Russian dictator Vladimir Putin attends a plenary session of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russia, September 5, 2024.
Steve Witkoff is a U.S. presidential envoy. Describing a recent phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Witkoff said, “It was these two great leaders coming together for the betterment of mankind.” I discussed this in a post last week. In my opinion, Putin is not a great leader and has no interest in the betterment of mankind. Quite the opposite.
Witkoff has now given another interview, saying that he likes Putin, that Putin has been “straight up” with him, and so on.
Here are maybe the mushiest of Witkoff’s remarks:
President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist and actually gave it to me and asked me to take it home to President Trump, which I brought home and delivered to him. . . . It was such a gracious moment.
Also,
[Putin] 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.
Uh-huh.
“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy,” said Witkoff. Clearly not.
When I was coming of age, conservative Republicans used Joseph Davies as a cautionary tale. Davies was our ambassador to Moscow during the Great Terror. Whatever his merits, Davies was incredibly naïve and gullible.
Wrote Davies, “He gives the impression of a strong mind which is composed and wise. His brown eye is exceedingly kindly and gentle. A child would like to sit in his lap, and a dog would sidle up to him.” Our ambassador was talking about Josef Stalin.
Once more, such naïveté and gullibility can be found in the highest councils of our government — and in a Republican administration backed enthusiastically by the Right, which shocks many of us who lived through an earlier period.
In the above-cited interview, Witkoff said that people in four Ukrainian oblasts had voted to be ruled by Russia. This happens to be the Kremlin line as well. The occupying Russians carried out “referenda” at gunpoint.
I would like to recommend a piece by Peter Dickinson for the Atlantic Council: “Putin is ruthlessly erasing Ukrainian identity in Russian-occupied Ukraine.”
Evidently, it is an article of faith among Republicans that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, behaved badly in the Oval Office, with Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Said Witkoff,
Putin’s got a huge respect for the president. And, you know, you saw what happened in the Oval Office with Zelensky and the president. Disrespecting him is not a healthy way to have a good relationship.
Zelensky did not “disrespect” Trump. He had the temerity to point out that Putin cannot be trusted to abide by agreements, having broken so many agreements in the past. Zelensky is a realist. No leader in his shoes can afford naïveté or gullibility.
Why do Republicans, in politics and the media, think that Zelensky behaved badly? It could be that they are accustomed to obsequiousness before Trump. And when a head of state or anyone else is non-obsequious, it looks weird to them, even outrageous.
(A Ukrainian satirist put together a cartoon video, interpreting the Oval Office fiasco. It is tragicomic. The White House would not like it, at all.)
Interviewing Steve Witkoff on Fox News, Shannon Bream challenged him: Are people wrong to characterize Putin as a tyrant? Someone whose political opponents tend to disappear or die? Witkoff answered, “I think, in my 68 years on this earth, I’ve never, ever seen a situation where there isn’t two sides to a story. It’s just never as black and white as people want to portray. So, there are grievances on both sides.”
Both sides, huh? Well, we have Putin’s side — how about Boris Nemtsov’s or Alexei Navalny’s? Are they available to give theirs? No, they are in their tombs, which is where Putin’s opponents somehow wind up.
When I was young, I heard from the Left, “It’s complicated. It’s not black and white. There are two sides.” Blah blah blah. I heard it about the Soviet Union, about China, about Cuba, about Cambodia — conservative Republicans poured scorn on it (and rightly so).
Last fall, I wrote a piece called “Our Political World, Topsy-Turvy.” The subheading: “The Right today often sounds like the Left of yore.”
A news item from this morning:
Russian forces launched a drone attack overnight on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, killing three people — including a 5-year-old child — and injuring 10 others, according to the city administration.
Among the dead were a father and his young daughter. The youngest casualty was 11 months old.
The chief foreign-affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal says the following:
The Ukrainian civilians murdered by Russia are not just numbers. They have faces, histories and even Instagram accounts. This is the family wiped out by Iranian-designed drones in Kyiv last night. https://t.co/Kn41OlVVDD
— Yaroslav Trofimov (@yarotrof) March 23, 2025
Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, I wrote a piece called “The End of Illusions.” I thought of it when listening to Steve Witkoff, saying that Ukrainians in the eastern oblasts want to be ruled by Moscow and all the rest of it. He is chockfull of illusions, three years after the full-scale invasion. And he plays an important role in U.S. policy toward Russia.
In that piece, I wrote,
Let us have an end to illusions: that Ukraine is not a real country; that Ukrainians are essentially Russians with a funny accent; that one half of Ukraine wants to be free and independent while the other half wants to be ruled by Russia; that Putin is looking out for the Russian-speakers; that he is a guardian and champion of Christian civilization; that NATO is obsolete and unnecessary; that the United States must “pivot to China” because Russia and Europe are insignificant; that the fates of nations, in either hemisphere, are unrelated; that Ukraine is a Nazi enterprise; and so on and so forth.
An end to illusions is impossible. They are never killed off entirely. But maybe we could have fewer of them? A reprieve from them?