Donald Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, has dismissed UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's proposal for an international force to support a ceasefire in Ukraine, calling it a posture and a pose.
He criticized the plan as being based on a simplistic view that the UK Prime Minister and other European leaders believe they must all adopt a stance like Winston Churchill.
Asked about Keir Starmer's plans to forge a coalition of the willing to provide military security guarantees for a post-war Ukraine, Witkoff said: "I think it's a combination of a posture and a pose and a combination of also being simplistic. There is this sort of notion that we have all got to be like [British wartime prime minister] Winston Churchill. Russians are going to march across Europe. That is preposterous by the way. We have something called NATO that we did not have in World War Two."
In an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson, Witkoff praised Vladimir Putin, saying he "liked" the Russian president. "I don't regard Putin as a bad guy," he said. "He's super smart."
Witkoff, who met Putin 10 days ago, said the Russian president had been gracious and straight up with him. Putin told him, he added, that he had prayed for Trump after an assassination attempt against him last year. He also said Putin had commissioned a portrait of the US president as a gift and Trump was clearly touched by it.
During the interview, Witkoff repeated various Russian arguments, including that Ukraine was a false country and asked when the world would recognise occupied Ukrainian territory as Russian.
US-Russia Negotiations
Witkoff is leading the US ceasefire negotiations with both Russia and Ukraine but he was unable to name the five regions of Ukraine either annexed or partially occupied by Russian forces.
He said: "The largest issue in that conflict are these so-called four regions, Donbas, Crimea, you know the names and there are two others."
The five regions - or oblasts - are Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Crimea. Donbas refers to an industrial region in the east that includes much of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Witkoff made several assertions that are either not true or disputed:
He said Ukrainian troops in Kursk were surrounded, something denied by Ukraine's government and uncorroborated by any open-source data and added that the four partially occupied regions of Ukraine had held "referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule".
The US is set to hold separate talks in Saudi Arabia with Ukraine and Russia about a ceasefire at meetings over Sunday and Monday.
Ahead of that, Ukrainian authorities said Russia had launched drone attacks on Kyiv overnight, resulting in deaths of three people, including a five-year-old child. As per BBC, officials said that eight people had been injured.
Russia also struck the southern city of Zaporizhzhia on Friday, killing a family of three.
Meanwhile, on Sunday Russia's ministry of defence said it had shot down 59 Ukrainian drones across a number of regions in the south as well as in Crimea, the peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
