russia will prevent the resumption of war—and that American investors will get rich in the process.
But some who’ve played a role in Russia’s economic sector are less optimistic, casting doubt on the prospect that trade could guarantee peace and that Russia is an untapped El Dorado.
Investing in Russia “will be a very, very difficult environment for a very long time,” said Chris Weafer, the CEO of Macro-Advisory, a business consultancy that covers Russia’s economy.
The United States, Ukraine, and Russia have been working on a peace deal for months. The U.S. side has been optimistic about its progress—even as Russia has objected to key demands from Ukraine. The latest round of negotiations was planned for Feb. 1, but rescheduled for later this week.
Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer, friend of U.S. President Donald Trump, and chief envoy to Russia on the Ukraine war, has framed trade deals with Russia after a peace agreement as a guarantee against future hostilities.
If “everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that’s going to naturally be a bulwark against future conflicts there,” Witkoff told the Wall Street Journal in November.
Meanwhile, the administration appears to be salivating over the amount of money to be made if peace is declared. “Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land,” Witkoff told the Journal. Trump also seems optimistic: In February of last year, Trump said that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin were discussing “major economic development transactions” between the United States and Russia.
But a trade deal is unlikely to guarantee peace, said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center think tank and the founder of the Russian political analysis website R.Politik.
In part, she said, that’s because money doesn’t trump what the Kremlin sees as its core security interests. Any U.S. actions that appeared to threaten Russian security—which historically has meant anything from placing troops in the Baltics to stationing missile defenses in Romania—would still trigger alarm for Moscow.
To some who were involved in Russia’s economy in the 1990s and 2000s, the Trump administration’s thinking is all too familiar.
“Here we are once again, thinking that business can transform political relationships,” said Charles Hecker, a geopolitical risk consultant who served as managing partner of Control Risks in Moscow from 2000 to 2008. “And I think the answer to that assumption is that actually, no, it can’t.”
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of Russia as an independent state in 1991, U.S. direct investment in Russia rocketedgoing from $1.7 billion in 1999 to $20.8 billion in 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. The European Union went even further, with Russia ranked in the bloc’s top five trading partners for goods exports and imports in 2021, the year before Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Doubts, though, began to enter investors’ minds as the Kremlin’s foreign policy hardened and Putin clamped down on civil society. Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea “changed our perspective of Russia—even though many of us should have known better,” said Ed Verona, who was previously a senior executive at ExxonMobil Russia and a former head of the U.S.-Russia Business Council. “We deceived ourselves into thinking that, through engagement and appeals to mutual self-interest, things would go in the right direction,” Verona said.
The administration’s vision of Russia as a major investment opportunity, meanwhile, might not be quite right either.
For one, Russia’s economy has long dragged behind those of smaller nations. Russia’s prewar gross domestic product in 2021 was around $1.83 trillion—less than Italy’s that same year. Weighed down by military spending, low oil prices, and Western sanctions, Russia’s economy is expected to grow just 1 percent this year.
Even if peace were declared tomorrow, Russia’s high military spending would likely continue, Weafer said, in order to replace its huge losses of soldiers and equipment in Ukraine. There will only “be a very gradual kind of shifting of state resources to economic recovery,” Weafer said.
Russia’s investment climate, in which powerful, politically connected actors regularly dominate business partners, is also risky. In perhaps the most famous case, two Russian business partners of Michael Calveya prominent American businessman who spent decades promoting foreign investment in Russia, arranged to have him arrested in 2019 over a dispute. Despite the intervention of prominent Russians—including Kirill Dmitriev, Witkoff’s current interlocutor with the Kremlin—Calvey then entered a Kafkaesque ordeal before finally being allowed to leave Russia in 2022.
“You really need to do your due diligence,” Weafer said.
Russia will likely be more welcoming to companies involved in gas, oil, and other industries that are key for the Russian state, such as nuclear power, critical minerals, or agriculture, Weafer said. Russia is the second-largest producer of gas in the world and the third-largest oil producer.
But it’s unclear how many U.S. companies will bite.
On the one hand, mineral and oil extraction deals are highly lucrative, and—unlike private investors—these investments will be safer from predatory partners because they are dealing directly with the Russian state, Weafer said.
Companies involved in energy are also used to dealing with political risk, Hecker noted. “They’re used to playing at a very high level of geopolitics.”
The Kremlin previously appeared to dangle investment in Russian gas as a lure to the Trump administration. On the same day of an August 2025 peace meeting on Ukraine with Trump, Putin signed a law that would make it easier for ExxonMobil to win back shares in a major gas investment.
On the other hand, these companies are also likely to be cautious of the reputational risk of doing business in Russia, Verona said. “I don’t think [companies] would want to sully their reputation just for some good trading opportunities, especially if sanctions are still [in force]if not from the U.S., then by the European Union.”
“Most will wait until they are convinced that the risk of a further outbreak of war is minimal,” Weafer said.
That’s not to say that no U.S. investors would be interested. Indeed, some Trump-aligned businessmen are already making moves. At least two Trump allies have been in talks with Russia on investments, according to the Wall Street Journal. Gentry Beach, a friend of Donald Trump Jr., President Trump’s son, has been in talks to buy a stake in a Russian gas development in the Arctic. Stephen P. Lynch, a Trump donor with long history of investing in Russia, has sought to buy Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
To the Kremlin, such linkages may be familiar—Russia’s own economy is dominated by businessmen with personal ties to Putin.
And while other U.S. businesses might not win favor from the Kremlin, Moscow is likely to protect Trump-connected types of investors from predatory Russian business partners, Verona said—making a peace deal a potentially lucrative development for them.
