President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev stated that former senior German officials had met in Baku in July with representatives of Vladimir Putin. Aliyev’s revelation followed a recent Die Zeit probe, which reported that the principal negotiators on the German side are former head of the Federal Chancellery Ronald Pofalla and former Minister President of Brandenburg Matthias Platzeck, while Russia was represented by former Prime Minister and Gazprom board chairman Viktor Zubkov.
Speaking at a press conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin on July 21, Aliyev said: “Our territory was used for such a meeting without our knowledge. I cannot comment on the details, as we were not present at the meeting. However, flight data allows me to confirm that a secret meeting in Baku did indeed take place. If this meeting was aimed at facilitating an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine, we can only welcome it.”
Aliyev declined to name the participants in the Baku talks. Merz, for his part, stated that he had no knowledge of such contacts.
The Azerbaijani president spoke of only one meeting. However, as the Die Zeit investigation shows, the matter concerns a series of contacts between Zubkov, Pofalla, and Platzeck going back at least to 2024. The newspaper noted that Pofalla and Zubkov share close ties. They served as co-chairs of the Petersburg Dialog forum, which was established in 2001 under the patronage of Vladimir Putin and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (though Germany withdrew from the forum following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine).
At the most recent alleged meeting in Baku, held on July 13, Zubkov was accompanied by two other Russian representatives: Alexei Gromyko, director of the Institute of Europe at the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Valery Fadeyev, chair of the Presidential Council for Human Rights. Fadeyev is subject to EU sanctions.
According to Die Zeit, Moscow plans to use Pofalla (a member of the ruling CDU) and Platzeck (an SPD member) to influence Germany’s ruling coalition by convincing their German counterparts that ending the war in Ukraine is only possible on the Kremlin’s terms. According to the newspaper, German security services regard these contacts as a Kremlin operation aimed at influencing Berlin’s policy.
Notably, similar contacts between Zubkov and Pofalla in Baku were in both 2024 and 2025. In May of last year, it was alleged that former OSCE Secretary General, Swiss diplomat Thomas Greminger, participated in the talks, and that Zubkov was accompanied by Fadeyev at that time as well. Aside from Baku, the negotiators met once in Abu Dhabi. At least five such in-person contacts are said to have taken place in total.
