US special envoy Steve Witkoff has admitted that he may have been “duped” by Hamas during failed ceasefire negotiations but insisted that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin doesn’t want to “take all of Europe,” during a Fox News interview.
Witkoff’s team helped broker a ceasefire-for-hostage deal, intended to set the stage for a more durable peace, shortly before President Trump took office again. But last week, Israel resumed its military campaign in the Gaza Strip amid the ongoing conflict with Hamas.
“I certainly hope we get everybody back to the table and get the hostages home,” Witkoff said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I thought we had a deal — an acceptable deal. I even thought we had an approval from Hamas.”
“Maybe that’s just me getting duped,” he added. “I thought we were there, and evidently, we weren’t.”
Witkoff affirmed that the US “stands with the state of Israel” and stressed, “We need to be clear who the aggressor is here and that is Hamas.”
Israel’s military resumed fighting in Gaza due to “Hamas’ refusal to release the hostages and threats to harm IDF soldiers and Israeli communities,” the country’s defense minister Israel Katz claimed on Friday, one of several leading politicians to declare a ramping up in the conflict.
“From now on, negotiations will only take place under fire,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Tuesday night.
With respect to the bloody war in Ukraine, Witkoff struck a more conciliatory tone towards the Russians who began the unprovoked war against its neighbor three years ago.
“In my 68 years on this Earth, I’ve never ever seen a situation where there isn’t two sides to a story,” Witkoff replied when asked if Putin has been mischaracterized as a “tyrant” who kills his political rivals.
Witkoff has met with Putin in person twice, including earlier this month. He recently recounted how the former KGB agent gave him a portrait of Trump and told him that he went to church to pray for the 47th president after the assassination attempt.
“I simply have said that I just don’t see that he wants to take all of Europe,” Witkoff assessed. “This is a much different situation than it was in World War II. In World War II, there was no NATO.”
The US special envoy explained that in Putin’s speeches for years, he’s talked about the “five regions,” likely referring to Crimea as well as the Donbas oblasts of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
Russia currently controls Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, and controls a majority, but not all of the four Donbas oblasts.
“That’s an academic issue,” Witkoff added about Putin’s true objectives. “The real issue here, the agenda set forth by President Trump, he is my boss and I adhere to that fact. That the agenda is stop the killing. Stop the carnage. Let’s end this thing.”
Last week, Putin rejected the Trump administration’s framework for a 30-day ceasefire so that more comprehensive peace talks could take place, something to which Ukraine agreed.
Instead, Moscow offered to pause attacks on “energy and infrastructure” for 30 days. A readout from Moscow stated that Putin demanded the US cease military aid and intelligence sharing to Ukraine, but Trump has publicly denied that claim.
Zelensky later agreed to the scaled-down ceasefire the Russians proposed but warned that “nothing has changed” with the Russians, who launched a brutal and massive drone attack on the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa Thursday.
