After Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States and much of the West all but severed economic ties to Moscow.
But since President Trump took office more than a year ago, he has described a “tremendous opportunity” for deals with Russia if the war ends, and the Kremlin has dangled possible investments in front of the famously transactional leader.
Now a Texas investor with ties to the Trump family is testing the possibility of making deals with Russian companies, even as the fighting in Ukraine rages on. The investor, Gentry Beach, said that he quietly signed an agreement with one of Russia’s biggest energy companies last fall to develop natural gas in Alaska.
Mr. Beach’s deal, which he insisted was motivated by business interests and not politics, shows how Mr. Trump is starting to bring Russia back into the Western economic fold, even as few signs point to President Vladimir V. Putin being ready to stop his assault on Ukraine and U.S. sanctions against Russia remain in place.
It also shows how the Kremlin’s messaging about what it says are immense business opportunities in Russia — an aide to Mr. Putin this week put their value at an improbable $14 trillion — is starting to resonate in the United States.
“Trump is a transactional president,” Mr. Beach said in an interview. “I don’t think people would have felt as comfortable working with Russian companies during the Biden administration as they do during the Trump administration.”
The project is in its early stages and faces steep hurdles, and Mr. Beach declined to disclose the financial details. The Russian company, Novatek, said it was “indeed having negotiations on the potential use” of its technology to liquefy natural gas in remote northern Alaska. But it did not confirm that it was working with Mr. Beach.
Mr. Beach’s deal could represent the first known instance of an American investor formalizing a new business venture with a major Russian company since the Kremlin started promoting deal-making opportunities to the Trump administration a year ago. Overall, U.S. companies have remained deeply skeptical of doing business with Russia, and the Trump administration imposed significant new sanctions on Russia’s oil industry last fall.
But Mr. Trump, despite voicing occasional frustration with Mr. Putin, has often echoed the Kremlin’s talking points, both on Russia’s economic promise and on the idea that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is standing in the way of peace. He said last week that Russia “wants to make a deal” to end the war, and that “Zelensky is going to have to get moving.”
Mr. Beach said he negotiated his deal in meetings in Dubai and Europe last year with Novatek’s billionaire chief executive, Leonid Mikhelson, who is under sanctions in the U.K. and Canada but not in the United States or the European Union.
“It’s time for all of us to work together,” Mr. Beach said, describing himself as a “bringer of peace.”
Mr. Beach, a hedge fund and private equity investor, is a college friend of Donald Trump Jr.’s, the president’s eldest son, and served as a finance vice chairman for Mr. Trump’s 2017 inauguration. His pursuit of deals around the world since Mr. Trump’s re-election has sowed confusion about his ties to the administration and frustrated Donald Trump Jr., The Wall Street Journal reported last fall.
Speaking to The New York Times last week, Mr. Beach said the relationship with Donald Trump Jr. played no role in the Novatek deal, and said he did not “do any business with the Trumps on any level.” He said that his effort was not part of the U.S.-Russia talks led by Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s peace envoy.
But Mr. Beach also said that “this project is known about at the highest levels” in Moscow and Washington. He said he would soon announce the names of executives who would lead the project.
Last August, days after meeting Mr. Trump in Alaska, Mr. Putin said that “we are discussing with our American partners” the possibility of using Novatek technology to produce liquefied natural gas in Alaska. Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, said in October that foreign investors were interested in exporting the gas directly from Alaska’s North Slope.
Mr. Mikhelson, one of Russia’s richest men, has kept a low profile since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but met regularly with Mr. Putin before then, according to the Kremlin’s website.
Novatek, which has close ties to the Kremlin but is not state-controlled, is under partial U.S. sanctions, and some of its subsidiaries face more severe restrictions. Mr. Beach said he had been able to legally pursue his deal because the United States did not fully sanction the Novatek parent company itself.
Kirill Dmitriev, Mr. Putin’s economic envoy, has pitched a multitude of potential deals to Mr. Witkoff and other interlocutors, including jointly selling gas to Europe and building an undersea tunnel from Russia to Alaska.
Many U.S. companies scrambled to pull out of their business dealings with Russia after Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, facing intensifying Western sanctions and political pressure.
Under Mr. Trump, that pressure has eased. Last spring, Mr. Trump described Russia’s economic potential as a “tremendous opportunity.” But while the Kremlin was eager to reestablish business ties, Mr. Trump said that major deal-making would only be possible after Russia stopped its war in Ukraine.
That is why Mr. Beach’s deal could mark a milestone, especially as the U.S.-mediated Ukraine peace talks drag on. Mr. Beach said he was not waiting to jump into deal-making with Russia, because “the guy that’s early to the opportunity is usually the one I’ve found that makes the money.”
Most of the American corporate world, which once saw Russia as a hot emerging market with a growing middle class, remains skeptical about returning to the country because of the political uncertainty and the limited potential gains.
Ivan Grek, the director of George Washington University’s Russia program, said that Mr. Beach’s project could be an early test of whether new U.S.-Russia deals are realistic. He said he also saw interest in doing more business with Russia from medical technology, pharmaceutical and consumer goods companies.
“Gentry is a pioneer in this case, if not the only pioneer,” said Mr. Grek, who has been convening discussions among officials, businesspeople and academics on economic policy toward Russia.
Mr. Beach’s project would tackle an enduring conundrum for the U.S. energy industry: how to sell the huge amount of natural gas produced in the slice of tundra near Alaska’s Arctic Ocean coastline known as the North Slope. But it still faces major obstacles, including securing the participation of larger energy companies that would supply gas to the project.
It could also compete with Trump-backed plans for an 800-mile pipeline to send North Slope gas to southern Alaska, where it could be liquefied and exported. Mr. Beach argued that his project would be complementary to the pipeline.
The project would echo the approach Novatek has developed for shipping gas from the remote Russian Arctic: turning it into liquefied natural gas in a prefabricated plant and transporting it out by icebreaker. Novatek said in its statement that the climate in the Alaskan Arctic was similar.
“Experts have discussed this opportunity for many years,” Novatek’s statement went on. “Having said that, all the arrangements can only be implemented subject to support from the Russian and U.S. authorities.”
Mr. Beach described Mr. Mikhelson, the billionaire head of Novatek, as “very pro-American,” and said his agreement envisioned using a movable liquefied natural gas plant already under construction at Novatek’s factory in Russia’s Murmansk region. He also said he would seek to use ice-breaking liquefied natural gas carriers built in South Korea to transport the gas to Asian markets.
Mr. Beach said he was pursuing the Novatek project from a “purely business” perspective. But people with experience doing business in Russia said that Mr. Beach’s reputation as a Trump associate was likely to serve him well there.
Paul Ostling, a former Ernst & Young executive who served on Russian corporate boards until the Ukraine invasion in 2022, said the risks in Russia now were so steep that only people with strong political connections stood a chance of success in entering the market.
“That’s a huge difference from saying the door is open for normal business,” he said.
Anton Troianovski writes about American foreign policy and national security for The Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Berlin.
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