By Noah Rothman
Friday, April 11, 2025
Steve Witkoff, a career real estate attorney drafted by
Donald Trump into the role of global conflict mediator, maintains a ballooning
portfolio.
Beyond his remit as Trump’s special envoy to the Middle
East, a role in which he attempted to guide Israel toward a conclusion of
conflict with Iran’s proxies on terms negotiated by the Biden administration, Witkoff is
also taking point on negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program and Russia
amid its expansionist adventure in Ukraine. Witkoff is in Saint Petersburg
today, where he met directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin. There,
Trump’s all-purpose negotiator seems to have been comprehensively outmaneuvered
by his Russian counterpart.
According to the “two U.S. officials and five people
familiar with the situation” with whom Reuters reporters spoke, “The fastest way to broker a
ceasefire in Ukraine, said Witkoff, was to support a strategy that would give
Russia ownership of four eastern Ukrainian regions it attempted to annex
illegally in 2022.”
Imagine that! If the United States and its allies
sanctioned the appeasement of the Kremlin by forcing Ukraine to give up the
territories Moscow tried to seize by force, it could enjoy a temporary reprieve
— at least, until Putin presses his territorial ambitions in Europe once again.
That’s quite the insight. Why didn’t anyone else think of that?
Russia could be enticed to enter a temporary cease-fire
that allows it to regroup, rearm, and reorient its exhausted forces in exchange
for reintegration into the global economy and the spoils of territorial
conquest it didn’t even manage to secure through force. That probably wouldn’t
take much arm-twisting. The Ukrainian people, not just Volodymyr Zelensky’s
government, would have a tougher time of it.
Accepting the concession of the four Ukrainian Oblasts
that Moscow unilaterally annexed into the Russian Federation — portions of
which the Russian military does not even control — would be a tough pill to
swallow. Given the Ukrainian experience behind enemy lines, in which its
citizens are summarily executed en masse, raped and tortured, their
children kidnapped, and their language and culture subject to stigmatization
and extermination — their hesitation is understandable.
In addition, it’s not clear what the West gets out of
this arrangement save the cold comfort that its citizens might derive from a
wretched condition that Trump could nonetheless call peace. Indeed, it seems
that arriving at that sort of ignominious peace, even if it is so clearly
unjust and pretextual that it only sets the stage for another war on terms
favorable to America’s enemies in Moscow, is the only objective Witkoff has in
mind.
If either Witkoff or his boss were observing the tenets
of the Art of the Deal, they would likely conclude from the Russian
leader’s intransigence that they are being strung along and the time to cut
bait is fast approaching. But this isn’t a real estate deal; it’s
world-historic geopolitics, the stakes and terms of which diverge dramatically
from the commercial transactions with which the president and his chief
negotiator are familiar.
If this were a business deal, neither Witkoff nor Trump
would attach their names to it. But politics is a different animal, and the
politics of the moment have convinced the representatives of the United States
that surrender is their best option. It remains to be seen whether the
Ukrainians, the Europeans, or the American people themselves will agree.
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