Trump's special envoy dismisses Starmer's Ukraine plan as a 'posture and a pose'
23 March 2025, 06:36
Donald Trump’s special envoy has dismissed Sir Keir Starmer’s peace plan for Ukraine as "a posture and a pose."
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Steve Witkoff, who met with Vladimir Putin ten days ago, accused the prime minister and other European leaders of thinking "we have all got to be like Winston Churchill."
“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy, he’s super smart,” Witkoff told pro-Trump former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
During their meeting Putin had been “gracious” and “straight up with him,” he added.
He also revealed Putin had commissioned a portrait of Donald Trump as a gift, a move that the 47th president was “clearly touched by.”
Sir Keir Starmer says any deal between Ukraine and Russia 'must be a lasting deal'
Speaking about Ukraine, Witkoff parroted a series of pro-Russian arguments, including branding the European nation a “false country.”
Unable to name the five regions of Ukraine Putin has annexed, Witkoff, who is leading ceasefire talks, said: "The largest issue in that conflict are these so-called four regions, Donbas, Crimea, you know the names and there are two others."
He missed out: Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson.
"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,” he said.
“The Russians are de facto in control of these territories. The question is: will the world acknowledge that those are Russian territories?
"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."
He went on to dismiss the idea that Russia could “absorb” all of Ukraine if given control over those five regions.
This comes despite Putin's attempt to invade the entirety of Ukraine when Russian troops first entered the country in 2022.
"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?"
On Euope’s peace plan for Ukraine, he 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 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."
