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A History of the Present — The Intellectualist Premium Series. This essay, part of The Intellectualist’s premium series A History of the Present, is being made freely available to all because it speaks directly to the stakes of this moment.
A U.S. envoy coached a senior Russian official on how to influence an American president into embracing a plan that advantaged an aggressor and weakened an ally fighting for its survival as a sovereign state.
By Brian Daitzman
A betrayal rarely arrives as a dramatic gesture. It accumulates through process—through choices that elevate an adversary’s interests while diminishing those of an ally, through private conversations that displace public commitments, through the quiet reordering of whose voice is heard first and whose is heard last. What occurred in October 2025 was neither an ideological shift nor a sudden rupture. It was something more deliberate: the migration of American power away from an ally fighting for survival and toward the autocrat attacking it.
On October 14, as Bloomberg reported, Steve Witkoff, the newly appointed special envoy, placed a five-minute call to Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s senior foreign-policy adviser. He did not present an American position or outline U.S. red lines.
Instead, he coached Ushakov with an ease that would have been notable even in peacetime. According to the Bloomberg recording, Witkoff offered no deterrent message. Rather, he advised a senior Russian official on how best to flatter and influence an American president whose sensitivity to praise has been extensively documented in U.S. and foreign reporting. He urged Ushakov to schedule the call before President Volodymyr Zelensky’s October 17 White House visit, ensuring that Moscow—not Kyiv—would reach President Donald Trump first. He proposed beginning with congratulations on the Gaza agreement, describing Trump as a “man of peace,” presenting Russia as cooperative, and invoking the “20-point” Gaza plan as a model. He even encouraged Putin to reference earlier “Steve and Yuri” conversations to signal rapport.
This guidance did not come from Moscow’s political operatives. It came from a U.S. envoy—advice that helped an adversary prepare for a conversation with the American president at a moment when Ukraine depended on U.S. backing for its survival.
In American diplomacy, envoys do not serve as communications consultants to foreign leaders, especially not to adversaries engaged in active war. AFSA guidance, State Department protocol, and the White House’s “One Voice” doctrine all define envoys as extensions of the Secretary of State, charged with advancing U.S. policy rather than refining an adversary’s messaging.
Yet a U.S. envoy prepared a Kremlin adviser for a call with the American president before America’s ally had even been heard. In alliance politics, sequencing is not ceremonial; it determines influence. The first speaker sets the frame; the second must work within it. By advising Russia on timing, tone, and approach—by helping an adversary craft a calibrated appeal to a president whose reaction to praise is a matter of public record—Witkoff granted Moscow advantages alliances normally reserve for partners. Ukraine—under attack and reliant on American military and intelligence support—entered the conversation only after the adversary had already shaped its outline.
This inversion was not procedural noise. It was, in operational terms, a form of betrayal: an American envoy equipping an adversary to shape his own president’s perceptions while the ally under attack received no comparable preparation in a moment that cannot be replayed—the initial framing that guides all subsequent decisions.
Two days later, as Bloomberg documented, Putin followed the guidance closely. He opened his two-and-a-half-hour call with Trump using the congratulatory tone, Gaza framing, and conciliatory posture Witkoff had outlined. The overlap between the coaching and Putin’s talking points was unmistakable in the recorded evidence.
Within days, Axios and Bloomberg reported that Witkoff met in Miami with Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and long identified by the Senate Intelligence Committee as a Kremlin-linked backchannel to Trump-aligned networks. By month’s end, Axios reported that Dmitriev and Ushakov were discussing how far Russia should press its “maximum” terms.
This was not coincidence. It was structure.
Dmitriev is a Kremlin-designated backchannel operator; Ushakov is Putin’s top foreign-policy aide. Both participated before Ukraine saw anything resembling a plan. The pattern was unmistakable: the adversary brought into the room early, the ally relegated to reacting after the framework had already taken shape.
The result was a shift in negotiating power toward the aggressor—before the victim state had been invited to the table.
Ukraine eventually received a 28-point peace proposal—unsigned, unattributed, and far from what Kyiv expected from a major ally. AP and Axios reported that the language displayed hallmarks of Russian bureaucratic drafting: legalistic verbs, administrative cadence, and syntactic patterns associated with Russian state memoranda rather than American diplomatic documents. Ukrainian officials recognized these features immediately. The text did not resemble something produced in Washington. It resembled something shaped in Moscow.
The damage lay not only in authorship, but in form.
