As US officials prepare for peace talks in Saudi Arabia, Witkoff gave insights into Donald Trump‘s relationship with Putin in an extended interview with podcaster and former Fox News host, Tucker Carlson.
Instead, Pytin offered to stop attacks on Ukraine’s power grid in exchange for a pause on retaliatory strikes targeting Russia’s energy sector.
Here, The i Paper takes a look at the bombshell revelations from the interview.
Putin is ‘gracious’ and ‘smart’
He said he “liked” him, adding: “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. He’s super smart.”
Before meeting him in Moscow, Witkoff said someone in Trump’s administration told him to “watch it, because he’s an ex-KGB guy” – a reference to Putin’s former career in the Soviet Union’s security agency.
US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff (Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Pool Photo via AP)“In the old days, the only people who went into the KGB were the smartest people in the nation… He’s a super smart guy,” he said.
The Russian President said he went to his local church and met with a priest after hearing Trump had been shot in the ear at a rally in Pennsylvania last year, according to Witkoff’s account.
Witkoff said Putin gave him a “beautiful portrait” of Trump he had commissioned from a “leading Russian artist” and asked him to bring it back to the White House.
“This is the kind of connection that we’ve been able to re-establish through, by the way, a simple word called communication,” he added.
US envoy unable to recall names of Ukrainian territories in negotiations
“The largest issue in that conflict are these so-called four regions, Donbas, Crimea, you know the names and there are two others,” he said.
Witkoff said it was “correct” from the Kremlin’s perspective that the partially occupied territories in Ukraine were now part of Russia.
“Can (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelensky survive politically if he acknowledges this? This is the central issue in the conflict.”
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky (Photo: Sergei SUPINSKY / AFP)Zelensky stressed last weekend that Ukraine’s position “is that we do not recognise the occupied Ukrainian territories as Russian”.
Witkoff said a ceasefire in the Black Sea would be “implemented over the next week or so” and “we are not far away” from a full 30-day ceasefire.
Disputed referenda cited as ‘evidence’ of desire to split from Ukraine
Russia has staged referenda on joining the country in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, which Witkoff claimed as evidence of their desire to split from Ukraine.
Kyiv and the international community have widely disputed the legitimacy of the referenda, and CNN reported that voting in the regions has been carried out at gunpoint.
Even though Kyiv declared that elections were neither logistically possible nor constitutionally legal during wartime, Witkoff claimed that Ukraine’s leadership agreed to hold a presidential election.
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Sir Keir Starmer’s plan for an international force to support a ceasefire in Ukraine was dismissed by the envoy.
“There is this sort of notion that we have all got to be like [British wartime prime minister] Winston Churchill. Russians are going to march across Europe. That is preposterous by the way. We have something called Nato that we did not have in World War Two.”
US plans to ‘collaborate’ with Russia after ceasefire
“Who doesn’t want to have a world where Russia and the US are doing collaboratively good things together, thinking about how to integrate their energy polices in the Arctic, share sea lines maybe, send LNG gas into Europe together, maybe collaborate on AI together?” he said.
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