President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy echoed President Vladimir Putin’s longstanding assertion that Ukraine is Russian territory in an appearance on Fox News Sunday.
“There’s a view within the country of Russia that these are Russian territories, that there are referendums within these territories that justify these actions,” Steve Witkoff, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, told host Shannon Bream.
Witkoff also said he believed the Russian leader’s assurances that he wouldn’t invade other European countries.
“I just don’t see that he wants to take all of Europe,” Witkoff said. "This is a much different situation than it was in World War II. In World War II, there was no NATO. You have countries that are armed there. To me, it just—I take him as his word in this sense."
Putin has said the Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” and denied Ukraine’s sovereignty.
Putin said earlier this month he agrees with the concept of a ceasefire, but only one that includes Ukraine dropping its ambition to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and agreeing to cede the territory Russia has claimed in the war.
“We proceed from the fact that this cessation should be such that it would lead to long-term peace and would eliminate the original causes of this crisis,” he said.
Putin has also said he had no intentions of invading a NATO nation, calling the idea “complete nonsense” in 2023.
Bream also asked Witkoff whether he thought Putin had been mischaracterized as a tyrant who ordered his political opponents' deaths. Putin’s Kremlin has been linked to the deaths of numerous political adversaries, including imprisoned opposition politician Aleksei Navalny last year.
“It’s just never as black and white as people want to portray,” he said. “There are grievances on both sides.”
“Our job is to narrow the issues, bring the parties together, and stop the killing,” he added.
Witkoff’s comments come as the White House courts the Kremlin with a charm offensive as it seeks to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. While Trump did threaten tariffs against Russia earlier this month, he also discussed the prospect of a hockey match between Russian and U.S. players in a call with Putin. Trump has also called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator.”
Witkoff also told Tucker Carlson in an interview on Friday that he doesn’t think of the Russian leader as a “bad guy.” Instead, he noted that Putin regards Trump as a “friend.”
“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy,” Witkoff said. “That is a complicated situation, that war, and all the ingredients that led up to it.”
As negotiations have continued over a ceasefire, Russia has maintained its offensive campaign against Ukraine. A drone strike on multiple regions early Sunday killed seven people, including three in the capital of Kyiv.
