US official heading Ukraine peace plan has history of empathizing with Russia

[groundloop]

Source: The Guardian

A retired US general charged with helping sell the Trump administration’s Ukraine peace plan wrote a string of op-eds and reports for a rightwing thinktank in which he repeatedly questioned whether Ukraine had a legitimate part to play in peace negotiations.

Keith Kellogg also blamed the war on the machinations of a US “military-industrial complex” and “[Joe] Biden’s national security incompetence” rather than Russia’s 2022 invasion, which has been condemned across the globe and resulted in a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Kellogg has been seen as a hawk on Russia, but he also wrote that “the US should consider leveraging its military aid to Ukraine to make it contingent on Ukrainian officials agreeing to join peace talks with Russia”. Earlier this month, after a disastrous Washington DC meeting with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on 28 February, US aid to Ukraine was paused, as was intelligence sharing.

[snip]

After spending the Biden years at the rightwing and Trumpist America First Policy Institute (AFPI), Kellogg took at least two young AFPI staffers with him to assist him as Trump’s presidential special envoy to Russia and Ukraine.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/15/keith-kellogg-ukraine-russia-trump

[turbinetree]

1. Kellogg sounds like wet corn flakes..................I guess when he got his news from Pravda

that Russia and the oligarchs were not at fault.........what a fucking embarrassment.............go live in Russia with that has been Steven Seagal........bring along that Flynn character also along that Stein person ....

[Emrys]

2. Yes, Kellogg has a checkered past, for sure.

The article's a little misleading - his idea, expressed in a number of interviews before he took office, was that, yes, they would threaten to or actually withhold aid if Ukraine didn't enter talks, but also that they would bump up supplies to Ukraine if Russia was obstructive. Of course, since Trump is the final arbiter of what Russian obstructivism looks like, it's a heavily skewed measure.

Kellogg's certainly a dyed-in-the-wool Republican judging by his social media presence, but the Ukrainians found him a more receptive liaison than others the US has sent, and the Russians demanded he be barred from negotiations as they felt he was too sympathetic to Ukraine.

For perspective, since then they've also demonstrated coolness toward Trump's other liaison officer, Steve Witkoff, making him wait eight hours for an audience with Putin. The main takeaway from this, apart from Russia's unwavering demands, seems to have been propagation of the Putinite lie blasted across social media by a gullible Trump that Ukrainian troops in Kursk are surrounded and face annihilation unless they surrender to Putin's tender mercies. No OSINT aggregators see any encirclement of Ukrainian troops anywhere in Ukraine.

[republianmushroom]

3. Nothing new so does our president.

Ukraine tell them both to fuck off.

[James48]

4. So Kellogg is running the Ukraine war.

Trump is detached from everything- and he is just letting his people do what they want.

Kellogg says cut off arms to Ukraine-- so Trump says ok- cut off arms.

Well, at least we know who is driving that bus.

Thanks for the link.