The diplomatic shock in Washington spread to Europe. While the Trump team is negotiating a peace plan in Geneva, it is unclear in the US who wrote the 28 points – the White House or the Kremlin.
What is currently happening in Washington, Switzerland and other European countries is a diplomatic emergency. The US delegation is negotiating in Geneva with Ukraine and Europe over the controversial 28-point plan.
The American team, consisting of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff, was flanked by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who does not hold any official position. But the fact that the Trump family’s financial interests are also at the negotiating table with Kushner, as they are in the Middle East, seems almost irrelevant compared to the rest of the drama.
Because there is fierce controversy in the US capital over what exactly this peace plan is and, most importantly, who wrote it – America or Russia. The chaos and confusion surrounding this question and the reliability of American foreign policy is felt around the world.
A statement from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said as much: “It would be good to know exactly who the author of this plan was,” he told the public. Almost no foreign policy initiative of the current US administration was communicated in a contradictory manner and caused a lot of diplomatic damage to allies even before negotiations began in Geneva.
At the center of the current escalation are US Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio and Trump’s special envoy, New York real estate investor Steve Witkoff:
Several influential senators, including Republican Mike Rounds, reported publicly on Friday that Rubio told them in a phone call regarding the 28-point plan that “this administration is not responsible for this release in its current form.” Instead, as Senator Angus King put it, it was “a wish list from Russia.”
Rounds said: “It looks more like it was written in Russian.” The plan is said to have been conveyed through Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, who led negotiations on Ukraine with Jared Kushner and Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev in Miami. How exactly he got to the media is still a matter of speculation. Witkoff openly suspected that a journalist got the plan from K., which may have offended Russian negotiator Kirill Dmitriev.
