ALSO SEE: Michael Weiss on X

Questions I would ask at this stage:

1. Where is Rubio? Where is State? Rubio said the other day Putin's position is unchanged and suggested any prospect for peace was remote, an assessment echoed by Richard Moore. Rubio is Acting NSA, and so his lack of input here is telling. Is he purposefully letting Witkoff fly this plane into a mountain again, as he did in Alaska, or is he too busy with Venezuela to care?

2. Yermak's cozying up to Witkoff is quite revealing, as is the fact that Witkoff canceled his Turkey trip -- evidently because he was not acquainted with the full scale and scope of the Ukrainian corruption scandal now threatening to end Yermak's overlong political career. (There's a shocker: Witkoff was uninformed.) Yermak using Dim Philby to save his own hide by negotiating terms that aren't exactly transparent to all in Kyiv would be an ignominious sideshow to this whole circus, but wholly in keeping with Yermak's style.

3. Trump today said he is "disappointed" in Putin and vented about the difficulty of ending the war. This is an odd thing to say when you're an emotional toddler without a verbal filter and you have just handed the keys to the kingdom to Putin, according to anonymous sources quoted in the U.S. media. Does Trump even know what's in this 28-point plan? Does he know there is a 28-point plan? Does he care?

4. The administration has expended a great deal of energy of late telling the Europeans what to do: arm, pay up, impose 100% tariffs on India and China for importing Russian oil, further eliminate European dependency on Russian oil, do more sanctions on the shadow fleet, etc, etc. State just approved $105m in Patriot sustainment to Ukraine and $500m via PURL to the Nordics and Balts. Yesterday, Grynkewich allowed ATACMS to be fired into Russia and for the first time Kyiv acknowledged that development. The UK just resupplied Ukraine with more Storm Shadow cruise missiles, which it won't have done without Washington's approval. (The Kremlin now evidently insists on eliminating all long-range missiles from Ukraine's arsenal.) And yet... it's "Fuck the Europeans, we're going it alone with Moscow."

Smiley is suspicious, Percy.

This is something the U.S. simply cannot do even if it wanted to because there are limits to what an autocratic president can achieve (or perpetrate) unilaterally. I've commented before on Congressional approval for lifting CAATSA-certified sanctions on Russia, and how concomitant without EU sanctions relief the Russian economy does not rebound. Moreover, Republicans have rebuffed Trump on Epstein and Brazil and they're rightly worried how he's leading them into an electoral slaughterhouse in the midterms. Ukraine is not Gaza, and Russia is not Israel, where the U.S. had/has enormous leverage in the form of military aid and diplomatic cover. There is nothing concrete in any of the reporting on what Ukraine or Europe or indeed the U.S. might get out of this scheme, apart from mushy rhetoric on "security guarantees." NATO diplomatic and military planes must leave Ukraine? ZSU must reduce itself by 250%? All Donbas goes to Russia and Ukraine must legally certify the land grab, plus Crimea? This is parodically maximalist, invites more war in the immediate future, and has absolutely no chance of being agreed to in Kyiv or Brussels. Or Warsaw, which is preparing for the next war and will bear the brunt of this sell-out on its periphery, and which just suffered a Russian intelligence attack on its rail system.

5. Using the U.S. press corps to launder a FUBAR "framework" as some signed, sealed and delivered policy proposal when it may only be the brainchild of one braindead American diplomat and one desperate Russian sovereign wealth fund CEO would be very on brand for the Kremlin. And it would be very on-brand for the U.S. press corp to work itself into a lather over this: see the copy filed on the Budapest summit that wasn't. Already there are indications of comms manipulation. Dmitriev, for instance, claimed in Axios to have hung out with Witkoff for three days in Miami last month. Uh, no he didn't. This is easily checked in the open source and shown to be an exaggeration. What else might Dmitriev be exaggerating? And is it perhaps worth inquiring why a man described as a forgettable "propagandist" by the U.S. Treasury Secretary only a few weeks ago is now very chatty to Western journalists that peace is upon us and there's not a damned thing Ukraine can do about it?