Former Trump special envoy Keith Kellogg directly challenged Steve Witkoff's public praise of Vladimir Putin as a reliable negotiating partner, comparing trust in the Russian president to Neville Chamberlain's faith in Adolf Hitler on the eve of World War II.
As "Hvylya" reports, Kellogg responded to Witkoff's Fox News statement - "He has never been anything other than straight with me" - during a wide-ranging interview on PBS NewsHour's Compass Points.
"As long as you realize that President Putin was a KGB colonel," Kellogg began. He noted Putin's career in Soviet intelligence, including his posting in Dresden, Germany, and argued that understanding "the personality and the understanding of Slavic and the Russian personality" is essential. "Do you really trust a guy like that?" the retired general asked. "Any KGB agent, a good one, would probably tell you one thing and mean something else."
Kellogg then drew the Chamberlain parallel explicitly: "I keep going back, let's say back to 1938, when Neville Chamberlain said he trusted Hitler. Well, history proved that not to be good." He noted that two senior European intelligence officials told reporters at the Munich Security Conference that Putin is not negotiating in good faith - an assessment Kellogg appeared to share.
The disagreement between Kellogg and Witkoff reflects a deeper divide in approach. Kellogg described Witkoff as viewing the situation through a businessman's lens, susceptible to economic promises from Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund. "When he starts talking like trillions of dollars are available, which I don't believe, and that kind of sways you," Kellogg said. He added that European allies he met with in Cambridge, UK last week share his skepticism: "They are not willing to go there." Historians have traced this pattern of deception to the roots of Putin's political system, which inherits the worst traditions of Soviet governance.
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