Steve Witkoff is Donald Trump’s representative in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and is responsible for brokering a ceasefire deal between Russia and Ukraine to bring the war to an end
Donald Trump’s bumbling special envoy Steve Witkoff made repeated errors about Ukraine. Witkoff is Trump’s man-on-the ground to negotiate a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia, but the advisor seems completely unaware of the history of the conflict and the countries involved.
To make matters worse, he has repeated some of Russia’s own false claims about Ukraine. During an interview with pro-Trump journalist Tucker Carlson, Witkoff said Ukraine was a “false country” and questioned when occupied territory in Ukraine would be recognised as Russian. Early in the war, the Kremlin seized several Ukrainian territories and held mock referendums to give their land grab validity.
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The rest of the world, including America up until now, slammed the snatching of territory as illegal under international law and refused to acknowledge the territories as Russian.
Witkoff couldn’t even name the five regions annexed and occupied by Vladimir Putin’s forces – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Crimea. The “Donbas” area he referred to is an eastern region where most of Luhansk and Donetsk are situated.
The official also claimed that Kyiv’s troops in Kursk were surrounded. The Ukrainian government has denied this, and there is no data to prove the assertion. He said that in the regions where referendums were held, the “majority of the people” voted for Russian rule.
The referendums were not as widespread as Witkoff claims, and they have been widely disputed and discredited. He also claimed residents of the occupied oblasts spoke Russian, inferring that this indicated support for the Putin regime, which is untrue.
In the same interview Witkoff turned on Keir Starmer, claiming the UK’s plan to create a “coalition of the willing” to maintain peace in Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire was a “combination of posture and a pose”. He then accused the PM of thinking all leaders have to “be like Winston Churchill”.
“The Russians are going to march across Europe. I think that’s preposterous. We have something called Nato that we did not have in World War Two,” he added.
However, he praised tyrannical warlord Putin who he recently met in Moscow. He told Carlson he “liked” Putin and that he doesn’t “regard Putin as a bad guy”. He said: “I thought that he was straight up with me.”
It comes as US and Russian negotiators sit down for talks in Saudi Arabia on a partial ceasefire in Ukraine, hours after a round of negotiations between US and Ukrainian delegations.
The Russian-state Tass and RIA-Novosti news agencies said the negotiations had begun in the capital Riyadh. The meeting is expected to be followed by another contact between US and Ukrainian teams.
The separate meetings are set to discuss details of a pause in long-range attacks from both Russia and Ukraine against energy facilities and civilian infrastructure, as well as a halt on attacks in the Black Sea to ensure safe commercial shipping.
Ukraine and Russia agreed in principle Wednesday to a limited ceasefire after Trump spoke with the countries’ leaders, but the parties have offered different views of what targets would be off-limits and accused each other of undermining efforts to reach a ceasefire.
While the White House said “energy and infrastructure” would be covered, the Kremlin suggested the agreement referred more narrowly to “energy infrastructure.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he would also like railways and ports to be protected.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasised Friday that the agreement reached between Trump and Putin referred only to energy facilities, adding that the Russian military is fulfilling Putin’s order to halt such attacks for 30 days.
Peskov accused Ukraine of derailing the partial ceasefire with an attack on a gas metering station in Sudzha in Russia’s Kursk region. Ukraine’s military General Staff rejected Moscow’s accusations and blamed the Russian military for shelling the Sudzha gas metering station, a claim Peskov rejected as “absurd.”
As negotiations on a partial ceasefire progressed, Russia launched a barrage of drones across Ukraine overnight on Saturday that killed at least seven people, including a father and his five-year-old daughter in the capital Kyiv.
In a televised statement Sunday evening, Zelensky said: “Since March 11, a proposal for an unconditional ceasefire has been on the table, and these attacks could have already stopped. But it is Russia that continues all this.
“There must be more pressure on Russia to stop this terror.” He added that it “depends on all our partners – the US., Europe, and others around the world”.
Zelensky said Ukraine is open to a full, 30-day ceasefire that Trump has proposed, while Putin has made a complete ceasefire conditional on a halt of arms supplies to Kyiv and a suspension of Ukraine’s military mobilisation – demands rejected by Ukraine and its Western allies.