Bessent Tells Russia's Finance Chief: No Deals Until Ukraine War Ends, as Modi Also Presses Putin to Stop Fighting

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has spent the past week running two tracks on Russia at once: squeezing Moscow's economy while quietly reopening a direct line to it. On Monday, August 31, at the G20 finance ministers meeting in Asheville, North Carolina, that contradiction played out in public.

Bessent sat down with Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov on the sidelines of the summit. It was Siluanov's first in-person G20 appearance since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, according to The Moscow Times. A source familiar with the meeting told Reuters that when Siluanov tried to raise areas of mutual economic interest, Bessent cut him off, saying flatly that nothing is possible until the war ends. Axios and Newsquawk both confirmed the same account. A Treasury spokesperson told Axios the two men discussed President Trump's Ukraine peace plan and broader economic growth, while Russia's Finance Ministry characterized it as a discussion of G20 economic cooperation.

Europe pushes back

The meeting drew immediate criticism from European officials. German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil told reporters he'd made clear to his European counterparts that morning he would not pose for a photo with the Russian finance minister, and said hosting Siluanov at all "sends a signal I find troubling," according to The Moscow Times.

Giving Russia's top financial official a seat at the table, four years into a war that's killed tens of thousands, can look like normalization to allies who've spent that time trying to isolate Moscow. Daniel Fried, a former assistant secretary of state under George W. Bush, told the Associated Press that the U.S. may find it hard to rally "its usual friends and allies" unless it consults more carefully with them going forward.

The White House's answer is that talking isn't the same as caving. White House spokesman Kush Desai told AFP the administration is "working with Russia" to push a peace deal that would "stop the endless bloodshed that the president has really condemned," and said Trump "will never shy away from talking with the folks we need to talk to." Asked directly why Siluanov was invited, Trump said, "We like getting along with everybody." Bessent's own message to Siluanov, that no relief comes without an end to the war, is the substantive answer to Klingbeil's objection: the U.S. position hasn't softened, even if the venue has.

A wider back-channel

The Siluanov meeting isn't happening in isolation. Breitbart reported that CIA Director John Ratcliffe met with Russian intelligence officials in Moscow the week prior, the first publicly known visit by a sitting CIA director to Moscow since 2021. Axios reported Ratcliffe floated a trilateral meeting between Trump, Putin, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to end the war.

Diplomacy is moving on other fronts too. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, also Monday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Putin directly that "we must move from endless war to the end of war, to the cessation of hostilities," and that "every day the war continues, humanity takes a step backwards," according to CNBC. Putin's response noted trade growth between Russia and India but conceded "a slight decline" last year.

Russia supplied more than half of India's crude imports in June and July, and Russian exports to India hit over $34 billion between April and July, up nearly 60% year over year, per India's own trade data cited by CNBC. The U.S. House is expected to vote later this month on legislation named for Senator Lindsey Graham, which the Senate already passed 86-11 on August 7, that would impose tariffs up to 100% on the top five buyers of Russian oil and gas, including India and China. Trump has indicated he'll sign it. India already faces a combined 50% tariff burden from the U.S. over its Russian energy purchases, later reduced to 18%, while Washington pushes Venezuelan crude as a substitute, according to CNBC.

Cracks Moscow doesn't want discussed

While Bessent and Modi both pressed for an end to the fighting, Russia was dealing with a problem of its own making public. Andrei Klepach, one of Putin's top macroeconomists at the state development bank VEB, was fired after remarks from May resurfaced in Russian media, in which he said "we are falling behind" and "we will not win the competition in this war of attrition," according to two sources who spoke to Reuters and reporting by the Daily Wire. Putin himself has insisted the economy's slowdown is deliberate, not distress, pointing to a 14.5% central bank rate meant to avoid hyperinflation. Charles Lichfield of the Atlantic Council's GeoEconomics Center told the Daily Wire that Russia is on track to double its budget deficit for the second year running.

None of this has stopped the fighting. Russia's Defense Ministry said Monday it is planning "massive strikes" on Ukraine's energy grid, days after an attack on an ammunition warehouse killed 38 people, and a Saturday strike killed 37 more, among the deadliest days of the war, per Breitbart and CNBC. Zelensky said Sunday that Russia's strategy is to "wear down Ukraine and Ukrainians." The open question now is whether the Bessent-Siluanov contact and the Ratcliffe back-channel produce an actual Trump-Putin-Zelensky sit-down, or whether the House's tariff bill and continued Russian strikes overtake the diplomacy before it goes anywhere.