The Correspondent Podcast — Episode No. 1

Welcome to the very first episode of The Correspondent. I’m Caitlin Doornbos.

If you’ve followed my reporting over the years, you know I’ve spent a lot of time covering American foreign policy from the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House — but also from the places where those decisions actually land.

That’s what I want this show to be about: not just telling you what happened, but taking you beyond the headlines to explain what it means, what the people making these decisions are actually trying to accomplish, and what we should be watching next.

So I doubt there could be a better story to start with.

On Sunday, President Trump’s two top diplomats on all things peace — Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — traveled to Kyiv for the first time, meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after months of diplomacy conducted largely everywhere but Ukraine.

Witkoff and Kushner arrived in Kyiv almost directly from Moscow, where just a day earlier they spent more than three hours behind closed doors with Russian President Vladimir Putin. They came out of those meetings talking about new ideas, substantive discussions and the possibility of moving toward a deal.

But there’s still one enormous problem: Russia and Ukraine remain very far apart on what ending this war actually looks like. And positions don’t seem to have changed much since the last big diplomatic push nine months ago.

So, what happens now?

To help me break all of that down, I spoke with George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War, who has spent years closely tracking the battlefield, Russia’s military campaign and the Kremlin’s objectives in Ukraine.