Trump’s inexperienced special envoy to Ukraine Steve Witkoff has made the White House Vladimir Putin’s mouthpiece
If it weren’t so pathetically predictable, the weekend’s developments in Washington pertaining to President Donald Trump’s 28-point peace plan for Ukraine would stretch credulity. It turns out the document is not – in fact – Trump’s 28-point peace plan, but mostly a Russian document that US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff or one of his colleagues may simply have run through an online translation app before giving it the White House seal of approval.
At the G20 Summit in Johannesburg, Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, was pictured in deep conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. As they discussed the crisis sparked by Trump’s demand that the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accept the American-backed plan by Thursday, or else face an immediate and complete cut in US military assistance, even the three European leaders may not have fully understood the scale of Trump’s sell-out to Moscow.
Sir Keir Starmer, France’s President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in South Africa on Saturday (Photo: Leon Neal/Getty)
The architect of the latest Kremlin moves to secure a peace that dismembers Ukraine and is entirely favourable only to Vladimir Putin, is one of the Russian leader’s most prominent advisers. Harvard-educated Kirill Dmitriev has shuttled back and forth between Moscow and various cities in the United States for meetings with Witkoff, Trump’s fellow property magnate who has become America’s de facto “Mr Fixit”.
The head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Dmitriev appears to have capitalised on Witfkoff’s lack of experience in the world of international diplomacy. Witkoff himself has said that in order to bone up on global affairs, he has watched a series of Netflix documentaries. But none, it appears, that provided relevant advice on how to avoid being taken in completely by Moscow.
Various clumsy efforts were made this weekend to clean up Witkoff’s mess, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio racing to Geneva for emergency talks with European foreign ministers. But the Trump administration could not even keep its own story about the document straight and managed to create a circular firing squad that left top Republicans taking aim at one another.
Head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, Kirill Dmitriev, and President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff (r) in St Petersburg in April (Photo: Vyacheslav Prokofyev/ Sputnik via Reuters)
Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota claimed that Rubio had disclosed in a phone call that the 28-point plan had its origins in Moscow. “He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to [Witkoff]. It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan”, he announced.
Hours later, State Department deputy spokesman Timothy Piggott contradicted Rounds’ claims. “As Secretary Rubio and the entire administration has consistently maintained, this plan was authored by the United States, with input from both the Russians and the Ukrainians,” he wrote on social media.
In Ukraine itself, the Kyiv Independent accused Witkoff of “running a shadow operation inside the White House in an effort to sideline pro-Ukraine officials”. The newspaper claimed that Rubio had been blindsided by the peace plan, and that Vice President JD Vance had been actively supporting Witkoff’s efforts to promulgate it.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, right, and Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga during the G7 Foreign Ministers earlier this month (Photo: Mandel Ngan/Pool Photo via AP)
It will now fall to European leaders, once again, to try and talk sense into Trump. For the second time in recent months, a phalanx of them were discussing the possible need to fly to Washington urgently, although that was before the revelations about the Russian origins of the peace plan.
On Saturday the President appeared to back away from his insistence that Zelensky must accept the plan before America’s Thanksgiving holiday weekend that begins on Thursday. Asked what would happen if Zelensky rejected the plan, Trump said “then he can continue to fight his little heart out”. Whether the US leader intends to make good on his threat to cut weapons shipments and other military assistance, including the provision of intelligence about the disposition of Russian forces, is unclear.
Hour after hour this weekend, revelations regarding the scale of Russia’s capacity to co-opt the Trump White House have stunned veteran US foreign policy observers. Phillips O’Brien, a respected American historian and professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, suggested on social media that “the US and Russian governments are now so close that the US government takes large parts of Russian proposals and passes them off as their own”. He went on to claim that “some people are so desperate to exonerate Trump that they act like this is a good thing”.
“We are doomed”, he concluded.