The most extensive public report, from the U.S. side, of the extended three-hour discussion between Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian President Vladimir Putin, came from Secretary of State Marco Rubio in an interview with Fox’s Larry Kudlow. The entire interview is worth reading. It is to be emphasized here, that Rubio adopted the tone, and even the order of proceeding, that Putin, Foreign Minster Sergey Lavrov, and chief Istanbul negotiator Vladimir Medinsky have been consistently advancing.
An immediate and/or comprehensive ceasefire and even meetings of Presidents—formerly deal-breaker issues for Kiev—were secondary or completely missing. Instead, the first order of business was each side formulating its position for peace, to be followed by rolling up the sleeves to work on bringing the positions into alignment. If a deal is in sight, it would then be appropriate to hold a meeting of principals and implement a partial ceasefire as the deal is finalized. Along the way, negotiations are not to be the stuff of daily talking points.
Rubio: “At some point a ceasefire has to be a part of this process, because it is hard to negotiate details of a final peace agreement while you’re shooting at each other. So I think you have to make enough progress with enough of an outline of how the war’s going to end that then, ideally, puts you into a ceasefire position for a short period of time, and you use that time to finalize an end to the war.”
