Peace in Ukraine is unlikely until at least May 2025, and constructive negotiations in Davos to end the conflict are unlikely because a Russian delegation will not attend, Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, one of the oligarchs who have been sanctioned, believes in the West.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, French President Emmanuel Macron and key Middle East leaders are expected to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos next week, where talks to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine are high on the agenda.

“It’s a pity that a constructive discussion about the situation in Ukraine will not take place (because) there will be no Russian delegation,” Oleg Deripaska said in a Telegram post on Sunday, according to Reuters.

“Don’t expect peace before May 25,” Deripaska wrote.

Deripaska, who is said to have made his fortune buying shares in aluminum plants, has been sanctioned by the United States and Britain over his alleged ties to Putin.

Oleg Deripaska, one of the first critics of the war in Ukraine

Almost a year ago, Deripaska said at an economic forum organized in Siberia that the Russian state may run out of money as early as next year and needs foreign investment.

Deripaska and Mykhailo Fridman were the first Russian oligarchs to criticize the start of the war in Ukraine, with Deripaska as recently as February 27, 2022 stressing that “peace is very important” to the business environment.

In early March 2022, Deripaska issued a new call for peace, adding that “the whole world will be different, and Russia will be different” after the conflict in Ukraine.

Then, last June, the oligarch made rare statements for a representative of the Russian elite, calling Putin’s war against Ukraine a “colossal mistake.”

“Is it in Russia’s interest to destroy Ukraine? Of course not, it would be a colossal mistake,” Deripaska said at a press conference in Moscow. He repeated the phrase “colossal mistake” several times and spoke of a “war” in Ukraine, the conduct of which was completely prohibited in Russia at the time.

The Russian oligarch is close to the Kremlin

Deripaska is considered close to the Kremlin, and many Russian political analysts say he is President Vladimir Putin’s most trusted industrialist.

Deripaska, the founder of Russian aluminum giant Rusal, was once Russia’s richest man but lost that title during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, when his business suffered more than those of other Russian oligarchs.

Despite his earlier comments, he now told the Financial Times that he had always doubted that sanctions, which he describes as a “19th century tool”, could work as a “miracle weapon” in a globalized world.

Russian aluminum tycoon says sanctions are not ‘wunderwaffe’

“I’ve always had my doubts about this Wunderwaffe, as the Germans used to say, of sanctions — the weaponization of the financial system to be used as a kind of negotiating tool,” he declared.

“Yes, there’s war spending and all these government subsidies and handouts, but it’s still a surprisingly slow slowdown [a economiei ruse]. The private economy has found a way to work and how to do it successfully,” he added.

The United States has imposed sanctions on him since 2018 over suspicions that he and other Russian tycoons financed attempts to influence the 2016 US election.

The European Union, Great Britain, Canada and Australia put it on the sanctions list after the war in Ukraine began.

____

• Follow the latest events of the war in Ukraine LIVETEXT on HotNews.ro