Summary
Donald Trump lashed out at media reports claiming Russian President Vladimir Putin kept his envoy, Steve Witkoff, waiting for over eight hours in a “power play.”
Sky News reported the delay, but Trump denied it on Truth Social, calling the story fake and the media “sick degenerates.” He insisted there was “no wait whatsoever” and that discussions were productive.
Trump also faced criticism for repeating Putin’s claims about Ukrainian troops being surrounded.
Witkoff left Moscow without securing a ceasefire agreement.
Yeah, “well, there were other meetings going on which had to end first” and “there was absolutely no wait time at all”…
I think I can discern what he meant but couldn’t articulate, but if we have to interpret what a more capable person would have said any time the president speaks…
But since we do have to interpret what he must have meant, my interpretation is that he was trying to say “there was reasonable justification for the wait time, it wasn’t artificially increased as a power-play”. Though a counter argument would be, that is exactly how a power play of artificially increasing wait times is accomplished. Instead of scheduling stuff so that people will be met with at a reasonable time given their circumstances, things are shuffled around to make the person unsure when they are supposed to go in. Enough so that they can’t leave cuz it could be any minute, but long enough that they should feel slighted. 2 hours would be a pretty ridiculous slight. Making someone spend 8 hours in your lobby without leaving is overkill. That means the whole time they kept assuring him it would be soon. At no point did they give him any heads up that he could maybe safely go to lunch or dinner or whatever since it wasn’t gonna be “that” soon.
For these meetings, it is generally considered a normal level of respect for the meeting to occur within an hour of the plane landing. Especially for someone who should be incredibly busy and scheduled to have other meetings in other countries that same day.
8 hours is fully, literally, toying with him. 100% showing how little they respect him and who he represents. 3 or 4 hours would have accomplished a complete and utter embarrassment… they wanted to set a record, just for fun.