Russian President Vladimir Putin said he prayed for “his friend” Donald Trump after an assassin’s bullet grazed the then-presidential candidate’s ear last year, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff said in an interview Friday.
Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, Witkoff praised Putin’s willingness to discuss how to end the war in Ukraine and said it was “preposterous” to say that Russia had designs on eventually attacking other countries in Europe.
Witkoff, who has met with Putin twice, said during his second visit to Moscow the Russian president’s messages for Trump “got personal.” The Russian autocrat recounted his deep concern after Trump was targeted in an assassination attempt during a campaign stop in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July of last year, Witkoff said.
Putin “told me a story … about how when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president,” Witkoff said. Putin did it “not because … he could become the president of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him, and he was praying for his friend.”
During the same visit, the Russian president presented a painting of Trump that he commissioned from a Russian artist as a gift to the American president, Witkoff said.
“I came home and delivered that message to our president, and delivered the painting, and he was clearly touched by it,” Witkoff said. “So this is the kind of connection that we’ve been able to re-establish through, by the way, a simple word called communication.”
Witkoff dismissed criticism of the Trump administration’s outreach to Putin, saying the only way to resolve the war in Ukraine is to speak to all sides in the conflict. He also rejected portrayals of Putin as a nefarious actor who can’t be trusted.
Witkoff said some people might question if he should have met with the Russian president because they see Putin as “a bad guy.” But he said: “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy.”
A real estate tycoon and friend of the president who has become a top diplomatic envoy for Trump, Wiktoff said he appreciated Putin being open to meeting with him and communicating in a “straightforward” way.
“I liked him. I thought he was straight up with me,” he said, adding that “it was gracious of him to accept me, to see me.”
Poisonings, shootings and plane crashes
Putin, a former KGB officer who has ruled Russia for the last 25 years, has been blamed for the killings of multiple Russian opposition leaders, most recently Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison last year.
Mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a plane crash last year, just months after leading his Wagner Group forces in an aborted mutiny against Putin. His short-lived rebellion was sparked by disagreements about the war in Ukraine. No investigative findings were released after the fiery crash, which also killed nine other people.
Boris Nemtsov, once considered the leader of Russia’s opposition and one of Putin’s fiercest critics, was shot dead in 2015, just a few feet away from the Kremlin.
And in 2018 former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in the U.K. with a nerve agent believed to be the same Novichok poison later used on Navalny. Two Russians also allegedly poisoned former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, an outspoken critic of Putin’s who had fled to the U.K.
Renowned journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down outside her Moscow apartment in 2006 after warning reporters in Russia about the risks of challenging the Kremlin’s narrative.
Putin blamed Biden
Witkoff said Putin pointed out in their meeting that he and former President Joe Biden did not speak for three years, which Witkoff called a mistake.
“How do you settle a conflict unless we establish trust and good feelings with one another?” Witkoff said.
Trump’s envoy said an administration official had warned him beforehand that Putin was a former KGB officer. But Witkoff said that background merely meant that Putin was among the elite in the former Soviet Union, as he said the spy service recruited highly capable people.
“In the old days, the only people who went into the KGB were the smartest people in the nation,” Witkoff said. “That’s who went into the KGB. He’s a super smart guy.”
Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine violated international law, and Russian forces appear to have committed war crimes there, according to European, United Nations and Biden administration officials. But Witkoff suggested the media coverage of the war had been distorted and that the conflict could not be blamed entirely on one side.
“That is a complicated situation that war, and all the ingredients that led up to it,” he said.
The special envoy said the key to resolving the war in Ukraine was Russia’s claim to four eastern regions in Ukraine — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. He called the issue “the elephant in the room.”
Ukraine opposes ceding the territory, which remains part of Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders.
Russian troops occupy most of the regions and Moscow has held referendums on joining Russia, which Western countries and Ukraine have denounced as shams conducted under repression.
But Witkoff, who struggled to name all four of the regions in the interview, cited the Russian-organized votes as an indication that people in the area preferred Russian rule.
“They’re Russian-speaking,” he said. “There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule.”
Witkoff said it was unclear if Ukraine could accept ceding that territory to Russia and if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy could survive politically if he acknowledged Russian control of the area.
“The Russians are de facto in control of these territories,” Witkoff said. “Will the world acknowledge that those are Russian territories?”
He added that Russia did not want to absorb all of Ukraine and that it already has what it wants, by taking the four eastern regions and the Crimean Peninsula.
“The Russians also have what they want,” he said. “So why do they need more?”
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