Earlier this month, news emerged of an American financier with ties to the US President Donald Trump’s family having reached an agreement with a Russian energy company in the fall of 2025 to explore mobile liquefied natural gas development in Alaska. The disclosure of this deal, shortly after the latest US-mediated Russia-Ukraine talks in Geneva, signals a broader push by the Trump administration to normalize economic ties with Moscow as part of a negotiated settlement of the Ukraine war, while also applying diplomatic and economic pressure on both Kyiv and Moscow to accelerate a settlement.
American financier Gentry Beach, a longtime acquaintance of the US President Donald Trump’s eldest son, reached an agreement last autumn with the Russian energy producer Novatek to pursue natural gas development in Alaska, the New York Times (NYT), reported on February 19th.
Beach said that the deal envisioned using a mobile liquefied natural gas plant being built by Novatek at its factory in Russia’s Murmansk region. The system has been developed by Novatek for shipping gas from the remote Russian Arctic, which involves cooling it into liquid form at a portable plant and then shipping it aboard icebreaking tankers.
Novatek, in its statement to the NYT, reportedly said that it was “indeed having negotiations on the potential use” of its technology to liquefy natural gas in remote northern Alaska without confirming whether it was working with Mr. Beach.
Per the Novatek’s statement as cited by the NYT report, the company pointed out the similarity in the climate of the Alaskan and Russian Arctic regions to demonstrate the viability of its technology in developing natural gas in Alaska.
“Experts have discussed this opportunity for many years,” Novatek was cited as saying by the NYT. “Having said that, all the arrangements can only be implemented subject to support from the Russian and U.S. authorities.”
Beach reportedly told the NYT that the negotiations took place in 2025 during meetings with Novatek chief executive Leonid Mikhelson in Dubai and Europe. Mikhelson is subject to sanctions by the United Kingdom and Canada, but not the US or the European Union (EU).
He is also said to have described Mikhelson as “very pro-American.”
That said, the American investor also noted that the agreement is at a preliminary stage and faces several hurdles, adding that he cannot divulge further details.
The NYT said that Beach’s proposed collaboration with Novatek could potentially rival the Trump-supported plan to construct a roughly 800-mile pipeline for transporting gas from Alaska’s Northern slope to the state’s southern coast for liquefaction and export.
Beach, however, argued that his initiative would complement, rather than compete with, the planned pipeline development.
A hedge fund and private equity investor, Beach served as a finance vice chairman for Donald Trump’s 2017 Presidential inauguration and he is a college friend of the US President’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
However, while speaking to the NYT, Beach said that his relationship with the Trump family had no role in the Novatek deal, and noted that he did not “do any business with the Trumps on any level.” He also clarified that his agreement was not linked to any bilateral talks between the US and Russia.
He did say, though, that “this project is known about at the highest levels” in Moscow and Washington, and that he would soon announce the names of executives who would lead the project.
According to Beach, the current political environment in the United States has made the businesses in the country more willing to consider engagement with Russian firms, a shift he attributes to the transactional approach of the Trump administration.
“Trump is a transactional president,” Beach said in an interview with the NYT. “I don’t think people would have felt as comfortable working with Russian companies during the Biden administration as they do during the Trump administration.”
Why is this news important?
This news is in line with the Author’s projections made in his previous article, ‘Trump, Putin, and Ukraine: A Geopolitical Turning Point?’, published on June 1st, 2025, wherein he had stated that with the advent of second Trump administration in the US, Putin is on the cusp of realizing long-sought success of most, if not all of his concerted efforts since 2014.
In that article, the Author had pointed out that by improving relations with Russia, Trump intends to pull Russia away from China and for that he has to provide economic incentives to the Russian President Vladimir Putin, as ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and ensuing Western sanctions against Russia, the Russian economy has been increasingly becoming dependent on trade with China to remain afloat.
And, Russia’s increasing dependence on trade with China has put Beijing in the position to dictate the terms of the overall bilateral economic relations between the two countries, which is causing growing frustration within the Russian business class over the difficulties of doing business with China.
The aforesaid assessments were made in the context of US-led peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine to end their ongoing war since 2022, and with the emergence of this recent news report, the Author would like to use this opportunity to double down on his assessments made in all his previous articles relating to ongoing Russia-Ukraine war so far.
