Jared Kushner is an observant Jew. On Saturday, Sept. 5, he sat in the Kremlin for more than three hours and stayed for dinner with Russian President Vladimir Putin. That was the Sabbath. It was also the night Selichot begins, the penitential prayers Ashkenazi Jews recite in the week before Rosh Hashanah.
Jewish law permits this. The principle is pikuach nefesh: Saving a life overrides the Sabbath. Ending a war qualifies. No rabbi would object.
But the choice tells you something. The American side rated this weekend high enough to spend a Sabbath on it. Steve Witkoff and Kushner flew on Friday, met Putin on Saturday, and reached Kyiv by train Sunday morning. Two capitals then had 48 hours to show whether they rated it the same way.
BERLIN BLAMED RUSSIA FOR A BOMB AT NATO’S AIRLIFT HUB. THEN IT CLOSED A CONSULATE
Start with Moscow’s ledger.
Putin ordered a three-day halt to strikes on Kyiv for the duration of the visit. He opened the meeting by asking the envoys to carry his warm wishes to President Donald Trump and told them he had full trust in American mediation. His foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, said afterward that the two sides had gone through potential joint economic ventures in considerable detail.
The envoys also thanked Putin for something he had done a month earlier. On Aug. 11, Russia released Robert Gilman, a former U.S. Marine who had spent more than four years in a prison in Voronezh and whose family said he was near death. Trump announced it himself and said Russia had asked for no one in return.
None of this was a concession. No breakthrough was announced, and the territorial question, the only one that matters, went nowhere. Russia still demands that Ukraine abandon the part of Donbas it holds. Kyiv still refuses.
But look at what the envoys carried home. A freed American, a pause in the bombing, and a Russian president publicly praising the president who sent them. The Kremlin gave away nothing on substance and still sent the mediators back with a full bag.
Now Kyiv’s ledger.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave the envoys embroidered shirts and T-shirts printed with the words “Kyiv regime.” His spokesman, Serhiy Nikiforov, confirmed that the president had ordered them prepared. Zelensky first displayed the slogan on David Arakhamia, who leads the ruling parliamentary faction and sat on the negotiating team.
The joke is aimed at Moscow. “Kyiv regime” is Russian propaganda’s term for the Ukrainian government, and turning it into merchandise is a decent piece of defiance. I understand the impulse. I laughed.
It was also the deliverable.
Then came the press conference closing the talks, held outdoors. Kushner and Witkoff sat on the stage. Zelensky sat beside them. Dmytro Gordon, Ukraine’s best-known broadcaster, asked Witkoff whether Putin had been deceiving him all along, whether Russians understand only force, and whether he found it repugnant to sit across a table from a war criminal. Witkoff replied that he had been to Moscow roughly eight times and had always been treated with respect.
Consider who was asking. In 2020, Gordon interviewed Igor Girkin, the self-declared defense minister of the Donetsk separatist statelet, and Natalia Poklonskaya, Russia’s former prosecutor in occupied Crimea. Protesters threw eggs at his Kyiv office. Gordon then explained that both interviews had been conducted in cooperation with Ukraine’s security services and that the recordings had gone to The Hague as evidence.
So Gordon understands perfectly well why a country talks to its enemies. He has done it himself and defended it as service to the state. His question to Witkoff was not naive. It was cynical.
There is one more thing on the record. Before the war, interviewing Gary Tabach, a retired U.S. Navy captain, on his own program, Gordon said that if a call-up were declared, he would go and fight himself. He is 58. Ukraine mobilizes men up to 60. He did not go.
Conor Kennedy did. The son of the current U.S. health secretary joined Ukraine’s International Legion in 2022 with no military experience and served on the northeastern front. Last month, a Moscow court put him on Russia’s wanted list.
I raise this not to settle scores with a television host, but because Gordon was not an accident in that room. The exchange aired on Ukraine’s United News telethon, the joint national broadcast created by presidential decree in February 2022 and funded from the state budget. The State Department’s annual human rights report has described that telethon as giving the government an unprecedented level of control over primetime television news, and noted that speakers who criticized the government were blacklisted from it.
A broadcast that can keep the president’s critics off the air did not have to put Gordon on it. Someone accredited him. Someone set the format. Someone decided that this would be the last image the American negotiators carried out of Kyiv.
Nor is Gordon an isolated case. In June 2024, Texty.org.ua, a Ukrainian data journalism outlet, published a study naming roughly 390 Americans it identified as obstacles to continued aid to Ukraine. Among them were Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with 116 House Republicans and 21 Republican senators. Vance, then a senator, wrote with former Rep. Matt Gaetz to former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and noted that the outlet’s founder was listed on a United States government website as supported by the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The House Appropriations Committee voted to cut off that funding. Texty called the backlash an attack on free speech.
Two years later, three of the men on that list are the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state. Witkoff and Kushner went to Moscow and Kyiv carrying their authority.
Russia started this war and is still bombing Ukrainian cities. Ukraine deserves to win it. That is precisely why the rest of this matters. Zelensky himself behaved correctly all weekend. He thanked Trump for the trip, called the discussions good, and talked about air defense and the winter package. His conduct was not the problem. The problem is everything around him that his own government could shape, and does not. A government that can commission souvenir T-shirts for its guests on 48 hours’ notice can also decide who gets a microphone.
I spent 12 years in Georgia’s security, interior, and defense structures working against Russian operations, and four more in its parliament. Moscow spends years and considerable money trying to pry countries away from Washington. It funds outlets. It grooms commentators. It plants stories. It rarely gets a return as clean as a hostile question from a trusted local voice, delivered to an American envoy, on camera, at the close of a peace mission.
I have watched this before at home. For two decades, Georgia was the most pro-American country in Europe. Its government and much of its opposition media then spent a few years teaching Georgians that Washington was the adversary, and the polling moved. I have written in these pages about how quickly that happened. Moving it back is much harder.
Ukraine cannot afford that experiment. This is not about gratitude. Gratitude is a sentiment, and sentiments do not win wars. It is about arithmetic. Ukraine’s air defense, its intelligence picture, and its access to any settlement Russia will actually sign all run through Washington. Russia is working to sever that line. Kyiv should not be volunteering.
The Kremlin understood the assignment. Putin does not like Americans, and he does not want this war to end on terms Ukraine can live with. He still spent the weekend making the mediators comfortable, because comfortable mediators come back. That is not virtue. It is tradecraft.
I SPENT 12 YEARS IN COUNTERINTELLIGENCE. TRUMP’S DEFENDERS ARE SABOTAGING THEIR OWN CASE
Kushner spent his Sabbath on this. The next round of trilateral talks is being scheduled. There will be another weekend like this one, another press conference, and another set of gifts.
Kyiv gets to decide what goes in the bag.
Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco–based geopolitical analyst and columnist who monitors Russian-language media. From 1996 to 2008, he served as a senior official across Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work appears in Newsweek, the Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, and RealClearWorld, and at emzargelashvili.substack.com.