Trump’s Nord Stream Bargain With Putin Sells Out Europe and NATO

The talks run through the Kremlin’s front door. On September 5, Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff spent about three hours with Putin in Moscow. At the start of the meeting, in video released by the Kremlin, Witkoff told Putin that he, Jared, Kirill and Yury had been sitting outside “talking about when we retire, we’ll have all these incredible stories and incredible memories, and yours will be right at the top of it all.”

The flattery had a purpose. The offer is commercial: give Americans a stake in the pipeline, and American sanctions stop being the obstacle. Dmitriev met US Energy and Treasury officials in August and was in New York for talks in late September, according to Kyiv Post’s account of the Reuters report. The same envoys have also discussed a plan for a consortium of the US Development Finance Corporation and Gulf investors to buy Lukoil’s European refineries and petrol stations, with sanctions lifted as part of the deal.

The Kremlin has signalled the same idea from its side. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said this year that Washington wants to acquire the pipelines from their European owners, restart them and profit from the gas. A White House official told Reuters there had been “no Nord Stream discussions recently” and that any deal must benefit US taxpayers and companies. That is not a denial. It is a price list.

No. Russia throttled supplies in 2022, and on September 26 of that year underwater explosions near the Danish island of Bornholm wrecked three of the four lines. One Nord Stream 2 line survived intact, which is why a restart is technically conceivable. German prosecutors have since charged Ukrainians: a suspected coordinator, Serhii K., was arrested in Italy in 2025 and extradited to Germany, and on August 19 this year a second Ukrainian suspect was arrested in Croatia. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2024 that US intelligence knew of the plot in advance.

Whoever lit the fuse, the United States has been the commercial winner. Since the pipelines went dark, the United States has become Europe’s largest supplier of liquefied natural gas. That is what makes the new talks so cynical. Washington spent years fighting Nord Stream because it competed with American gas. Now that the pipes are broken, it wants a share of fixing them. An early industry estimate put the repair bill at around half a billion dollars, small change next to what the pipelines cost to build.

The bargain has two obstacles, and Washington knows it.

The first is Congress. Trump can waive or soften US sanctions on his own, but if Democrats win control of Congress in November’s midterm elections, as many expect, lifting sanctions on Russia’s energy sector becomes far harder. Democrats will not hand Putin his pipeline back.

The second is Germany. A spokeswoman for Germany’s economy and energy ministry told Reuters that Nord Stream is sanctioned in Europe, that Germany has found other suppliers, and that a restart requires government approval, which is not desired. Michael Kellner, a Green lawmaker, called it “a dirty deal that will cost Europe dearly.”

Germans have reason to be angry. Russia is waging a hybrid war against Europe: disinformation, election interference, sabotage and economic pressure. In August, an airport worker found a drone carrying explosives near the runway at Leipzig/Halle airport, a hub for supplies to Ukraine and NATO airlift. On September 1 the German government formally blamed Russia, summoned Moscow’s ambassador and closed two Russian institutions. Poland and the Baltic states reject any energy ties with Moscow.

Washington’s answer to German resistance is to wait for a different Germany. Chancellor Friedrich Merz is deeply unpopular, and his coalition is losing ground. An INSA poll for Bild in early October put the far-right Alternative for Germany at a record 30.5 percent against 17.5 percent for Merz’s CDU/CSU, according to UNI’s report on the poll. Merz is heading for defeat, and the AfD is waiting.

The AfD wants Russian gas back. Its co-leader Alice Weidel calls cheap Russian energy the secret of “Made in Germany”. In September Reuters reported that AfD leaders and Dmitriev are preparing talks on restoring Russian gas supplies to Germany, tentatively for early next year and conditional on a peace framework. AfD foreign policy spokesman Markus Frohnmaier met Gazprom chief Alexei Miller and Dmitriev at the St. Petersburg economic forum. For the AfD, Ukraine, the war and NATO all come second to the German economy.

Trump would not float a deal like this if he expected Merz to stay. He is counting on the chancellor’s fall, and his Nord Stream channel lines up with the AfD’s agenda. A senior US official told Reuters that Witkoff and Kushner have not been invited to the AfD’s talks with Dmitriev. They do not need an invitation. Trump’s Republicans and Germany’s far right are working toward the same pipeline, and Europe should see that coordination plainly.

The bargain comes as the war has turned from a clash of armies into a contest of endurance fought against bridges, power plants and data centres. Over October 1 to 3, Russian drones struck Kyiv’s Southern and Northern bridges over the Dnipro, forcing full or partial closures of three of the city’s six road bridges and halting metro trains on the Southern Bridge. Ukrainian officials say the aim is to split the capital in two before winter; Russia says the bridges carry troops and military cargo. On October 8 a Russian glide bomb hit two public buses in Kramatorsk and killed at least 33 people, the deadliest single attack this year. Russia is also hitting data centres, refineries and power plants.

Ukraine is hitting back at Russia’s economy. The same night, Ukrainian drones struck a Yandex data centre in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, which reportedly houses two of Yandex’s Nvidia-based supercomputers used to train its AI models. Sanctions make that hardware very hard to replace, even on the black market, so a strike there hurts Russia’s artificial intelligence capacity, not just one company.

Each side has been betting since the war’s second year that the other cannot last one more. Moscow points to Europe’s shrinking aid, Ukraine’s manpower shortage and its empty treasury. Kyiv bets that economic pain will break Russia first.

The governments in Berlin, Paris and London are still committed to Ukraine to the end, even if it costs them elections. On October 4, Merz made a surprise visit to Kyiv while Russian strikes continued, announcing more than 1.3 billion euros in military and energy aid, while German companies travelling with him signed agreements worth about 6.6 billion euros. “We will not be intimidated,” he said. Weeks earlier, in September, a Russian drone struck the rail line near the Polish border minutes after a train carrying Boris Johnson, the former British prime minister, had pulled out of the station.

But Zelensky’s position is precarious, and not because of the front line. Europe’s far right is rising, and cutting aid to Ukraine is one of its founding demands. It argues that Europe has wrecked its own economy paying for a war that neither side is winning. A Nord Stream deal is exactly the reward that argument has been waiting for.

The bargain arrives while much of the world is wary of Moscow. A plague case linked to a laboratory in Irkutsk has fed fears that Russia is hiding the truth, and Trump has offered to help while playing down talk of a bioweapon: “We don’t think so,” he said.

Putin, for his part, still avoids a general mobilization that would let his army push deeper into Ukraine, because he fears public anger at home. Yet Russia has stood against NATO’s support for Ukraine for more than four years without collapsing, and it now produces more munitions than the United States. That is the adversary Trump wants to do business with.