Does Steve Witkoff believe Ukraine has a right to exist?
It’s a legitimate question to ask after the envoy’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show. Although the United States does not need to be neutral when mediating a conflict’s resolution, we should never put the dissolution of one party to the conflict on the table. Yet this quote from Witkoff, now Trump’s top envoy to Russia-Ukraine peace talks, comes awfully close to doing so:
“There’s a sensibility in Russia that Ukraine is a false country. That they just patched together, in this sort of mosaic, these regions. And that what, that’s the root cause in my opinion of this war: that Russia regards those five regions as rightfully theirs since World War II. And that’s something that nobody wants to talk about. Well, I say it out loud, how are we going to solve this thing unless we solve the central issue that underpins the conflict?”
It’s true that Russia denies the existence of the Ukrainian nation, and that this is central to Vladimir Putin’s continued pursuit of Ukraine’s territory.
So what, then, does Witkoff mean when he says this issue must be “solved” if the war is to end? It has already been solved: Ukraine exists as an independent state, and the United States has committed in writing to the reality of that fact on the ground.
Indeed, we can argue over what exactly is required of us by the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Ukraine surrendered its nuclear arsenal in return for an American guarantee of support to maintain Ukraine’s territorial integrity. But surely it goes without saying that the agreement precludes us from actively abetting the destruction of the Ukrainian nation-state.
That agreement didn’t come out of nowhere, either. Contrary to Witkoff’s framing of this as a post-WWII conflict, the first Ukrainian state was established in the mid-17th century, 300 years earlier. Beset by disloyal allies and external foes, the new state turned to Moscow for protection. It was a fatal mistake; Moscow took it as an opportunity to swallow the Ukrainian state and chip away at its independence. Far from the Ukraine-Russia borders being arbitrary lines drawn within a larger empire, the two sides often had to speak through interpreters. They were separate polities, and the Ukrainians stood just as much a chance of being incorporated into Poland and Lithuania’s territory as Moscow’s. Witkoff appeared on the scene nearly four centuries after that tug-of-war began.
Yet the truth is even simpler than that. Let’s say the Budapest Memorandum never happened (or never explicitly obligated the U.S. to the maintenance of Ukraine’s borders). And let’s say Witkoff isn’t aware of the long history of the conflict into which he has just been planted, like those Colorform stickers we had as kids which could be constantly re-stuck into different scenes in the book. It would still be preposterous to consider putting America’s imprimatur on Putin’s demented philosophy of ethnic elimination.
Putin’s admission that he doesn’t believe Ukraine should exist represents valuable context for Witkoff’s negotiations. It reveals to him Putin’s true endgame. Elsewhere in his interview with Carlson, Witkoff seems to acknowledge how important it is to have such transparency of intentions:
“I was able to speak on behalf of Trump because we talked about it. We had a great conversation about it. He said to me, this is where I want to get to, Steve. And so when I went in there, I went in with the imprimatur of the president… . And no one doubts that you speak for the president. That you know what the president wants.”
Witkoff’s point was that the other parties to the negotiations know what Trump wants because they know Witkoff speaks for the president. And knowing what the leader of one negotiating party wants is crucial.
So now Witkoff knows what Putin wants: the destruction of Ukraine. Yet Witkoff said in a separate interview that Putin “wants peace.” How to reconcile that contradiction? The only way both can be true is if you accept Putin’s narrative that Ukraine’s right to exist is a radical idea, a recent invention, and thus a legitimate point of contention in peace negotiations. Is that what our envoy believes?
