Vice President Vance, along with a top Kremlin negotiator and a chorus of critics allied with President Trump, attacked Politico on Friday over an article about special envoy Steve Witkoff’s “struggles to manage” peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.

“This story from Politico is journalistic malpractice. But it's more than that: it's a foreign influence operation meant to hurt the administration and one of our most effective members,” Vance wrote Friday in a post on social platform X.

Witkoff has been Trump’s interlocutor in talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, visiting Moscow at least five times in the past six months.

Following the president's summit with Putin in Alaska earlier this month, Witkoff said Russia had agreed to a Western security presence in Ukraine, which he ca

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