Putin, Trump, and the Inept New York Times

[Celerity]

Today on TAP: How could the Times so totally bungle the story of Russia’s latest peace plan and Trump’s capitulation?

https://prospect.org/2025/11/24/putin-trump-ukraine-inept-new-york-times/


Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak, second from right, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio talk to the press as their consultations continue at the U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Geneva, November 23, 2025. Credit: Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP

If you get your news on the Russia-Ukraine negotiations from The New York Times, here is what you read this morning. Headline: “Ukraine and U.S. Cite Progress in Talks on Ending War With Russia.” And the lead paragraph:



Just about everything in this framing is wrong, and the rest of the piece is worse. For starters, this is not a “U.S. plan.” It’s a Putin plan. Most of the story just quotes official, soothing statements. That’s not reporting; it’s stenography. Only in paragraphs 28 and 29, if you read that far, do you get a hint of the real story:



Right. And so …? The Times doesn’t tell us. To get the real story, you might have read The Wall Street Journal’s Saturday editorial, which points out that the 28-point plan is basically a Putin wish list, and a total capitulation. Or you could just read the plan, which somehow escaped the attention of the Times. It gives Putin all of the Donbas in the east, prohibits NATO defense of Ukraine, requires new elections in Ukraine within 100 days (how about free and fair elections in Russia?), ends all sanctions on Russia, and a great deal more, all favoring Putin and all undercutting Ukraine.

Or to get a proper explainer piece, you could have read Heather Cox Richardson. Her post early this morning scrupulously unpacked the infighting between Vice President JD Vance, who deceptively presented Putin’s leaked plan as a joint U.S.-Russian plan, and the hapless secretary of state, Marco Rubio. Richardson went into detail about how Rubio initially contradicted Vance, telling a group of Republican senators that the plan was in fact Putin’s, then ineptly tried to walk that back. Richardson deliciously quotes Sen. Mitch McConnell: “Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool. Rewarding Russian butchery would be disastrous to America’s interests.”

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