Opinion: The Russian Offer That Sounds Too Good to Be True

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

In the slowest and most tentative of releases, we learned this month that Russia is talking about making some very generous offers to the United States.

The notes were first reported by Bloomberg – the Putin regime is apparently offering valuable partnership opportunities to the United States, such as joint access to rare earths and other metal and mineral resources (Russia is one of the world’s best sources of many of these), joint development of traditional (non-green) energy projects, potentially $12 Trillion in investments in all, and a return to doing business in the world in U.S. Dollars.

There has been precious little serious reporting on it since Bloomberg revealed the story. Does that mean it was a fake, and Bloomberg got hornswoggled? Or does it mean that other media sources have just been waiting for independent confirmation that has yet to appear? Or does it mean that other media just doesn’t know what to think of it?

It’s an interesting story, because it rings true, to one from outside the closed set of American mass media, even though it sounds suspect, almost unbelievable, to those within that world.

To the mainstream press, we must remember, the days of American superiority in the world are long past. The modern Left spent so long grudgingly acknowledging that the 20th was “The American Century,” they were happy when the 21st began.

Such “journalists” can’t imagine that Vladimir Putin’s Russia could ever jettison their partnership with Xi Jinping’s China. Even though such an alliance is obviously bad for the world, and particularly awful for the United States, many journalists’ instinctive fondness for marxism keeps some warm spark in their hearts for both Russia and China. The thought that these one-time marxist rivals are now friends, a terrifying prospect for sane Westerners, is a welcome development for the descendants of the Soviet apologists of the early and mid 20th century. They so desperately want to love and respect the heirs of Lenin and Mao, their consciences don’t even try to put up a fight.

But it really isn’t that hard to believe that Putin’s Russia might be open to a pivot at the present moment.

A decade ago, when Putin started his ill-fated annexation of Crimea, the West unanimously agreed to punish the move with severe economic sanctions. North America, the European Union and the United Kingdom started cutting off trade, banning not just normally export-controlled goods and technology (such as defense articles and sensitive equipment), but going so far as to declare normal commerce, such as energy equipment sales and consumer goods, to be banned as well.

American and European businesses must now check every participant in a Russa-related transaction from buyer to delivery address, from freight carrier to banker – to see if any have been added to the sanction lists in pursuit of the misguided theory that if we squeeze the Russian business sector hard enough, the “oligarchs” will pressure Putin to withdraw from Ukraine. This convoluted theory has borne no fruit thus far, nor is it likely ever to do so.

So, it wasn’t so much that Russia happily turned toward China as a trading partner and military ally; it’s more that we in the West drove Russia away, leaving it no choice but to do business with whoever would do business with them.

At the same time, China’s long period of growth stalled, and in fact, by some measures, has begun to plummet, especially since the mismanagement of the Covid “pandemic.”

A decade ago, with Obama and Biden in the White House and China still on the ascendant, hitching the Russian bear’s wagon to China’s powerful dragon may have seemed like a sensible move.

But the two presidencies of Donald J. Trump have been centered on freeing the world, first the United States alone and then the civilized world, from China’s economic clutches.

Trump’s policies have driven not just American purchasing departments, but also European and British and Mexican ones as well, to reduce their dependence on Chinese vendors, improving manufacturing at home, yes, but especially, building up the economies of all of China’s rivals. There are a dozen countries or more that should have been sharing in the bounty of “Low Cost Country” sourcing to the developed world for decades, but China has long frozen them out.

Now Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, and many more are finally benefitting from world trade.

And since it’s so hard to move a production line once, companies don’t move them back a second time on a whim. China therefore knows that all the work they’ve lost over the past few years, they’re not getting back.

For decades, China acted as if it would continue to grow by leaps and bounds forever; but that was never really possible. Now the Chinese economy is contracting, with fewer manufacturing orders slowing their factory towns to a crawl, with sloppy, foolishly rushed construction jobs causing bridge and building collapses, and with whole ghost-town cities collecting dust due to a fake real estate boom and the final bill for generations of intentional population shrinkage finally coming due.

China may have looked like a solid partner worth connecting with, ten years ago. To say that that’s no longer true is putting it mildly.

Viewed in this more honest light, one can understand why Russia might not exactly rush to abandon China, but might certainly wave olive branches at the West to see what might be possible.

So, assuming that this report is real – and it makes enough sense that it’s worth pondering – what should we do with the offer?

The offer is of course not a strictly one-way offer. It’s a package in exchange for something – presumably both an amicable end to the Russia-Ukraine war and the lifting of sanctions.

At first blush, it looks like crass bribery: “here’s $12 trillion if America lifts the sanctions.” Putin has seen high dollar figures offered by other countries in President Trump’s reciprocal tariff negotiations over the past year; he might have seen little difference between those circumstances and this one, and therefore thought the American President would jump at the offer.

But this too is less simple than it appears.

If it were simply a bribe, we would have to turn it down, of course. We have invested too much on the Ukraine side of this war to walk away for a cash payment, and just imagine what that would do to our nation’s reputation in the eyes of historians (and voters).

But if it’s part of the negotiated settlement that ends the war rationally, such as accepting the reality that Crimea and the Donbas region is now Russian territory, but with security guarantees for the rest of Ukraine, then there is no reason not to let bygones be bygones, lift the sanctions and become trading partners again.

We have a long history of restarting trade immediately after a peace agreement, after all. Japan and Germany prospered after World War II, once the peace was brokered and new governments took over. Why shouldn’t Russia expect the same opportunity for a return to vigorous trade once hostilities are over?

Russia may well have discovered that they’ve already gotten about all they’re likely to get out of their partnership with China, and they don’t just want to find a way out of Putin’s Ukraine folly, they’d like to find a way out of their alliance with a China in decline.

With a big enough trade deal – focused on joint American-Russian development of Russia’s vast natural resources – Russia could conceivably make out better from that partnership than they could ever hope for from their fellow politburo members in Beijing.

Our sanctions regime on Russia hasn’t just been crippling to Russia, after all. It’s been crippling to the United States too.

Our own manufacturers – from heavy equipment to consumer goods – have lost access to that market in this misguided effort to pressure Russia to pull out of Ukraine.

But that’s the obvious part. The hidden part is worse; it’s what’s known as “the cost of compliance.” A business isn’t just losing the opportunities to sell; that’s just small change.

The sanctions on Russia have required considerable labor costs even for companies that don’t try to sell to Russia. American companies must build third-party-programs (3PP) to study the ownership of potential customers, partners and distributors. They must train their law and sales departments to look for Russia-sanction specific risks in every contract and sales agreement. Companies that had already designed their systems to deal with the restrictions under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) had to add a whole new layer of restrictions, because the Russian sanctions operate so completely differently than all of our other, previously existing sanctions programs.

Eliminating these Russia-specific sanctions would be welcome relief to the many innocent multinational companies who’ve had to suffer with these odd rules for a decade now. Lifting that burden off the American business sector at last would be a boost to our economy, even before the first dollar of product was sold to a freshly legalized Russian customer.

So. What should we hope for? Peace, of course, first and foremost. An end to this miserable war, with reasonable and defendable borders so that a slightly smaller Ukraine can live without fear for years to come.

And as part of that peace?

As part of Russia’s settlement with the rest of the world that has bankrolled the cost of fighting this war for so long, is it too much to hope that Russia could partner with us for the development of the natural resources that Russia has in abundance in every way but lacks the ability to cost-effectively bring them to market on their own?

Sure, it makes perfect sense. There’s no reason in the world not to, and in fact, as history tells us, it is indeed the right thing to do.

Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo