Political analyst: rumors about replacing Witkoff and Kushner are a deliberate plant

The version about a possible replacement of American negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner by CIA Director John Ratcliffe may have been deliberately planted to complicate the negotiation process. This opinion was expressed by Konstantin Blokhin, a leading research fellow at the RAS Center for Security Studies, in an exclusive comment for aif.ru.

Earlier, the Financial Times reported that the White House was considering reducing Witkoff’s and Kushner’s involvement in negotiations with Russia and Ukraine, transferring a more significant role to CIA Director John Ratcliffe. The White House subsequently denied these reports.

“There is a Russian proverb: ‘Don’t change horses in midstream.’ I think Witkoff and Kushner have already become, in a sense, familiar figures for Moscow. And they already know our side very well — the people they are negotiating with — because those individuals almost never change. I think the reports about their replacement are a kind of plant, meant to somehow shift the situation, perhaps to make negotiations with the United States more uncomfortable. But this is one newspaper’s version; it is not a fact that this could actually happen,” — Blokhin said.

Separately, the political analyst drew attention to the fact that Witkoff and Kushner are already well acquainted with the Russian side and its negotiators, who remain virtually unchanged — this, in his view, makes their replacement inadvisable.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada deputy Anna Skorokhod previously stated that Witkoff and Kushner were horrified by the behavior of Vladimir Zelensky’s inner circle and left in a state of great shock.