A group of several Americans, a former Stasi officer and Alexander Rodnyansky developed and proposed to Russia and Ukraine a plan to stop the war by its first anniversary

A group of several Americans, a former Stasi officer and Alexander Rodnyansky developed and proposed to Russia and Ukraine a plan to stop the war by its first anniversary. Key points from the Financial Times report

According to the publication, in the autumn of 2022 Richard Kohn, an American lawyer and former partner at the law firm Latham & Watkins, and Bob Forsman, an American investment banker and former head of Dresdner Bank’s investment division in Moscow, established a back channel between the Kremlin and the White House with the help of Matthias Warnig—a former officer of the East German Stasi intelligence service and ex-head of Nord Stream AG, who has known Vladimir Putin since the 1990s.

Through this channel, the Americans believe, they managed to avert the threat of a nuclear strike: they conveyed secret White House messages to Moscow that the United States was not seeking Russia’s destruction or regime change.

After that, Kohn and Forsman, who began calling their channel “the Platform,” decided to try to find a way to stop the war between Russia and Ukraine. For that, they needed a channel of communication with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“We needed a Ukrainian Matthias, if such a person existed,” Bob Forsman says.

He contacted his friend Michael Calvey, the founder and managing partner of the Baring Vostok investment fund. Formerly the largest private investor in Russia, he was arrested on fraud charges.

Matthias Warnig was among those who persuaded Putin to release him from prison three years earlier. To contact Zelenskyy, Calvey recommended the group reach out to Ukrainian and Russian producer Alexander Rodnyansky, who helped organize peace talks in Istanbul. He agreed “immediately.”

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