The Kremlin has announced that Vladimir Putin has been invited to join Donald Trump’s “board of peace”, set up last week with the intention that it would oversee a ceasefire in Gaza.
The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told journalists on Monday that Russia was seeking to “clarify all the nuances” of the offer with Washington, before giving its response.
The claimed invitation comes as Putin shows no signs of ending his invasion of Ukraine, in which hundreds of thousands have been killed and Russian troops have carried out multiple atrocities against civilians. The Russian president has repeatedly rejected proposals of ceasefire along the current frontines.
The Kremlin also said on Monday that Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev would be attending the World Economic Forum in Davos this week and would meet members of the US delegation there. It is unclear whether those meetings will involve discussions of the Gaza board.
The invitation to Putin, which has yet to be confirmed by Washington, raises more questions about the intended agenda for the board. It was originally part of Trump’s ceasefire proposals for the Gaza war, and was supposed to oversee the transition to a lasting peace in the territory and supervise the work of a committee of Palestinian experts, also announced last week, who would take care of the day-to-day running of Gaza. The vaguely described scheme was endorsed in a UN security council resolution in November.
The first appointments to the board, announced on Friday, included Trump himself as chair, the former British prime minister Tony Blair, the current US secretary of state, Marco Rubio; Trump’s troubleshooting envoy, property developer Steve Witkoff; the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and the president of the World Bank, Ajay Banga.
It has emerged over the weekend that Trump had also sent invitations to the leaders of Argentina, Paraguay, Turkey, Egypt and the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, and most likely others. The invitation letters included a “charter” saying the board would seek to “solidify peace in the Middle East”, and at the same time “embark on a bold new approach to resolving global conflict”. According to US reports over the weekend, each country would have pay $1bn for its membership.
The inclusion of Putin in a global body supposed to oversee peace around the world would add considerable weight to longstanding suspicions that Trump leans heavily in Putin’s favour in his approach to the Ukraine conflict.
At the same time as he was apparently inviting friendly leaders to join the board of peace, Trump also sent a letter to Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, over the weekend, telling him that “considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace”.
Trump has been escalating pressure on Denmark and the rest of Europe to accept his plans to take over Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory, and has imposed punitive measures on European countries who have objected most strenuously to his plan.
The UK is one of the targeted countries, and the prime minister, Keir Starmer, denounced the tariffs as “completely wrong” on Monday, restating that “any decision on Greenland belongs to people of Greenland and Denmark alone”. However, Starmer did not commit to the imposition of retaliatory tariffs on the US, and downplayed the prospect of Trump’s actual use of force in Greenland.
Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, meanwhile suggested that a US takeover of Greenland would cement Trump’s place in the history books.
“Here, perhaps, it is possible to abstract from whether this is good or bad, whether it will comply with the parameters of international law or not,” Peskov said, but he added it would “certainly go down in history”.
