Part 1: Of Course William Spaniel Gets the Witkoff Call Wrong
- john raymond
- 1 minute ago
- 7 min read
William Spaniel’s take on the Witkoff leak is not just wrong in detail; it is wrong at the level of basic problem definition. Anyone who watches his latest video and comes away thinking the leak somehow weakens the case that President Trump is structurally aligned with Kremlin interests has been misled.
In plain English: on this question, Spaniel is behaving like a fucking idiot. The point is not that he and I disagree; the point is that Spaniel refuses to see the game that is actually being played.
The core mistake is simple: Spaniel does not understand that Steve Witkoff’s call is solving a Trump branding problem for achieving Russian war aims, not a “how do we persuade Trump” problem for a reluctant, independent U.S. president.
What is happening is Witkoff is explaining Trump’s domestic propaganda persona to Yuri Ushakov so Russian moves can be packaged in a way that fits Trump’s prebuilt-mythology as peacemaker while delivering exactly what Putin requires in Ukraine.
Once you set the facts out cleanly, Spaniel’s Witkoff-is-incompetent take collapses.
1. What the leak actually shows
On 14 October 2025, Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy, held a roughly five-minute call with Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s top foreign-policy aide and former ambassador to Washington. Bloomberg published the transcript; multiple outlets have confirmed its authenticity.
Three elements of that call are decisive.
First, Witkoff shows that he has internalized the Kremlin’s minimum terms for “peace.” He tells Ushakov:
“Now, me to you, I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done: Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere.”
This is not a free-floating personal idea; it is a loyalty signal. He is telling the Russian side that he understands the floor: Russian control over Donetsk plus additional Ukrainian territory.
Reporting summarizing the call has been explicit that Witkoff “said he understands a peace deal would require Moscow gaining control of Donetsk and potentially additional Ukrainian territory.”
Second, he proposes to copy the Gaza template into Ukraine as a Trump-branded communications framework:
He describes the earlier Gaza deal as a “20-point Trump plan” for peace.
He suggests “maybe we do the same thing with you,” meaning Russia.
He proposes a “20-point peace” package that can be sold as another Trump masterstroke.
Third, he coaches Ushakov on how to speak Trump-ese:
Congratulate him on his “achievement” in Gaza.
Emphasize that Russia “supported” it.
Call Trump “a man of peace” and say Russia is glad to have seen it happen.
Link that praise directly to the new Ukraine framework.
At the same time, Witkoff tells Ushakov that he has already told Trump “the Russian Federation has always wanted a peace deal” and that he personally believes it—an absurd claim on the merits, but perfectly tailored to Trump’s preferred narrative that he alone sees Russia’s allegedly hidden willingness to compromise.
Think about it. Who else in the world pretends to think Putin actually want peace but Trump?
In addition, surrounding this call is a 28-point peace plan whose original draft, as Reuters and Axios have now reported, was heavily based on a Russian “non-paper” submitted to the Trump team in October. That document codified core Russian demands: Ukraine ceding significant territory in the east, strict limits on Ukraine’s armed forces, and an effective veto on NATO membership.
The pattern is straightforward: Moscow sets the material floor; Witkoff internalizes it; he then designs a Trump-branded wrapper so those Russian demands can be sold as the natural outcome of Trump’s peacemaking persona.
2. The real problem on that call: Trump’s brand, not Trump’s will
Spaniel tells his viewers that the call demonstrates Witkoff’s naivete: a businessman who thinks in terms of contracts, not mafias; a man who believes in his own “breakthrough” and is being played by Russians.
Spaniel portrays the coaching of Ushakov as a banal attempt to keep a mercurial president from blowing up a “good” deal at the one-yard line.
That reading only works if you get the direction of the ignorance wrong.
Ushakov is not confused about what Russia wants; he is a central node in Putin’s foreign-policy machine. What he doesn’t fully understand is the delicate fiction President Trump has built for Western audiences:
That the war “would never have started” if he had been in office.
That his unique mission is to “end the killing” and stop a “pointless” war.
That he alone can strike deals with Putin that weak, corrupt Western elites could never manage.
That is the Trump brand—a cover story that allows him to push Russian-aligned outcomes while posing as humanitarian savior.
European leaders are now explicitly saying they welcome “efforts to find peace” but will not accept a deal that legitimizes changes of borders by force, precisely because the original 28-point plan looked like a Russian wish list wrapped in Trump’s peacemaker costume.
Witkoff’s task on that call is to explain this brand logic to Moscow. He is explaining to Ushakov:
I know what Putin’s minimum terms are (Donetsk plus more).
I know what Trump needs domestically (to be praised as a “man of peace” with his own 20-point plan).
Therefore, if you want this to go through, you must present your demands through Trump’s brand, not around it.
That is why he rehearses the “man of peace” language and “thanks for your support” of the Gaza deal. He is teaching Ushakov how to speak in ways that reinforce Trump’s myth while locking in Russian gains.
The ignorance, in other words, is on the Russian side about U.S. propaganda constraints—not on Trump’s side about Russian war aims.
