Remember when U.S. President Donald Trump declared that Russia would face “severe consequences” if it didn’t agree to a cease-fire in Ukraine? When he threatened to impose draconian sanctions if Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t agree to peace? When he told Fox News that he wouldn’t “be happy” if Putin didn’t stop the fighting?
All these things happened just before the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska on Aug. 15. Then, the U.S. media was full of feverish reports on Trump’s supposed vexation with Putin and alleged shift toward Ukraine. Since the U.S.-Russia mutual admiration event last week, all that has vanished down the memory hole, melted away like the snows of yesteryear. As many of the same reporters once again gush about the positive vibes emerging from Trump’s meetings with Zelensky and other European leaders at the White House yesterday, let’s keep their previous mistakes in mind.
In Alaska, Trump invited Putin, an indicted war criminal, into his limo for a private chat, drowned him in public flattery and praise, and blathered about the glittering future of U.S.-Russian relations. (Among other things, Trump declared Russia to be “number two in the world”—this about a nation whose economy is smaller than Italy’s.) Putin basked in the attention, celebrating his emergence from the international isolation he’s been in since 2022. Russian politicians hailed the meeting as a huge triumph. Shortly afterwards, Putin launched yet more drone and rocket attacks on Ukrainian cities, killing at least 14 Ukrainian civilians. Russian soldiers continued to press forward on the front lines.
What Kyiv should expect in return for Trump’s peacemaking remains unclear, but the initial signs are ominous in the extreme. When Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky after the summit, he shifted back into his old hectoring mode, saying that he told Zelensky that “it’s going to be up to him” to end the war. Fortunately, Trump changed his tone for the better when he welcomed Zelensky and other European leaders to the White House on Aug. 18. But none of the more positive notes emerging from those meetings change the fact that, as a result of Trump’s summit with Putin, the United States is evidently pressuring Ukraine to cede territory to the aggressor that invaded without provocation three and a half years ago, killing hundreds of thousands, setting millions of refugees in flight, and laying waste to the Ukrainian economy. On Moscow’s behalf, Washington even wants Kyiv to hand over large additional territories that are not under Russian occupation.
In his White House meeting with Zelensky and European leaders, Trump held out the possibility of U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine in the event of a settlement. But a clear sense of unease lingered beneath all the smiles, assurances, and positive statements. “I am not convinced that President Putin also wants peace,” French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters at a press conference. He has good reason to worry—Putin thinks he’s winning the war. He’ll be happy to string Trump along just as he’s done before, playing for time even as he continues the violence.
Though Trump is the ultimate decider, the current negotiations process wouldn’t be in the bad place it is now without Steve Witkoff, Trump’s shadow secretary of state. It was Witkoff’s many visits to Moscow—most recently on Aug. 6—that set in motion the events that have brought us to this point. Following a briefing with European leaders after his last meeting with Putin in Moscow, it was revealed that Witkoff apparently misunderstood what the Russians had told him, shocking his interlocutors. A White House spokesperson denied this account, saying Witkoff understood everything perfectly. But that sort of blunder would be expected for an envoy who has excluded U.S. State Department and National Security Council experts—who likely would have knowledge of Russia, Ukraine, and high-powered negotiations—from his meetings, sometimes relying solely on Kremlin-supplied interpreters, which is an appalling breach of diplomatic due diligence. Notoriously, Witkoff has been accused of not knowing the names of the Ukrainian provinces whose fate he is now working to decide.
The Alaska summit went ahead regardless, with Witkoff being one of the people in the room with Trump and Putin. How has Witkoff managed to keep Trump’s favor? Perhaps one of the reasons is Witkoff’s determination to stay on Putin’s good side by parroting Kremlin rhetoric. He has repeated its false claims that Russian speakers in Ukraine’s eastern provinces have endured discrimination at the hands of the Ukrainian government. He doesn’t seem to know that hundreds of thousands of people in those provinces have fled west to democratic Ukraine, rather than staying at home or moving to Russia. The Ukrainian military is filled with Russian speakers, and it is still perfectly normal to hear Russian spoken on the streets of big cities such as Kyiv or Kharkiv. “I just don’t see that he [Putin] wants to take all of Europe,” Witkoff once told a Fox News interviewer. “I take him at his word in this sense, and I believe the Europeans are beginning to come to that belief, too.”
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Witkoff made the memorable claim that Moscow’s control of the occupied territories has been legitimized by “referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule”—as if those votes hadn’t been organized at gunpoint by the aggressor’s troops. Witkoff also has a strikingly high opinion of Putin, the man who was perhaps best known, at least until he began bombing maternity hospitals, for poisoning his critics. “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy,” Witkoff told Carlson, describing the Russian leader as “gracious” and “great.” When a Wall Street Journal interviewer asked Witkoff about his assessment of Putin, the envoy replied: “I think that he’s strong for his country and he believes in what he’s doing.” The same could be said, of course, for pretty much every other dictator who has tried to take a blowtorch to a neighboring country or a sledgehammer to the international order.
On some level, Witkoff could hardly think otherwise, given his conspicuous reluctance to visit Ukraine and see what has actually been going on there. It is striking that the man who regularly visits Kyiv on Trump’s behalf, Keith Kellogg—a former U.S. Army general who is the United States’ special envoy for Ukraine and Russia—has been virtually iced out of the policy-making process while the bumbling, Putin-channeling Witkoff got an invitation to join the summit in Alaska. Witkoff was also the man that Trump chose to go on CNN and explain why the summit was actually a great success. Yet even as Witkoff touted the likelihood of a trilateral meeting between Trump, Putin, and Zelensky, the Russians were throwing cold water on the idea. The Europeans, for their part, have continued to insist that a cease-fire must take hold before serious negotiations can proceed.
In a world where accuracy and professionalism count, Witkoff would be long gone from his job. But he has risen to his present position precisely because he is the perfect embodiment of Trump’s low-information approach to international relations. These two men stand in a long tradition of American contempt for diplomatic expertise. The idea that good old common sense and back-slapping bonhomie can overcome foreign ideologies, age-old vendettas, or entrenched interests goes back to the very founding of the republic. Under Trump and Witkoff, it has merely been taken to an absurd and dangerous new extreme.
More importantly, though, the meeting in Alaska once again revealed the depths of Trump’s predilection for Russia—a predilection so successfully cultivated by Witkoff. Finding a diplomatic solution to the Russia-Ukraine war has never required this shameful degree of obeisance to the Russian dictator, yet Trump feels compelled to indulge in it regardless. He couldn’t care less about Putin’s morals or lack thereof. Putin is the leader of a big and supposedly strong country, so he deserves to have his praises sung. Zelensky clearly doesn’t hold the same place in Trump’s heart. He’s just a vassal, a chump to be ordered around.
But will the Ukrainians and their European supporters really accept a deal that involves giving up thousands of square miles of their own country to the thieving Russians? One wonders. If Trump and Witkoff try to impose such an outrageously unfair deal on Kyiv, the two businessmen may find, to their surprise, that the famously stubborn Ukrainians aren’t willing to go along. The Ukrainians won’t be swayed by hype about the commercial value of their oceanfront property. They won’t be convinced by security guarantees proclaimed by a Brooklyn real estate developer who can’t even remember the names of the provinces that he is trying to negotiate away. They’re not just fighting to preserve territory but also their sovereignty, democracy, and existence as an independent state. Moscow and Washington can issue all the diktats they want. But unless they address the cause of the conflict—namely, Russia’s imperial designs on its neighbor—they won’t really have ended anything.
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