US and Russia are discussing potential postwar business deals, including JV for US oil majors off Sakhalin and resumed sales via the Druzhba pipeline, as part of wider talks to end the war in Ukraine, reports FT citing sources

US and Russia are discussing potential postwar business deals, including JV for US oil majors off Sakhalin and resumed sales via the Druzhba pipeline, as part of wider talks to end the war in Ukraine, reports FT citing sources.

Sanctions relief floated as part of a negotiated settlement is a recurring feature of conflict endgames, and the sequencing question is consistent across episodes: headline agreement first, then the far slower work of unwinding specific restrictions, which in past cases has taken years and often stalls on verification and enforcement disputes. The two tracks here behave differently. Restored Druzhba flows are a logistics and payment-channel question that can re-route crude back toward European refiners relatively quickly once legal cover exists, while a JV for US majors off Sakhalin is a re-entry question with no fast precedent: Western operators that wrote down and exited Russian upstream assets did so under forced-sale or expropriation pressure, and the terms on which capital returns, if it returns at all, would be set by Moscow and tested against boards' willingness to re-underwrite Russian political risk. The transmission channel for crude is the seaborne-versus-pipeline split: incremental Russian barrels reaching refineries that currently buy at a distance would compress freight and the discounts non-Russian suppliers have enjoyed in those slots, rather than adding net supply in the near term. What is worth watching is whether this surfaces in any official statement, since sourced reports of exploratory talks have frequently preceded denials or dilution, and whether counterparties in Europe, which hold their own sanctions and asset-seizure positions, are party to the same discussions. The read at this stage is directional and contingent, not a flow event.