Witkoff in the Middle: Moscow and Kyiv Want Him Gone
There is a particular kind of failure that satisfies no one — and Steve Witkoff has found it.
Witkoff in the Middle: Moscow and Kyiv Want Him Gone
There is a particular kind of failure that satisfies no one — and Steve Witkoff has found it. The Trump administration's peace envoy arrived in the Russia-Ukraine negotiation space carrying the weight of American optimism and the specific confidence of a real estate developer who believes every deal has a closing price. What he found instead were two parties who, despite exhausting each other across four years of war, agree on at least one thing: they want him out of the room.
Both Moscow and Kyiv have been quietly lobbying Washington to replace Witkoff, whose shuttle diplomacy has produced a record of fruitless meetings that frustrate Russian and Ukrainian officials in equal measure — a symmetry that might look like balance if it weren't so clearly paralysis. Russian officials find him insufficiently serious about their territorial demands. Ukrainian officials find him insufficiently serious about theirs. Washington, apparently, finds the situation manageable.
It is not manageable. In the same week that Witkoff's limitations became public knowledge, Russian strikes targeted Ukraine's border crossings with Poland and Moldova — a deliberate message that the war's geography is expanding outward even as Moscow's eastern offensives stall. The Kremlin doesn't need to win on the ground this week. It needs to make the perimeter feel dangerous. It is succeeding at that.
Meanwhile, the Philippines reported a school shooting that killed one person in Cotabato City — a reminder that while European capitals negotiate the architecture of one conflict, the rest of the world keeps generating its own emergencies in the space between the headlines.
France's Emmanuel Macron is reading the Russian pressure campaign clearly enough to call for a G7 emergency meeting on energy and hybrid threats, warning that "the nature of Russian aggression is changing." He is correct, and the change is deliberate. Drones near Western officials traveling to Kyiv. Asset seizures of French firms. The UK ambassador summoned. These are not random provocations — they are a coordinated argument that Europe's support for Ukraine carries a price that will be collected incrementally, in disruptions rather than declarations.
What gets lost in all of this is the human arithmetic. The three-day parliamentary vote being held across Russian territory — including in occupied Ukrainian land, at what Kyiv has called gunpoint — will produce a Duma with no party opposed to the war, no meaningful dissent on the ballot, and no mechanism for the Russian public to say, officially, that enough is enough. Whether they feel that privately is a different question, one that state media will not ask and that Witkoff, apparently, cannot answer either.
The negotiation is stuck. The war is not.