In particular, the Author would like to draw the readers’ attention to the Russian President Putin’s remarks in a joint press appearance with the US President Trump during the summit in Anchorage, Alaska, in August 2025, wherein he said that the understanding reached in that summit could be a foundation for restoring business relations between Russia and the US.
“I expect that today’s agreements will be the starting point not only for the solution of the Ukrainian issue, but also will help us bring back businesslike and pragmatic relations between Russia and the US,” Putin said at the time.
During that same press appearance, President Trump described his talks with President Putin as “very productive”, and commended progress made on several issues by saying “many, many points” were agreed on but “a couple of big ones” remained unresolved.
“One is probably the most significant… We didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there,” the US president further said without elaborating.
Also, shortly after this summit in Anchorage, Putin, while answering questions during a visit to a nuclear research centre in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod Region, said that Russia and the United States were discussing joint projects in the Arctic and Alaska.
“We are discussing, by the way, with American partners the possibility of working together in this area. And not only in our Arctic zone, but also in Alaska. And at the same time, the technologies that we possess, today no one but us possesses. And this is of interest to our partners, including those from the States,” Putin had said, per a Reuters report at the time.
The same Reuters report also said that while Putin did not provide any details of potential US-Russia cooperation in the Arctic, he had referenced Russia’s liquefied natural gas company Novatek operating in the Arctic while making this point.
So, Putin made explicit reference to the restoration of business relations with the US as well as hinted at Novatek’s role in these business engagements, and Trump also made vague references by saying ‘many, many points’ to frame the talks as productive and indicative of broader engagement beyond the potential resolution of war in Ukraine while also maintaining that the negotiated end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict was a prerequisite for such engagements to materialize.
Therefore, it is plausible that the latest news of Russian energy producer Novatek pursuing natural gas development in Alaska with an American investor having ties to Trump family, could provide some indications of where the US-led peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine are headed.
This is because, per the NYT report, Gentry Beach had reached the agreement with Novatek in the fall of last year but the revelation has come only now, shortly after the recent round of US-mediated talks between Russia and Ukraine, held in Geneva on February 17th and 18th.
The trilateral talks ended without a breakthrough, and while Ukraine and Russia described the talks as difficult, the US’ White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that there was “meaningful progress made” in the recent round of talks with pledges “to continue to work towards a peace deal together”.
She also noted that President Trump considered the situation, nearly four years into the war, as “very unfair, not just for Russians and Ukrainians who have lost their lives” but also for American taxpayers who have provided financial support to Ukraine.
These remarks by Levitt are indicative of the US trying to move fast on reaching a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine, and similar signals can be gleaned even from the remarks of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who said that the US is pressuring him to make concessions for peace.
In his 37-minute phone interview with Axios, Zelensky said that he is open to considering the proposal put forth by the US mediators that Ukrainian forces withdraw from the roughly 10% territory they hold in Donbas and allow that area to become a demilitarized “free economic zone”, provided that Russia is also willing to pull its forces back by an equivalent distance.
Another important point that Zelensky made in the aforesaid interview by Axios, was that if the deal simply freezes the current battle lines in the Donbas, as is the plan in two other regions where Russia holds territory, then such a deal could be acceptable to the Ukrainian people.
“I think that if we will put in the document … that we stay where we stay on the contact line, I think that people will support this [in a] referendum. That is my opinion,” Zelensky was cited as saying by Axios.
Most importantly, he also noted that the Russian negotiators promised to consult with Moscow and return with a detailed position on the territorial question, which if true, should be considered very substantial, because this indicates that the talks between Ukraine and Russia have finally begun progressing toward a potential compromise, even if it is difficult to say at present what shape such a compromise could take if it indeed happens.
Now, this is precisely what the Author had projected in his article on June 9th, 2025, wherein he had said that the best-case scenario that Kyiv can hope for is that the Ukrainian armed forces “are able to persist for another five to six months and stop the Russians from advancing in the Donetsk region, which could force the Russians into withdrawing their demand that Ukraine abandon its territories.”
Another point that the Author had made in the aforesaid article was that “the US seems to have taken a wait and watch position until the hostilities in Ukraine result into the creation of new ground realities that force both sides to reconsider their positions, thereby giving impetus to the diplomatic track.”
The second round of US-mediated peace talks between Ukraine and Russia had occurred in late January in the UAE, which is exactly six months after the Author had made the aforesaid projections, and the third round (the latest) followed right in the month after, that is February, which is currently nearing its end.
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