Trump's special envoy gives disastrous interview on the war

Hello,

In this video, I comment on Steve Witkoff's interview with Tucker Carlson, where the amount of disinformation was so enormous that it's difficult to comprehend. Some people have speculated that this is an intentional distribution of false information by Trump's special envoy to Russia, but I think it's quite clear that this guy simply does not know what he's talking about. Apparently, he thinks that having prior knowledge about the war is unnecessary and that he can just get the information he needs from the Russians he talks with during the negotiations, including from Putin himself.

In the video, I reference a Bluesky post by Brian Taylor, and I mention that I conducted an interview with Brian on my YouTube channel a few years ago. Here is the link to that interview.

Watch the video on the website or read the transcript below.

Best,
Anders

Transcript:

Hi, I want this to be a pretty quick one, but I just wanted to comment on Steve Witkoff's interview with Tucker Carlson. He made this the other day. Steve Witkoff is Donald Trump's special envoy to the Middle East and as of recently also to Russia. He used to have a different envoy to Ukraine and Russia called Keith Kellogg, who actually knows quite a lot about the war in Ukraine and Russian geopolitics and those things. But he has been replaced now by Steve Witkoff, who quite clearly doesn't know all that much.

In this interview with Tucker Carlson, Witkoff just came out with one piece of Russian disinformation after the other, ranging from claiming that the reason for the war is that we have these Russian regions in eastern Ukraine where people are Russian because they speak Russian, and Ukraine just won't let them be Russian. And that this is the real problem here. To the fact that Zelensky is illegitimate because there haven't been elections, and just a whole range of Russian disinformation that he managed to mention in a very short period of time. He also said that clearly Russia's goals are limited to eastern Ukraine, and Russia does not have any intentions of going further. They don't want the rest of Ukraine. They don't want any other countries in Europe. And the Europeans are just hysterical.

And it's very clear that Witkoff doesn't know very much about what he's talking about. On the one hand, all these things he says are pretty silly. When he's talking about a referendum, for example, the people of eastern Ukraine showed in a referendum in 2022 that they want to be part of Russia. Well, this referendum actually happened at gun point where people said, "Well, tell us if you like Russia or not." And then they had to stuff these ballots into transparent boxes so everyone could see what they voted. You actually had armed soldiers coming to people's homes and telling them to vote. And also, you know, it was just absolutely ridiculous things that happened, that the Russians like to call referendums.

So these are things that we now have Witkoff parroting. And he also did not manage to correctly name the regions in eastern Ukraine. So he came up with all kinds of ridiculous names for them before he finally gave up on mentioning what they are called. So it's very clear that this guy does not actually understand the war. He does not actually understand geography. He doesn't understand what it's really about, what's at play.

But I think what I wanted to highlight here in this hopefully short video was this point that Brian Taylor made on Bluesky. And I'm going to put it somewhere on the screen. But the point here is that, well, it is really not all that smart for the Americans to appoint people to conducting these negotiations who don't know what the basic conflict is about and who seem willing to learn about the conflict from Putin.

And there are two problems with that. One of them is that Putin sometimes lies. He actually lies quite a lot. He does that all the time. But another problem about it is that many of the things that Putin personally believes to be true about Ukraine are actually not true. One of the reasons why there is a war in Ukraine, probably the primary reason why there is a war in Ukraine right now, is that Putin does not understand Ukraine. He does not understand the sentiments of Ukrainians. He does not understand the geopolitical realities of modern Ukraine and that the forces that he's up against are so strong that it's basically a hopeless endeavor to try to subjugate a country such as Ukraine in the 21st century. It's just too strong and Russia is not.

So one of the basic problems about this whole war is that Putin fundamentally misunderstands Ukraine. Putin believes that people who speak Russian are necessarily Russians and want to be Russian and support Russia, right? It's absolutely ridiculous to hear someone like Witkoff repeating that in the English language, indicating that the language you speak defines your nationality. So obviously by that logic, Steve Witkoff himself is English, right?

But these kinds of things are things that Putin genuinely believes to be true but just aren't. He genuinely believes that Ukraine is a divided nation with a big part of the population just eager to overthrow the Zelensky government and that this would be a short three-day war because all they had to do was go in and make this kind of symbolic invasion and then the Russians in the country would rise up and overthrow the government.

So it's really problematic that we have an American side in these negotiations so willing to just buy whatever narratives, including all the Russian misperceptions about Ukraine. And I think unfortunately it's not sustainable. I think this indicates that we are heading towards some kind of more definitive breakup in the relationship between Ukraine and the U.S. because it is so wrong and it is so far off what we can say are the geopolitical realities that it does not make sense to have this group of Americans in charge of anything in terms of negotiations.

Ukraine can play along so far because they want to secure as many weapons resources as possible before the final breakup happens. But it's not sustainable to have a guy like this in charge of the negotiations and eventually it will lead to, let's say, disappointment in Washington when it turns out that the Ukrainians are not actually going to go along with all the things that apparently now the Americans seem to believe to be true.

All right, it wasn't all that short but still I've managed to make longer videos in the past. But thanks for watching. And I will also put a link to an interview I did with Brian Taylor who made this Bluesky post. I interviewed him for my YouTube channel back in 2022 when the war was still young. So if you're interested in watching that, I think it was a really good interview. Of course many things have happened since then but I think it's still worth watching.

So, all right, thanks for watching.