Former Ukrainian military intelligence chief calls for “peace” with Russia

Kyrylo Budanov, the former head of Ukrainian military intelligence and one of the best-known figures in the war against Russia, is now playing an important role in efforts to end the conflict.

According to reports from foreign media, Budanov, who is wanted in Russia on charges related to his activities as head of the HUR, has said he is prepared to take any step that could lead to a peace agreement, provided the terms are acceptable to Ukraine.

A new cycle of escalation

Russia and Ukraine are currently in a new cycle of escalating warfare, attributed in part to their efforts to gain an advantage ahead of possible future negotiations.

Although both sides continue to strike each other with drones and missiles, Budanov said during the interview that talks mediated by the Trump administration are expected to resume by the end of September, several days after Russia’s parliamentary elections and several weeks before the midterm elections in the United States.

The process, he said, is expected to resume with a visit to Kyiv by the US government’s special peace envoy, Steve Witkoff, and President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Although Witkoff and Kushner have traveled to Moscow several times, they have not visited Kyiv, despite repeated official invitations. Barring surprises, this is expected to happen tomorrow, Sunday, while they will be in Moscow today.

Budanov, 40, is President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff and a lieutenant general in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Since he supports negotiations, he has nothing left to prove as a soldier who fought the Russians.

During the war in eastern Ukraine, which began in 2014 and continued for years at a lower intensity, Budanov led commando raids behind enemy lines. In one of them, the son of a Russian general was killed in battle.

He served in a CIA-trained Ukrainian military intelligence unit whose leader was killed in Kyiv by a Russian car bomb.

In 2016, a machine-gun bullet shattered Budanov’s elbow. He spent months at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland, where doctors reattached his arm. After Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, he helped plan some of Ukraine’s boldest counteroffensives.

Budanov still wears a military haircut and is known for his piercing gaze. In his office, decorated with a Christian icon painted on the ceramic plate of a bulletproof vest, he revealed several aspects of the art of negotiating with deadly enemies. As he put it, no one should waste time trying to prove that they are right.

“Of course, we cannot trust each other because we are at war. That is logical and understandable. At the same time, both sides understand that they must find a solution. The war cannot last forever,” he said.

Division over the talks

The Ukrainian government appears divided over the peace talks. In an analysis, the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center described Budanov as the leader of a faction that favors an agreement rather than risking even greater losses. Other Ukrainian officials, the center said, oppose any major concessions, arguing that they would damage the morale of the army and society.

Ukrainian public opinion, for its part, is skeptical of the US-sponsored talks. Before the negotiations stalled, many believed that the Trump administration was pressuring Ukraine to capitulate in order to support the US president’s effort to secure the Nobel Peace Prize.

At the same time, they believed that Putin had no intention of ending the war, regardless of the contents of any possible agreement. Nevertheless, Budanov said he believes in keeping lines of communication open, even as the fighting continues.

“I am a military intelligence officer. I have been involved in dialogues and communications all my life. For me, this is not difficult,” he said.

Negotiations have taken place, in various forms, since the beginning of the Russian invasion.

Russia and Ukraine have been in talks since the first day of the 2022 invasion, when a Putin adviser unsuccessfully attempted, in two phone calls, to negotiate Ukraine’s swift surrender.

Both sides have missed opportunities to reach a peace agreement. About a month after the war began, Russia walked away from a balanced agreement on the table, only to suffer a series of setbacks on the battlefield.

Moscow lost about 10 percent of Ukrainian territory that it would have retained had it accepted the agreement, although the exact territorial division proposed was never made public.

A year later, Ukraine, which was then enjoying military successes and high confidence, missed a potential window for negotiations offered by Washington. Since then, Kyiv has lost about 1.5 percent of its territory to the Russian advance.

A new wave of negotiations began immediately after Trump took office in January 2025. But only days after the Geneva meeting in February, the United States and Israel attacked Iran, triggering a war that has since drawn most of the Trump administration’s attention.

Nevertheless, negotiations continued behind the scenes at a lower level, Budanov said. He said he often spoke with Admiral Igor Kostyukov, head of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency. The two first negotiated in 2022, with Turkey’s mediation, the opening of maritime corridors in the Black Sea for the transport of grain, an important export product for both warring countries.

He was speaking with them while simultaneously attacking them on the battlefield.

“Over the years, we have managed to accomplish a great deal, including issues related to prisoners of war,” Budanov said.

He maintained this channel of communication even as he inflicted heavy losses on Kostyukov’s forces. In the lobby of his office, he keeps a photograph of Ukrainian special forces soldiers taking control of a GRU stronghold inside a cement factory in the city of Vovchansk in 2024. Many of the Russian admiral’s soldiers were killed in that operation.

Budanov also said he spoke regularly with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the ruthless, now-deceased founder of Russia’s Wagner mercenary organization. These talks, he said, continued until shortly before Wagner’s 2023 coup attempt against the Kremlin. Prigozhin was killed several weeks later when his private plane exploded in midair.

One of the main reasons Budanov took over as chief of staff last January, after six years as head of the military intelligence service (HUR), was, he said, his ability to lead negotiations.

By then, Vitkov and the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators had narrowed a 20-point peace plan down to two main unresolved issues: management of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and control of the territory still held by Ukraine in the eastern Donbas region.

The focus was on four medium-sized, partly destroyed cities, as well as a large area of farmland. During talks held in Abu Dhabi, Budanov tried, as he put it, to create a new atmosphere: he suggested that the Russian delegation set a specific goal, such as developing compromise solutions for the post-war administration of Donbas, and work toward it.

The proposal for Donbas

By February, he said, possible proposals under consideration included handing the region over to private military contractors, transferring its administration to Trump’s Peace Council, or creating joint Ukrainian and Russian civilian administrations.

Budanov acknowledged that he had advised Zelensky not to accept any compromise over Donbas that would allow Russia to appear to control the region and raise its flag there. Giving up the territory would offer Moscow a prize that the Russian army had proved unable to capture.

Although negotiations are likely to resume later this month, Budanov said the conditions for a ceasefire are unlikely to be in place until spring. Russia is expected to try to bring Ukraine to its knees with another strategic bombing campaign this winter, the fourth since the beginning of the war.

“Negotiations will, sooner or later, lead somewhere. You cannot fight all your life,” he concluded.