The Family Business Behind Both Sides of the Ukraine War Peace Talks

Every time someone buys a $WLFI governance token, three-quarters of the proceeds go to an entity affiliated with Donald Trump and his family.According to two US senators, at least one of those buyers had been trading with a ruble-backed tool built to help Russia dodge sanctions.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official.That crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, was co-founded by Donald Trump Jr. and Zach Witkoff, the son of Steve Witkoff, Washington’s lead negotiator with Moscow. Witkoff’s counterpart, Kirill Dmitriev, sits in a Russian network of family business ties that reaches Umar Kremlev, the Kremlin-linked businessman whom ProPublica reported helped pay for Trump Jr.’s Bahamas wedding in May.Kyiv Post traced the business interests surrounding both negotiating teams. The question is whether they intersect.The weddingIn September, ProPublica reported that Kremlev, who heads Russia’s International Boxing Association (IBA), paid hundreds of thousands of dollars towards Trump Jr.’s Bahamas wedding festivities in May. Trump Jr. called it a gift from a personal friend and said he repaid Kremlev.According to ProPublica, executives from WLFI and 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm where Trump Jr. is a partner, were also among the guests. The outlet did not name them or say whether they interacted with Kremlev.Alexander Gabuev, Berlin-based director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, told Bloomberg that friendship between Kremlev and Trump Jr., which both men say is not commercial, might be part of Moscow’s influence operation. Other Topics of Interest Russian Drone Hits Kherson Medical Center Staff were sheltering when a Russian drone hit a Kherson medical center on Monday. A separate drone attack on a car injured two people. Kremlev – ties to Dmitriev’s wife via sister-in-lawKremlev’s link to the Kremlin’s chief negotiator runs through their families.Kremlev’s sister-in-law, Ekaterina Leshchinskaya, heads a patriotic group called Healthy Fatherland, which since June has had a formal partnership with Mediapraktika. Mediapraktika is headed by Natalya Popova, Dmitriev’s wife.Popova also serves as a deputy to Katerina Tikhonova – widely believed to be the daughter of Russian President Vladimir Putin and sanctioned by the US – at the Technology Investment Fund.Kleptocracy, in which families of ruling elites preside over significant business interests, is hardly news in Russia. In a July 2022 explainer, UK-based think tank Chatham House pointed to Vladimir Yakunin, the former head of Russian state railways, whose mansion famously had a whole room dedicated to storing his wife’s fur coats.Zach Witkoff and Trump Jr.On the US side, the negotiators are similarly close to Trump family business interests.Zach Witkoff and Trump Jr. are co-founders of World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a corporate crypto platform.Connecticut Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro has said WLFI received $2 billion from the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) two weeks before Washington granted the country access to advanced computer chips.Trump Jr. also serves as a partner at 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm that topped $1 billion in assets in September 2025, months after Trump’s return to office. DeLauro has also questioned the firm’s dealings with the administration.“White House advisor Peter Navarro, a friend of Donald Trump Junior, got the Pentagon to loan more than $600 million to Vulcan Elements, a small North Carolina startup founded just two years earlier but linked to Donald Trump Junior. Estimates of the company’s valuation grew tenfold after the deal was announced,” she wrote.“As ProPublica has reported, this deal was also a win for Trump Junior’s venture capital firm 1789 Capital, which took a stake in Vulcan about three months before the Pentagon announced the deal,” she added.Witkoff and DmitrievDiplomatically, Witkoff and Dmitriev are working hand in hand to coordinate the US’s attempt to mediate an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine.In November 2025, the US backed a 28-point peace plan and pressured Kyiv into accepting it before Thanksgiving. Its terms, including Kyiv’s neutered army and NATO ban, resemble Russia’s war goals, and subsequent investigations suggest Russian origin, with leaked calls showing Witkoff coaching Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov on how to package the proposal.The proposal was eventually whittled down to 20 points and went nowhere as the war in Iran started.More recently, unconfirmed rumors suggest Washington’s considering lifting sanctions on the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which Dmitriev heads, to facilitate the diesel deals touted by Trump and Putin after earlier sanction-relief measures.The public reports, so far, showed no direct conflict of interest between the US and Russian parties – which brings us back to WLFI.Crypto sales linked to Russia, North KoreaIn November 2025, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, both members of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, wrote to the Department of Treasury about the sale of WLFI tokens to sanctioned actors.They alleged the firm was “[conducting] business with North Korean state-sponsored hackers, sanctioned Russian money-laundering entities, and other illicit actors.”“Since February 2, 2025, WLF sold over 10,000 $WLFI tokens to the user ‘0x9009’; this same user has conducted transactions with A7A5, a ‘Ruble-backed sanctions evasion tool’ backed by parties now under United States sanctions,” the letter says.The senators argue the Trump family profits directly from such sales.“For example, DT Marks DEFI LLC, ‘an entity affiliated with Donald J. Trump and certain of his family members,’ holds ‘22.5 billion $WLFI tokens’ now worth over $3 billion to date, and has a claim on ‘75% of $WLFI token sale proceeds,’” it says.“That means every time a governance token is sold, three quarters of that money goes directly to President Trump and his family, even for sales to entities linked to North Korea and Russia,” the letter says.At minimum, this raises questions about whether WLFI screens out sanctions-linked buyers. At worst, if the buyers prove to be tied to the Kremlin’s negotiating team, it would point to a direct conflict of interest.A7A5 itself is well documented. According to the US Treasury, which sanctioned the network in August 2025, the token is issued by Kyrgyz-registered Old Vector and was created by A7, a company owned by Russia’s state-owned Promsvyazbank and fugitive Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor.Identifying the owner of the 0x9009 wallet would shed more light on who exactly was behind the transactions.