For several hours now, the American press has been buzzing about the eight pages published by NPR, which were (un)wisely left by a US protocol officer in a hotel printer. Let's pay attention to the second and third pages, which refer to a 2:2 meeting, not a 3:3 meeting. No Rubio or Lavrov: on the American side, apart from Trump, only Steve Witkoff; on the Russian side, along with Putin, Ushakov. 

And that's interesting. 

Trump's longtime friend, 68-year-old Witkoff, has been consistently playing along with Russia for several months, traveling to Moscow five times and appeared in the scheme to resolve the Russian-Ukrainian war in the spring, taking over the Russian half of the work from General Kellogg (whom Trump appointed as special representative for Russia and Ukraine after returning to the White House), who has since been consistently pushed away from key negotiations. Back in the spring, the Daily Beast reported that Witkoff and Rubio were pulling Trump in completely different directions: former Senator Rubio did not think it was a good idea to befriend Putin, while Witkoff sees no problem with this and is pushing for the restoration of Nord Stream. The publication called it a “civil war” in Trump's MAGA camp.

Ambitious Republican Senator Marco Rubio ended up as Secretary of State after losing the internal competition for the role of vice president to JD Vance. In March, CNN claimed that a surprise awaited Rubio in his new position: Trump allowed his old friend Witkoff to effectively take over key negotiations at the State Department — first in the Middle East, then with Russia. No Ukrainian would be surprised by such an unconventional distribution of roles around the president. Witkoff “flies around the world and plays secretary of state,” CNN claims, citing an anonymous source close to the president. This is because Trump trusts Witkoff 100%.

So, it was in his company, once again pushing Rubio aside, that Trump was going to the long-awaited summit with Vladimir. During his first term, at a previous meeting with the Russian president in Helsinki in 2018, Trump also pushed aside his then-Secretary of State Pompeo and met with Putin alone (doing exactly what many senators had asked him not to do). The meeting with the Russians in Witkoff's company would have been little different from a one-on-one meeting. What went wrong at the last moment and why everyone appeared in front of the cameras in a 3:3 format, adding the heads of the American and Russian foreign ministries, has not yet been reported by any American publication. Either they have not noticed this change, or they are still trying to figure out what happened behind the scenes. 

It also remains a mystery whether Trump gave Putin a statue of an American eagle, as he intended, according to the same documents, (un)wisely left in a printer at a four-star hotel in Anchorage, the capital of Alaska — a sale that the Russians regretted for a century and a half until they turned it into a symbol of American shame.