President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said his high-stakes talks with Vladimir Putin were “compelling” — and insisted the Russian leader was open to a “permanent peace” deal with Ukraine.
Witkoff sat down with Putin in St. Petersburg last Friday amid the Trump administration’s efforts to spearhead a deal to end the three-year war.
“I think we might be on the verge of something that would be very, very important for the world at large,” Witkoff told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Monday, adding “it took a while for us to get to this place.”
Witkoff said that after five hours of talks, he saw a deal “emerging.”
“This peace deal is about these so-called five territories, but there’s so much more to it,” he said.
Witkoff added, too, that he saw “a possibility to reshape the Russian-United States relationship through some very compelling commercial opportunities that I think give real stability to the region too.”
It comes after Trump on Monday described Russia’s assault on Ukraine as “Biden’s war” — before suggesting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky played a hand in starting the conflict.
“The War between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine. I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening,” he posted on Truth Social.
“President Putin, and everyone else, respected your President! I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS WAR, BUT AM WORKING DILIGENTLY TO GET THE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION TO STOP.”
The Kremlin, meanwhile, described the talks as useful and effective — but said the two had not substantively discussed a possible meeting between Putin and Trump.
Asked if a Putin-Trump meeting was inching nearer, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian state television the two powers were “walking along this path together very patiently” but that trying to restore relations took serious and painstaking work.
He suggested that such a meeting “requires more work, requires more time.”
Details of the talks emerged after Zelensky pleaded with Trump during a “60 Minutes” interview to visit his country to see the war’s devastation firsthand.
“We want you to come,” the Ukrainian president said.
“You think you understand what’s going on here. Okay, we respect your position. You understand. But, please, before any kind of decisions, any kind of forms of negotiations, come to see people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children destroyed or dead.”
“Come, look, and then let’s — let’s move with a plan how to finish the war,” he added.
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