The Witkoff Phone Call Proves Witkoff Isn’t a Freelancer for Trump or Putin but Is a Cutout Working for Both at the Same Time
- john raymond
- 2 minutes ago
- 6 min read
The leaked Witkoff–Ushakov transcript closes one of the last convenient fictions in this scandal. Steve Witkoff is not “going rogue for Russia,” nor is he a naïve Trump loyalist being played by the Kremlin.
The call transcript shows him acting as a joint cutout for two principals at once: President Trump and Vladimir Putin. Witkoff’s real job is to help both men coordinate a collusive “peace” project that sacrifices Ukraine and misleads the West.
The point of the phone call was clearly not to negotiate with an adversary, but to align the two regimes.
1. What the transcript actually shows
In the Oct. 14 call, now published by Bloomberg and widely reported, Trump’s “special envoy for peace missions” Steve Witkoff speaks to Putin’s top foreign-policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, for just over five minutes.
The structure of the conversation is simple. It is damning:
Ushakov opens tentatively, asking whether it would be useful for “our bosses” to talk on the phone.
Witkoff instantly takes charge: he tells Russia how Putin should call Trump and what he should say, scripting a flattery campaign around Trump’s Gaza ceasefire and instructing Ushakov to present Trump as “a man of peace.”
Witkoff explains that he has already told Trump that “the Russian Federation has always wanted a peace deal,” reframing Moscow’s aggression as frustrated peacemaking.
He then floats the idea of a multi-point “peace proposal,” modeled explicitly on the Gaza framework, with Trump’s name on it — the conceptual embryo of what will later emerge as the 28-point Ukraine plan.
In a “me to you” aside, he admits that he knows what such a deal requires: Donetsk to Russia and “maybe a land swap somewhere” — territorial surrender by Ukraine — but urges that they “talk more hopefully” rather than bluntly.
Finally, he reveals that Zelenskyy is coming to the White House on Friday and presses for the Trump–Putin call to happen before that meeting, with himself present at both ends of the process.
This is not the behavior of a U.S. envoy probing an adversary’s intentions. It is the behavior of a trusted intermediary who already understands the real terms of a deal, accepts them, and is coaching the other side on how to present those terms so Trump can comfortably converge on Kremlin goals.
2. Two bad myths: “Russia’s freelancer” and “Trump’s naïve envoy”
Commentary has immediately gravitated to two comforting but false narratives.
The first says Witkoff is effectively “working for Russia” against Trump — that he is captured by Moscow and coaching them for their benefit. Certainly, he acts as a tactician for Putin’s side: he scripts the flattery (“man of peace”), endorses the Kremlin’s self-description as a peace-seeker, and quietly accepts that Russia must keep Donetsk and possibly more.
But the coaching makes no sense if Trump is merely a victim. Witkoff is not telling Russia how to crush Trump; he is telling Russia how best to reduce friction so Trump can say yes to Russia’s war aims with minimal political pain at home. That is servicing Trump’s interests as much as Putin’s.
The second narrative says Witkoff is only “Trump’s guy,” trying to bring Putin toward a more reasonable position.
That cannot survive a plain reading of his own words. Witkoff never challenges the idea that Russia gets Donetsk; he doesn’t float Ukrainian security guarantees as the core; he doesn’t warn Ushakov that some demands are unacceptable. Instead, he presents Russian territorial gains as natural and worries only about how to talk about it.
In both myths, Trump is implicitly exonerated: either betrayed by a Kremlin-leaning subordinate, or represented by a clumsy but well-meaning emissary. The transcript destroys both stories.
Witkoff treats Putin’s baseline demands as legitimate and Trump’s political realities as the main variable to be managed. That only makes sense if the underlying project is collusion, not adversarial bargaining.
3. The dual-principal reality: Trump and Putin as co-clients
The correct frame is that Witkoff is an agent of a joint principal: Trump and Putin together.
Every move in the call reflects that dual loyalty:
He carries Trump’s internal narrative to Moscow: that Russia “has always wanted a peace deal.” This is what he says he has already told Trump, and he repeats it to Ushakov as a shared premise useful for the project of pushing this poisoned deal through.
He carries Russia’s real terms to his own internal thinking: Donetsk and “maybe a land swap” as the price of peace. He does not dispute that; he simply advises that they not present it so bluntly, knowing it is terribly unpalatable.
He explicitly embeds both sides into the authorship of the scheme: “Steve and Yuri discussed a very similar 20-point plan to peace.” That is joint design, not adversarial negotiation.
He signals to Ushakov that Trump will give him “a lot of space and discretion to get to the deal,” presenting himself as empowered inside Trump’s system and reliable for the Kremlin.
In principal–agent language, he is not a single-principal agent subject to conflicting external influence. He is the shared cutout of a collusive enterprise whose principals are Trump and Putin. The target of the operation is everyone else: Ukraine, NATO, the EU, and their various publics.
Seen this way, the notorious “Donetsk and maybe a land swap” line is not an indiscreet aside by a rogue envoy. It is a confession of the real settlement he understands both regimes to be moving toward, coupled with a media-management strategy: hide the naked terms behind uplifting rhetoric so that Trump can present capitulation as statesmanship.
4. How the phone call locks onto the 28-point plan
The transcript only makes full sense when placed beside the history of the 28-point Ukraine plan.
Reporting now establishes that the original 28-point draft was hammered out in October over private dinners in Miami between Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Kremlin financier Kirill Dmitriev.
That draft
demanded Ukraine concede eastern territory,
accept limits on its armed forces, and
effectively give up NATO membership,
while extracting minimal concrete concessions from Russia.
European and Ukrainian officials immediately recognized the structure as a pro-Kremlin capitulation blueprint; some analysts have even flagged the syntax of portions of the English draft as clearly translated from Russian originals.
After public backlash, Rubio and others have scrambled to revise the document down to 19 points and strip out the most blatant giveaways, but the core logic remains contested.
Set against that background, the Witkoff–Ushakov call is not an isolated curiosity. It is the missing bridge between:
the Russian–American drafting process in back rooms in Miami, and
Trump’s public insistence that his plan is a U.S. “peace offer” that Ukraine should accept, even as Zelenskyy warns that the points force Ukraine to choose between national dignity and abandonment by Washington.
Witkoff’s role, as revealed on the tape, matches this architecture perfectly. He is not testing Russian red lines against American conditions. He is harmonizing two regimes that have already, in substance, agreed on what they want: freezing Russian gains, capping Ukraine, and selling the package as “peace.”
5. Why it matters to call the collusion by its real name
It is psychologically easier for many people — in Washington and in the commentariat — to blame the scandal on a compromised fixer. “Witkoff is working for Russia” is a story that preserves the idea of an essentially American White House being misled by bad staff.
The reality is more dangerous. The call and the plan together show a Trump administration whose core diplomatic project on Ukraine is functionally aligned with the Kremlin’s victory conditions, and whose lead envoy treats both Trump and Putin as his principals.
That is not drift or incompetence; it is collusion in the strict sense: coordination between two regimes against a third, under cover of a “peace” narrative.
If analysis stops at Witkoff, it misses the structure. A joint cutout implies a joint crime. The proper question is no longer whether Witkoff is “biased toward Russia,” but how far President Trump himself is willing to go to implement a settlement whose logic is written in Moscow.
The Witkoff phone call proves that the freelance-agent story is dead. The only coherent reading is the one the transcript itself points to: Trump and Putin as co-clients of a single channel, with Steve Witkoff working for both at the same time — and Ukraine, NATO, and democratic publics on the other end of the line.