Sir Keir Starmer’s plan for an international force to support a ceasefire in Ukraine has been dismissed as “a posture and a pose” by Donald Trump’s special envoy.
Steve Witkoff said the idea was based on a “simplistic” notion of the UK prime minister and other European leaders thinking “we have all got to be like Winston Churchill”.
In an interview with pro-Trump journalist Tucker Carlson, Witkoff praised Vladimir Putin, saying he “liked” the Russian president.
“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy,” he said. “He’s super smart.”
Witkoff, who met Putin 10 days ago, said the Russian president had been “gracious” and “straight up” with him. Putin told him, he added, that he had prayed for Trump after an assassination attempt against him last year. He also said Putin had commissioned a portrait of the US president as a gift and Trump was “clearly touched by it”.
During the interview, Witkoff repeated various Russian arguments, including that Ukraine was “a false country” and asked when the world would recognise occupied Ukrainian territory as Russian.
Witkoff is leading the US ceasefire negotiations with both Russia and Ukraine but he was unable to name the five regions of Ukraine either annexed or partially occupied by Russian forces.
He said: “The largest issue in that conflict are these so-called four regions, Donbas, Crimea, you know the names and there are two others.”
The five regions – or oblasts – are Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Crimea. Donbas refers to an industrial region in the east that includes much of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Witkoff made several assertions that are either not true or disputed:
- He said Ukrainian troops in Kursk were surrounded, something denied by Ukraine’s government and uncorroborated by any open-source data
- He said the four partially occupied regions of Ukraine had held “referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule”. There were referendums only in some of the occupied parts of Ukraine at different times and the methodology and results were widely discredited and disputed
- He said the four partially occupied oblasts were Russian-speaking. There are many Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine but this has never indicated support for Russia.
The US is set to hold separate talks in Saudi Arabia with Ukraine and Russia about a ceasefire at meetings over Sunday and Monday.
Ahead of that, Ukrainian authorities said Russia had launched drone attacks on Kyiv overnight, resulting in deaths of three people, including a five-year-old child.
Officials said that eight people had been injured.
Russia also struck the southern city of Zaporizhzhia on Friday, killing a family of three.
Meanwhile, on Sunday Russia’s ministry of defence said it had shot down 59 Ukrainian drones across a number of regions in the south as well as in Crimea, the peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
During his interview, Witkoff also repeated several Kremlin talking points about the cause of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
He said it was “correct” that from the Russian perspective the partially occupied territories were now part of Russia: “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?”
He added: “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, and that’s something nobody wants to talk about.”
Putin has repeatedly said that the “root causes” of his invasion were the threat posed to Russia by an expanded Nato and the sheer existence of Ukraine as an independent country.
Witkoff said in the Tucker Carlson interview: “Why would they want to absorb Ukraine? For what purpose? They don’t need to absorb Ukraine… They have reclaimed these five regions. They have Crimea and they have gotten what they want. So why do they need more?”
Asked about Keir Starmer’s plans to forge a “coalition of the willing” to provide military security guarantees for a post-war Ukraine, Witkoff said: “I think it’s a combination of a posture and a pose and a combination of also being simplistic. There is this sort of notion that we have all got to be like [British wartime prime minister] Winston Churchill. Russians are going to march across Europe. That is preposterous by the way. We have something called Nato that we did not have in World War Two.”
He said a ceasefire in the Black Sea would be “implemented over the next week or so” and “we are not far away” from a full 30-day ceasefire.
He also gave details of how Trump wanted to co-operate with Russia after relations had been normalised. “Who doesn’t want to have a world where Russia and the US are doing collaboratively good things together, thinking about how to integrate their energy polices in the Arctic, share sea lines maybe, send LNG gas into Europe together, maybe collaborate on AI together?”
