Witkoff Meets with Putin Envoy to Set US-Russia Relations, Ukraine Back on Track
Oct. 25—With President Donald Trump enroute to Asia for meetings that will include an expected "sidelines" summit at the APEC gathering in South Korea with Chinese President Xi Jinping, his Special Envoy Steve Witkoff met for several hours with Russian President Vladimir Putin's special envoy Kirill Dmitriev in Miami today. According to sources close to the White House, Trump had charged Witkoff with repairing U.S.-Russia relations following the bungled efforts of his Russophobe Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a call with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, that had caused Trump to postpone his proposed Budapest summit with Putin and to place sanctions on two major Russian oil companies.
The sources say that Witkoff did his job, and that the summit process is back on track, if delayed into the coming month. Trump had thought that in a phone call last week with Putin he had secured basic agreement to a ceasefire-in-place to jumpstart the peace process in Ukraine. Sources reported that Putin is willing to agree to the measure, which would stop the slaughter of NATO's war against Russia using Ukrainian bodies, which, according to Trump, is killing more than 7,000 soldiers from both sides a week. But such an agreement, these sources say, is preconditioned on getting NATO to agree to halt its eastward expansion to Russia's borders and the understanding that Ukraine will never join NATO.
Ceasefire Conditions and NATO Expansion
Witkoff, whom Trump pulled back from duty policing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu—the Butcher of Gaza's efforts to break the ceasefire with Hamas and restart his genocide against Palestinians—to work on ending the Ukraine war, reiterated Trump's commitment to block NATO expansion and his effort to get NATO's Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy to renounce NATO membership. He agreed with both Putin and Dmitriev that such agreement was necessary to enable a ceasefire-in-place to come out of any Trump-Putin summit.
Rubio, these sources report, in briefing Trump on his call with Lavrov, said that the Russians were insisting on dealing with all the root causes of the war and appeared to have no real interest in conceding any territory back to Ukraine, nor in stopping the fighting that they claimed they were winning. To support this assessment, Rubio reportedly briefed Trump on a special State Department intelligence report that said Putin had no interest in seeking a peace deal until he had fully achieved his military goals in Ukraine, which the report said was to take over all of Ukraine.
Sources noted that this insane assessment, drafted with the "help" of intelligence from the British and NATO, runs contrary to assessments from the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA.
Trump’s Strategic Rejection of War
Trump has decided already that this war is not America's war, said the source, and that the United States has no security interest in seeing it continue. "Trump has absolutely rejected the new version of the 'domino theory' used to justify America's disastrous war in Southeast Asia in the 1960s," said a source. "Trump does not believe that if Ukraine should fall, then Putin will devour all of Western Europe. He does not even believe that Putin wants to conquer the whole of Ukraine. If he did, he could have taken Kyiv a long time ago and totally taken out the Zelenskyy government and the military command."
Dmitriev again stressed this to Witkoff, further stating that Putin knows it is not the United States that is sabotaging peace, but the Europeans—whose leaders are mostly insane—and the British, who are and have been for centuries obsessed with destroying Russia. "It is one of the largest countries in the world—it does not need any more land."
Summit Prospects and Strategic Frameworks
This and other sources say that the meeting today has put not just the Ukraine peace process and a summit back on track, but also the expressed desire of Trump and Putin to normalize and improve relations. Dmitriev reportedly brought up Putin's offer to extend the START arms control treaty for one year beyond its February expiration date to allow time for negotiations on a new strategic and security framework that would involve START and other treaties. He told Witkoff that a clear and positive response to this offer from Trump would break the back of the effort launched by the Brits and NATO to turn all of Europe into a nuclear war-ready garrison state.
As for the summit itself, the preparations are ongoing. It can be announced for a date whenever Trump is ready to have some kind of agreement on NATO expansion in the pot, so that a workable ceasefire could come out of the discussion.
Bering Strait Tunnel and Broader Vision
Dmitriev also stressed to Witkoff the importance of his revival of the plans for a Bering Strait tunnel. He said that this project, more than any other, best symbolized the reality of what should be the relationship of the two countries—we are joined together for the progress of all mankind. He reportedly warned Witkoff not to believe British propaganda from sources such as the Financial Times saying there is no interest in the Bering Strait project in Russia. That is a lie, he said, because they are afraid of what it means.
The Financial Times expressed its total hostility to the idea, reporting that Dmitriev keeps proposing “potentially lucrative joint ventures in mining, the Arctic and even a tunnel under the Bering Strait,” only to argue that this will never work. “But after the new sanctions, Russian business circles have met the push with skepticism. ‘Dmitriev’s efforts are futile,’ one of Russia’s top businessmen told the Financial Times. ‘These projects are of no interest to anyone right now.’”
As John Kennedy understood with his covert support for what was dubbed then "The Kennedy-Khruschev Friendship Bridge," this is a transformational project for how people in both countries think about each other, after decades of brainwashing that they are enemies. Dmitriev reportedly wants Trump to set up an American committee to work on getting the project going with their Russian counterparts; he suggested that Elon Musk, whose Boring Company would play a major role in the project, be its chair.
Dmitriev on Peace Offensive Here
Prior to the meeting today, Dmitriev expressed calm optimism in comments to CNN: “I think we are finding those compromises that would work for all of the parties…. [There is] quite a bit of misinformation about what’s going on…. I think we are reasonably close to a diplomatic solution [for Ukraine] that can be worked out.”
Dmitriev added: “So, the meeting between President Putin and President Trump will happen, but probably at a later date. And I’m sure that these diplomatic efforts will succeed, because it’s much better to have dialogue with Russia than, like President Biden, [who] had no dialogue with Russia, wanted to have strategic defeat of Russia. And obviously that strategy failed.”
Dmitriev also told journalists upon his arrival in the U.S. that the U.K. and EU are blocking “many attempts to resolve the conflict,” saying London and Brussels wanted it to continue because "the British economy is in dire straits, and so is the EU’s…. It is important for them to maintain the image of Russia as an enemy." He said Kyiv is acting “at the request of the British and Europeans who want the conflict to continue.”
“‘We see that it is Ukraine that is dragging out the negotiations. It is Ukraine that is not willing to resolve the issues that have accumulated and need solving,’ Dmitriev stated, accusing Kiev of ‘disrupting the dialogue’ at the behest of its Western backers.”
Dmitriev made the same point speaking to Fox News Oct. 24. “Biden tried to unsuccessfully defeat Russia strategically. His approach of sanction didn’t work. How do you know this? Last year, the Russian economy grew 4%, whereas the European and U.K. economy grew less than 1%,” he added.
“I think the solution is not sanctions, but the solution is dialogue. The solution is really taking Russian security interests into account. And just as President Trump is defending the national interests of the U.S., President Putin is defending the national interests of Russia,” Dmitriev stressed.
According to him, “for Russia, it’s an existential issue not to have NATO be a threat at its borders, and only by listening to Russian position, as [Special Presidential Envoy] Steve Witkoff has done in the past, can a real solution be found.”