A peace proposal is a trust-bearing document: an ally offers it to safeguard another’s sovereignty. Here, Ukraine received a plan labeled as American—expected from the country supplying its weapons and intelligence—only to discover linguistic traces of the state invading it.
This was not a minor irregularity. It was a procedural breach: Ukraine received, under an American banner, the conceptual architecture of the aggressor—a plan demanding concessions and long-term constraints that originated not in Washington but in consultations with the invading state. Few signals could more deeply erode confidence than a document bearing an ally’s label and an adversary’s fingerprints.
This is why the proposal alarmed Ukraine and Europe. It was not only the terms. It was the realization that the voice inside the document did not sound like Washington’s.
When Ukraine examined the plan, it found demands that, according to AP, Axios, The Guardian, and Politico Europe, would formalize Russian territorial gains without requiring Russia to withdraw or disarm. The proposal required Ukraine to recognize Russia’s control over Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk; withdraw from additional territory Russia had not taken by force; accept frozen front lines in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia; renounce NATO membership; and limit its troop levels and long-range weapons. Russia, meanwhile, faced no reciprocal force caps, no withdrawal, and would receive phased sanctions relief.
These provisions were not theoretical. They would have redrawn Europe’s map, weakened Ukraine’s capacity to defend itself, and rewarded Russia’s invasion in concrete terms. They would codify gains achieved by force while constraining only the victim.
Perhaps most revealing were the proposed “security guarantees.” AP reported that they were non-binding, dependent on the political choices of future U.S. administrations, and voidable if Ukraine used certain U.S. weapons. Ukraine was being asked to trade territory and sovereignty for assurances the United States could reverse easily.
The historical record—Helsinki in 2018, the 2019 Ukraine aid pause, public statements suggesting NATO allies deemed “delinquent” might be left vulnerable, and the 2025 suspension of military and intelligence support—shaped how Kyiv evaluated those guarantees. These events, reported by CBS, PBS, AP, UPI, and the Senate Intelligence Committee, formed the context through which small states assess reliability.
When AP reported that U.S. officials warned Ukraine its intelligence support might be affected if it refused to engage with the plan, the structure clarified. Pressure flowed only toward the state under attack. Ukraine—dependent on U.S. intelligence for air defense and targeting—was told its essential tools might be limited if it resisted a framework that advantaged the invader. Russia faced no equivalent pressure. The process resembled not negotiation but the management of Ukrainian concessions, shaped in part by early Russian input.
This dynamic aligned with longstanding Western intelligence assessments: Russia sought not only territory but enduring leverage over Ukraine. Any settlement leaving Ukraine militarily inferior or barred from NATO would invite renewed assault. Those assessments, reiterated by NATO, the European Commission, and multiple Western intelligence chiefs from 2022 to 2025, warned that a weakened Ukraine and discretionary guarantees would create conditions for future aggression—not prevent it.
European partners reacted quickly. The Guardian reported that EU leaders deemed the plan a “non-starter.” Several noted the irregularity of learning about it through press leaks rather than coordinated briefings. Allies were treated not as participants but as recipients of a nearly finished document—observers rather than stakeholders in a process that affected their security.
Ukrainian officials recognized the pattern immediately. As The Guardian and AP reported, they described the proposal as “capitulation,” “absurd,” and incompatible with sovereignty. One adviser repeated a line held since the invasion’s first hours: “Sovereignty is not negotiable. Survival is not negotiable.” These assessments were not rhetorical; they reflected the lived experience of a country repeatedly forced to endure decisions made beyond its borders.
Historical analogies can mislead, which is why precision matters. Munich is often invoked reflexively, but the 2025 process bears little resemblance to Chamberlain’s world. Britain entered the crisis militarily unprepared, guided by incomplete intelligence, and constrained by constitutional machinery that governed its diplomacy. Chamberlain acted within that system—defending his policy before Parliament, accepting its verdict when support collapsed, and transferring power peacefully. In a 1939 letter, he wrote, “I act as the Constitution prescribes, and I shall abide by it,” a line reflecting both his temperament and the institutional limits within which he operated.
