Witkoff Sides With Putin To Impose Pro-Russia Deal On Ukraine

In widely criticized remarks about Russia, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff has attempted to create the conditions to impose an unfavorable ceasefire deal on Ukraine. Witkoff has been faulted for lacking the knowledge to negotiate a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. The criticism came after Witkoff made a series of disputed statements during an interview with ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, comments praised in the Russian media. In the interview, Witkoff, who Trump has tasked to lead efforts with Russia to end the war in Ukraine, repeated several pro-Kremlin talking points that few analysts believe are trustworthy and said he admired Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s kindness and intelligence. The broader context of Witkoff’s statements may be Donald Trump’s pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize without concern for a deal’s impact on Ukraine’s sovereignty and long-term security.

Witkoff Accused Of Ignorance Of Facts About Russia And Ukraine

In February 2025, Donald Trump appointed his longtime friend Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate developer, an American envoy to Russia and Vladimir Putin. There is no publicly available evidence that Witkoff possesses expertise on Russia or the region’s history.

After meeting with Putin in February as part of a prisoner exchange to release American Marc Fogel, Witkoff made the first of many disputed and controversial remarks about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. (Russia engaged in a more limited invasion in 2014, annexing Crimea and sending troops into other parts of Ukraine.) On CNN in February 2025, Witkoff declared that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “was provoked.” He added, “It doesn’t necessarily mean it was provoked by the Russians.”

In The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History, Harvard University professor Serhii Plokhy provides a definitive account of the history leading up to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Plokhy documents that Russia’s strategy for many years has been to control Ukraine, disarm its military and choose a leadership to Putin’s liking. In Forged in War: A Military History Of Russia From Its Beginnings To Today, Mark Galeotti, a historian and an expert on Russia, writes that Putin’s success using select soldiers in small-scale military operations, such as in Georgia, helped lead to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Those operations would give “Putin a mistaken sense of his armed forces as a whole and lead him into a disastrous miscalculation.” UK intelligence estimates 900,000 Russian soldiers have died or been wounded in Ukraine. (See here for more books.)

In a March 21, 2025, podcast interview with Tucker Carlson, Witkoff said the main obstacle to peace was not Russia stopping military action and withdrawing to the borders with Ukraine it had agreed to in previous treaties. Instead, he said the problem was the Ukrainian government not recognizing regions that Russia invaded and now occupies to various degrees.

Witkoff could not recall the names of the parts of Ukraine he said the country should cede to Russia. “He said it was ‘correct’ that from the Russian perspective the partially occupied territories were now part of Russia,” reported the BBC. “The elephant in the room is, there are constitutional issues within Ukraine as to what they can concede to with regard to giving up territory. The Russians are de facto in control of these territories. The question is: will the world acknowledge that those are Russian territories?” according to Witkoff.

He repeated Putin’s views on Ukraine: “There’s a sensibility in Russia that Ukraine is just a false country, that they just patched together in this sort of mosaic, these regions, and that’s what is the root cause, in my opinion, of this war, that Russia regards those five regions as rightfully theirs since World War Two.”

In another controversial statement, Witkoff claimed the late Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave the territories to Ukraine and said the regions should belong to Russia because many residents there speak the Russian language. He also cited referendums held during military occupation to justify giving the territories to Russia, even though international authorities condemned the votes and the U.S. State Department called the referendums “shams,” where “Ukrainian civilians were forced to cast ballots under the watch of Russian soldiers.”

“The depth of ignorance is something,” wrote Yaroslav Trofimov, the Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign-affairs correspondent and author of the book Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence. “Not only Steve Witkoff cannot name the five Ukrainian regions he’s ready to sign away to Russia, he also thinks they had been handed over to Ukraine by Khrushchev. (Crimea is the only one of the five that was transferred in 1954 to Ukraine under Khrushchev, who was actually not a Ukrainian, though he came from a border area of Russia.)”

Phil Gordon, a former National Security Council staff member in three White Houses, wrote, “Also does not seem to know that majorities in all those regions voted for independence from Russia in 1991, that Russia tried to conquer the whole country in 2022, and that what is really at stake here is the principle of not taking even contested territory by force.”

Military analysts dispute Witkoff’s claim that Russia had no interest in taking over Ukraine, given that Russian forces invaded the country from multiple directions in 2022 focused on that goal, including landing at Hostomel Airport, 12 miles from the center of the capital, Kyiv. Russian troops withdrew from other parts of the country and concentrated on the regions closest to its border with Ukraine only after fierce fighting by Ukrainians repelled the Russian military.

