Steve Witkoff is teaching a master class to Russian officials on how to get what they want from Donald Trump.
On Oct. 14, Trump’s special envoy advised Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, on how the Russian dictator should curry favor with Trump before broaching a proposed peace plan between Russia and war-torn Ukraine, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday.
During the five-minute call, Witkoff told Putin’s henchman that the Russian president should personally phone Trump, 79, ahead of his planned meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—where Zelensky hoped, but ultimately failed, to secure long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles—to congratulate him on the Gaza ceasefire.
Thing is, that’s a distinction without a difference, at least in the eyes of analysts in the IC, the people charged with making a formal assessment. From that perspective, what you do is more important than why you do it because the effects aland the fallout are all the same.
Oh yeah no. If your working backwards from the end result I totally get that approach. I’m not making a moral defense here. All I’m saying is that while we’re in it it’s important to understand what’s going on (and perhaps more importantly what isn’t) in his head so that we have an understanding of what’s possible. What he might be thinking. In that world, not that of the IC or one that’s capable of assessing legal culpability, it’s important to draw a distinction between a principled ideologically driven actor and one that’s just floating on the whims of their shattered psyche.