What might Witkoff and Kushner have achieved in Moscow and Kyiv?

What did Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner actually achieve in Kyiv and Moscow? The views are not entirely uniform, but one broad assessment stands out: the visits offered a little theater to imitate a peace process, while doing nothing harmful to Ukraine.

A particularly vivid moment came at a news conference in Kyiv. Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Gordon confronted Witkoff in unusually sharp terms, focusing on the U.S. envoy’s repeated meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“You have met President Putin many times. Does it not seem to you that Putin has been deceiving you all this time?” Gordon asked. He then questioned whether Putin, the Russians and Russia understood only “the language of force.”

Gordon ended by asking Witkoff whether he felt disgust at sitting at the same table with “an international war criminal, the executioner of the Ukrainian people, who is personally guilty of the tragedy of Ukrainians.”

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You have met President Putin many times. Does it not seem to you that Putin has been deceiving you all this time? Does it not seem to you that Putin, the Russians and Russia understand only one language, the language of force? And finally, are you not disgusted to sit at the same table with an international war criminal, the executioner of the Ukrainian people, who is personally guilty of the tragedy of Ukrainians?