Despite this well-documented history, Witkoff said, “First of all, why would they want to absorb Ukraine? For what purpose, exactly? They don’t need to absorb Ukraine. That would be like occupying Gaza. . . .But the Russians also have what they want. They’ve gotten—they’ve reclaimed these five regions. They have Crimea, and they’ve gotten what they want. So why do they need more?” Few analysts or historians support Witkoff’s statement that Russia has “reclaimed” rather than conquered sovereign territory. Whether Russia plans to “absorb” Ukraine or control the fate of Ukrainians through other means, Ukrainians would say it still entails relinquishing rights to a foreign power that has committed many atrocities on their soil.

Except for Crimea, Russia does not control the entirety of the other regions, or even the capitals of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. “Giving Russia control of the entire regions, something they have not won on the battlefield, would also give them a foothold on the right (Western) bank of the Dnipro River, which would make it far easier for them to advance further militarily, including towards Odesa,” according to Syracuse University professor Brian Taylor, author of Russian Politics: A Very Short Introduction.

He notes Ukrainian citizens living under Russian occupation in these regions are subjected to a variety of war crimes, including torture, rape, murder, disappearances and the abduction of children. Putin said recently that people living in the occupied territories must take Russian citizenship or be deported. “Either of these acts constitute a war crime,” said Taylor.

“Witkoff is very clearly out of his depth and breathtakingly ill-informed,” Dr. Bob Seely, a former Tory MP and an expert on the Russian military, told the Daily Mail. “He doesn’t know the names of the areas that he’s talking about. Saying the Ukrainian people want to be part of Russia—it is an absolute disgrace. . . .This man is simply regurgitating Kremlin propaganda.”

Russian expert Mark Galeotti argues the context of Witkoff’s statements is as important as what he’s saying. “He’s not an analyst or a moderator. He doesn’t care about the facts. He’s a political hitman out to impose a particular deal, and he’ll say what he needs to set up and justify it.” In that sense, Witkoff is following Donald Trump’s playbook by introducing disputed arguments as facts and forcing others to operate from that premise.

Witkoff Heaps Controversial Praise On Russia And Vladimir Putin

After meeting with Vladimir Putin to discuss the war, Witkoff praised Putin and excused the invasion of Ukraine as a “complicated situation.” He said, “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. That is a complicated situation, that war and all the ingredients that led up to it. You know, it’s never just one person, right?” The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for abducting approximately 20,000 Ukrainian children and bringing them to Russia, and most democratic governments have condemned him for starting a war that has killed thousands of civilian deaths and generated an estimated one million or more military casualties.

Witkoff passed along to Trump Putin’s claim—later disproven—that Russian forces had surrounded and were positioned to decimate Ukrainian troops in Kursk, which is part of Russia. It resulted in Trump repeating the false claim and asking Putin to spare the lives of the Ukrainian soldiers, which served the Russian government’s purpose of creating the impression it was defeating Ukraine in the war.

“The front line is not about to collapse,” wrote Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment who has made several trips to the front lines during the war. “Despite AFU [Armed Forces of Ukraine] being largely pressed out of Kursk, the overall situation from Pokrovsk to Kupyansk improved. The implication being that Ukraine is not in a desperate situation requiring a rushed ceasefire under unfavorable terms.”

During a March 23, 2025, Fox News interview, Witkoff made additional statements that were best understood as trying to sell a deal rather than depicting reality. He called repeating Russian talking points “level setting the facts,” which recalled a Trump press aide using the term “alternative facts” to describe Donald Trump’s claims about the crowd size at his first inauguration. Witkoff said he takes Putin “at his word” that the Russian leader does not want to take more of Ukraine or parts of Europe.

Witkoff claimed that the “Europeans are coming to the belief” that Putin has no greater designs on Europe, a statement contradicted by the actions of those governments. Germany recently approved a historic borrowing authority by changing its constitution to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bolster its military against Russia. The United Kingdom announced it would increase defense spending to 2.5% of Gross Domestic Product. The European Union approved borrowing authority of nearly $900 billion for countries to invest in defense due to the threat of Russia and concerns about America’s retreat from Europe.

In the Tucker Carlson interview, Witkoff said of Putin: “He’s a super smart guy. Okay. You don’t want to give him the credit for it. That’s okay. I give him the credit for it.” He tried to humanize the Russian leader, who has killed and imprisoned political opponents, by repeating an unverified story. “And told me a story, Tucker, about how when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president, not because he was the President of the United States or could become the President of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend.”

After reading Witkoff’s remarks about Putin, Shashank Joshi, the defense editor for The Economist, said, “The Russians must be dumbstruck that their opponents have managed to find perhaps the most gullible man on the planet.” Whether or not he is gullible or misinformed, Witkoff hopes to create the conditions to impose an unfavorable agreement on Ukraine.

“The real problem that Trump and Witkoff don’t understand is that Putin doesn’t want a deal, he wants victory, which he defines as the subjugation of Ukraine,” said Brian Taylor. “This has been clear from the first day of the full-scale invasion and remains true today.”