The United States in 2025 faced none of those guardrails. Several key actions surrounding the Ukraine proposal unfolded outside the diplomatic and interagency channels meant to protect American foreign policy—under a president who had been impeached twice, first for pressuring Ukraine to advance his domestic political interests and later for encouraging a mob to disrupt the transfer of power; who was subsequently convicted in New York on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in a scheme prosecutors argued—and the jury agreed—was intended to influence the 2016 election by concealing a sexual encounter with adult film actor Stormy Daniels; and who repeatedly challenged core elements of the constitutional order. He was also the first U.S. president ever found liable for sexual abuse and for defaming the woman who reported that abuse, in civil trials decided by two New York juries.
Those challenges included publicly encouraging his supporters to disrupt Congress’s certification of electoral votes on January 6, 2021—an assault in which more than 140 police officers were injured, several subsequent deaths were later attributed to the attack, and rioters vandalized the Capitol, including smearing human feces in hallways and offices; refusing to accept certified electoral results; proposing that parts of the Constitution be “terminated”; and publicly deriding Daniels—including in a 2018 tweet in which he called her “horseface.” None of this resembled the constitutional discipline within which Chamberlain operated. It reflected a political environment in which the safeguards normally governing American foreign-policy decision-making had been weakened or bypassed altogether.
The more revealing parallel is the Molotov–Ribbentrop logic of 1939. The method of the 28-point proposal—an aggressor engaged early, an ally excluded until the end, and borders discussed without the participation of the state affected—echoed the architecture of the secret protocols, in which larger powers negotiated the fate of smaller states without their presence. The contexts differ, but the structure does not. When decisions are shaped with the aggressor before they reach the intended beneficiary, they signal that sovereignty is being bargained in rooms the endangered state is not permitted to enter.
Seen as a sequence rather than isolated acts, the meaning becomes unmistakable. A U.S. envoy coached a Kremlin adviser on how to influence an American president. Russian officials shaped the early contours of a peace plan. Ukraine received an unsigned document bearing Russian linguistic features. The plan weakened Ukraine and strengthened Russia. The guarantees were structurally unsound. Pressure fell on the ally, not the aggressor. Allies were briefed late or through the press. None of this is moral inference; it is grounded in procedural facts.
Diplomacy depends on predictable architecture: allies consulted early, adversaries managed carefully, proposals vetted through institutions. October 2025 inverted that architecture, treating Russia as a drafting partner and Ukraine as an impediment. It constructed a parallel diplomatic track that bypassed the systems designed to guard against foreign influence and preserve alliance integrity. It replaced transparency with informality, expertise with improvisation, and collective security with private negotiation.
In that sense, this is betrayal in its precise meaning: a structural reordering of obligations. It occurs when an ally becomes the last to know and an adversary becomes the first to shape; when institutions built to protect democratic partners give way to backchannels with those seeking to weaken them. Such moments do not vanish when the documents fade or the actors depart. They endure because they reveal not only what was decided—but whom the decision was made to serve.
Brian Daitzman is the Editor of The Intellectualist [ [link removed] ]. Read the original article here. [ [link removed] ]
References
Bloomberg | November 25, 2025 | “Witkoff Advised Russia on How to Pitch Ukraine Plan to Trump” | [link removed] [ [link removed] ]
Axios | November 19, 2025 | “U.S. secretly drafting Ukraine peace plan with Russian input” | [link removed] [ [link removed] ] t.co [ [link removed] ]
Axios | November 20, 2025 | “Trump’s Ukraine-Russia peace plan, in all 28 points” | [link removed] [ [link removed] ]
AP News | November 20, 2025 | “Ukraine would cede territory to Russia in draft of Trump peace plan obtained by AP” | [link removed] [ [link removed] ]
CBS News | November 22, 2025 | “Newly revealed U.S. Ukraine peace proposal includes concessions to Russia” | [link removed] [ [link removed] ]
FactCheck.org (Annenberg Public Policy Center) | February 12, 2024 | “Trump’s Distorted NATO ‘Delinquent’ Comments” | [link removed] [ [link removed] ] FactCheck.org [ [link removed] ]
U.S. Government Publishing Office | 18 U.S.C. § 953 (Logan Act) | “Private correspondence with foreign governments” | [link removed] [ [link removed] ] GovInfo [ [link removed] ]
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel | 2022 | “The Logan Act” | [link removed] [ [link removed] ] Department of Justice [ [link removed] ]
International Criminal Court | March 17, 2023 | “ICC issues arrest warrant for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin” | [link removed] [ [link removed] ] Legal Information Institute [ [link removed] ]
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence | August 2020 | “Report on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 5” | [link removed] Senate Select Committee on Intelligence [ [link removed] ]

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