The leak of the contents of the phone call between the US special envoy Steve Witkoff and the adviser to the Russian president on foreign policy, Yuriy Ushakov, was described by the Kremlin spokesman on Wednesday as an attempt to undermine efforts for peace in Ukraine. This was reported by the DPA agency, writes TASR.
„It is clear that there are many people in various countries – including the US – who want to stop the trend towards peace.” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who is currently accompanying Russian President Vladimir Putin on a state visit to Kyrgyzstan, according to the Russian state news agency TASS. However, Peskov downplayed the importance of the leaked content of the phone call, which appeared in a report by the Bloomberg news agency on Wednesday night.
The alleged recordings of a telephone conversation between Witkoff and Ushakov from October were released, in which the US official gave the Russian side tips on how to communicate with US President Donald Trump and which parts of the draft peace plan to present to him. In response, Ushakov told the TASS agency that his conversations with Witkoff were not intended for public use. “No one is allowed to publish it. No one,” he declared according to the TASS agency. According to the British station BBC, Ušakov considers it most likely that the content of the phone call became public due to wiretapping.
He explained that the interested parties have such a telephone connection where “leaks almost never occur unless one party deliberately allows them’. However, he admitted that sometimes there are also conversations through the WhatsApp application, which “can someone eavesdrop somehow”. He added at the same time that in such a case it is unlikely that the leak would come from the interviewees. Trump defended his envoy on Wednesday, saying the way Witkoff negotiates is standard practice. According to Trump, Witkoff acted as “one who knows how to make deals”: first he spoke with Ukraine, then with Russia, while “each side has something to give and something to gain”.
Bloomberg also cited another phone call from late October between Ushakov and Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev, in which they discuss a peace plan for Ukraine and how to offer it to the Americans — a proposal later published by news website Axios, according to Bloomberg. This proposal included the maximalist demands of the Russian side. Dmitriev responded to this leak of the contents of his phone call with Ushakov with a post on the X network, in which he called the quotes a “fake” and added that “the closer we are to peace, the more desperate the warmongers are.”
Spokesman Peskov expressed himself in the same spirit when he confirmed that negotiations on ending the war in Ukraine are ongoing and that “many people” will try to “thwart” them. The subject of the negotiations is initially the 28-point American draft peace plan, which has undergone extensive modifications in the meantime, but has not yet been published. Witkoff will discuss the new version of this plan with Putin next week in Moscow.
