On Sunday morning, Steve Witkoff, the president’s foreign policy factotum, stunned the world by announcing on CNN that he’d gotten Vladimir Putin to agree to allow “Article 5–like” security guarantees for Ukraine. This would have been a shocking concession from the Russian president, who has repeatedly said that one of the aims of his war is to keep Ukraine out of NATO. But as Witkoff boasted to Jake Tapper, now Putin was just fine with a Western pact to defend Ukraine should Russia reinvade—essentially NATO by another name. Witkoff was clearly very proud of himself. This was, he said, “the first time we had ever heard the Russians agree to that.”