June 28, 2023

Last weekend, as President Joe Biden and top national security aides watched a dramatic — and ultimately, short lived — coup attempt play out in Russia, officials decided they needed to communicate directly with the Kremlin.

Using a regular diplomatic channel, administration officials told counterparts inside President Vladimir Putin’s suddenly wobbly government that the White House viewed the mutiny led by the Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin as an internal Russian matter. They would not be making any changes to U.S. or NATO troop positions. There was no need, the U.S. side made clear, for any direct talks between Biden and Putin or other high-ranking officials.

“Everything was done to ensure that Russia didn’t see an American hand in all this,” said Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group who first wrote about the backchannel conversation in his weekly client newsletter. “From a U.S. perspective, that was actually quite useful, being able to communicate to Moscow that America’s policy is to defend Ukraine and help them get their land back but that it’s not regime change or destroying Russia.”

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