Steve Witkoff “had no idea about Russia” or Vladimir Putin and “wasn’t too interested” when he first began negotiating with the Kremlin over a potential peace deal for Ukraine, US President Donald Trump said on Monday.
Trump made the remarks during an hour-long address to Israel’s parliament marking the release of 20 surviving hostages as part of a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.
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The speech, the first such address by a sitting US president to the Knesset since 2008, drew a lengthy standing ovation as some lawmakers were seen donning signature red MAGA caps emblazoned with “Trump the Peace President.”
As part of a triumphal victory lap, Trump lavished praise on his roving envoy Steve Witkoff, describing him as a “great negotiator,” a “great guy” and even “Henry Kissinger who doesn’t leak” as the envoy’s name sparked loud cheers from Israeli MPs.
Trump’s description of Witkoff’s role in negotiations with Russia, however, was more mixed.
“I set up a meeting for him to meet with President [Vladimir] Putin, thinking it would be a 15 or 20 minute meeting,” the US president recalled. “Steve had no idea about Russia, had no idea about Putin too much, didn’t know too much about politics, wasn’t too interested.”
“He was really good at real estate, but he had that quality I was looking for,” Trump continued.
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“They love him on this side, they love him on the other side”
In an anecdote about Witkoff’s April meeting with Putin, one of five over the course of six months and one that Russian state media reported at the time had lasted four and a half hours, Trump said he was stunned to find out that Witkoff had spoken with the Russian president for all of five hours.
The US president said that he called repeatedly to ask if Witkoff had left the meeting, before the conversation finally concluded.
“I said, ‘What the hell were you talking about for five hours?’” Trump quipped. “And he said: ‘Just a lot of interesting things, we were just talking about a lot of interesting things.’”
Trump said that Witkoff’s success as a negotiator was due to two factors: “Most people I’d send in, number one, they wouldn’t be accepted. Number two, if they were in there the meeting would last five minutes.”
“That’s what happens with Steve,” he explained. “Everybody loves him. They love him on this side, they love him on the other side.”
The remarks may go some way in explaining the conciliatory attitude displayed towards Russia in the first months of the second Trump administration, as Putin was greeted in Anchorage with a red carpet while ceasefire demands were dropped and threats of a tough crackdown repeatedly failed to materialize.
In an interview in March, Witkoff called Putin a “great guy,” “honest” and “super smart,” adding: “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy.”
“Rogue actor”
Critics, however, have raised alarms about Witkoff’s unorthodox and solitary approach to negotiations.
In August, Politico reported based on conversations with 13 sources that there were deep concerns among some US, Ukrainian and European officials about the “go-it-alone style” taken by Witkoff, who “refused to consult with experts and allies, leaving him uninformed at times and unprepared at others.”
“He’s kind of a rogue actor,” one US official told the outlet. “He talks to all these people, but no one knows what he says in any of these meetings. He will say things publicly but then he changes his mind. It’s hard to operationalize that.”
When the US president’s “fixer” flies to Moscow to meet with Putin, he does not bring policy experts and has on occasion relied on Kremlin-provided translators rather than bringing his own interpreter, according to reports.
There is often little information about what has been discussed and the meetings are shrouded in secrecy.
However, Witkoff has also been generously praised for his efforts in some corners, with US Vice President JD Vance saying that he “had made more progress towards ending the bloodshed in Ukraine than all his critics combined.”
“Time to focus on Russia”
Speaking on Monday, Trump said it is “time to focus on Russia” after his ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.
In a post on X praising Trump for the deal, President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed similar hopes, saying: “Russian aggression remains the last global source of destabilization, and if a ceasefire and peace have been achieved for the Middle East, the leadership and determination of global actors can certainly work for us too, in Ukraine, in Europe.”
It came after earlier in the day he accused Russia of “pouncing on the opportunity that global diplomacy’s eyes are on the Middle East” to further escalate the situation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and pursue ferocious attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid.
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