United States Special Envoy Steve Witkoff said Monday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sent a letter to President Donald Trump apologizing for his behavior in the Oval Office.
“Zelensky sent a letter to the president,” Witkoff shared. “He apologized for that whole incident that happened in the Oval Office.”
“I think that it was an important step,” he added, “and there’s been a lot of discussion between our teams and the Ukrainians and the Europeans who are relevant to this discussion as well.”
His comments build off Trump’s revelation, during his joint address to Congress last week, that Zelensky had sent him a letter following the contentious Oval Office scene. But Trump had not revealed that Zelensky had apologized to him during the joint address.
Trump told Zelensky to leave the White House, a White House official shared with The Daily Wire, after a fiery end to an otherwise pleasant Oval Office meeting to finalize a mineral deal between the United States and Ukraine.
Zelensky left without signing the deal and without attending a formal lunch that had been prepared for him — a lunch that was reportedly eaten by White House staff.
Trump, Vance, and other top officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized repeatedly that Zelensky owed the president an apology.
“We’ve explained very clearly what our plan is here, which is we want to get the Russians to a negotiating table,” Rubio said in a news appearance in early March.
“We want to explore whether peace is possible. They understand this. They also understand that this agreement that was supposed to be signed today was supposed to be an agreement that binds America economically to Ukraine, which, to me, as I’ve explained and I think the president alluded to today, is a security guarantee in its own way because we’re involved; it’s now us, it’s our interests.”
“That was all explained,” he argued. “That was all understood. And nonetheless, for the last 10 days in every engagement we’ve had with the Ukrainians there’s been complications in getting that point across, including the public statements that President Zelensky has made.”
This week, the State Department said, Rubio is traveling to Saudi Arabia to speak with Ukrainians about Trump’s goal of ending the Russia-Ukraine war.