3. Spaniel’s analytic face-plant
Spaniel’s final move is the truly disqualifying one. He tells his audience that Witkoff’s coaching “runs contrary” to the idea that Trump actively wants Russia to win, “due to kompromat or otherwise,” because—he says—if Trump were captured, Russia wouldn’t need to carefully “massage” him.
That argument would get you bounced out of a first-year game-theory seminar.
Under Pillar One of the Raymond Method—Regime Security Is the Prime Directive—the right question is:
Do the material terms of the process advance both Trump’s and Putin’s regime-security goals?
On the evidence we have, the answer is yes:
The 28-point plan in its original form required Ukraine to cede further territory in the east beyond what Russia already occupies, cap the size and structure of its military, and foreclose NATO membership.
Russian officials now openly say they expect the updated plan to reflect “basic tenets” agreed between Trump and Putin in Anchorage, and that those principles are “reflected in the plan” the White House proposed and Russia “welcomed.”
Those are Kremlin wins, not splits of the difference. When what is being proposed is full capitulation, that is not ignorance but alignment.
At the same time, Trump gets to fulfill his domestic narrative: he alone “found a way” to end the war quickly; Europe and Ukraine were too stubborn; the “globalists” couldn’t do it.
The branding is already in motion—Trump is publicly optimistic, describing the talks as making “tremendous progress” toward peace.
Once you see that, the existence of ego-stroking is irrelevant. Of course Putin has to call and pretend to flatter Trump. Mafias flatter their partners all the time. The flattery is part of the joint venture, not evidence there is no joint venture.
Spaniel has inverted the logic:
He takes Witkoff’s internalization of Russian demands as naivete instead of loyalty signaling.
He takes Trump’s need for praise as evidence of independence instead of evidence of personality-driven brand constraints.
He takes the fact of coaching a Kremlin aide as exculpatory rather than damning.
This isn’t “skepticism.” It’s analytic malpractice and Spaniel should be shamed for not seeing it clearly after the Witkoff-Shwartz debacle that happened earlier this year.
4. The Byzantine Traitor-General and the reveal
Under Pillar Three—the Byzantine Traitor-General paradigm—you ask: who inside your own system is routing information in ways that serve the enemy’s design?
In light of the leak, the answer is obvious:
Witkoff is co-designing a plan whose core terms track Russian war aims.
He signals to Ushakov that he accepts the territorial floor: Donetsk and more.
He describes his extensive discretion and the president’s trust, per the leaked transcripts: he has “a lot of space and discretion to get to the deal,” and he tells Russians he has the “utmost respect for President Putin.”
He trains the Kremlin on the exact language needed to reinforce Trump’s peacemaker brand.
The system’s reaction confirms how deep this goes.
In Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike have called for Witkoff’s removal; Representative Ted Lieu has labeled him an “actual traitor,” and other members have referred to him as effectively a paid Russian agent.
In Moscow, by contrast, Ushakov has confirmed the call’s authenticity, called the leak “unacceptable” and “hybrid warfare,” and said he will remain in touch with Witkoff. The Kremlin warns publicly that firing Witkoff would damage the “fragile trends” toward peace.
And President Trump? He defends Witkoff, denounces the leak, and continues with the plan—sending Witkoff to Moscow anyway, alongside Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, to keep pushing the framework forward.
If you still think this describes a “naive businessman being played,” you are not doing analysis. You are closing fucking your eyes to the obvious truth.
5. Why Spaniel’s audience needs to understand how bad this is
The reason this matters is that Spaniel isn’t just wrong; he is wrong in a way that comforts people who don’t want to accept the obvious.
If you follow his framing, you learn to see:
Structure as accident.
Collusion as incompetence.
A documented co-design channel between Trump’s envoy and Putin’s court as merely “bad optics” and poor staffing.
You also learn to treat each new revelation as isolated trivia, instead of as another node in the same network: Trump’s Anchorage understandings with Putin, the Russian non-paper feeding directly into the 28-point plan, the internalization of Russian territorial floors by Witkoff, and the export of Trump’s peacemaker brand to Moscow as the delivery wrapper.
From the standpoint of the Raymond Method, the conclusion is straightforward:
Pillar One (Regime Security). The plan, as conceived, secures Putin’s gains in Ukraine and Trump’s domestic myth as savior. That is alignment, not accident.
Pillar Two (Asymmetric Warfare). The “peace” process itself is the weapon: it reframes surrender as compassion and fractures NATO/EU unity by dangling a quick end to the war.
Pillar Three (Byzantine Traitor-General). Witkoff functions as a traitor-general: a trusted insider whose loyalty and understanding of Russian floors make him invaluable to the Trump-Putin axis.
An analyst who looks at that structure and announces that the real lesson is “see, Trump must not be that compromised, because Russia still has to flatter him” has vacated the field.
Call it what you like—intellectually unserious, strategically blind—but the non-technical assessment is such: Spaniel continues to act like a fucking idiot.
And anyone who takes his word is being led away from the truth and at the exact moment the traitorous system finally slipped up and showed you what it really is.