Kushner and Witkoff fly Kremlin to Dublin for the tenth time, war outlasting Soviet fight against Nazi Germany.

…(cont) I want to ask you something plain, because I wrote the number down twice to be sure I had it right. Putin, in person, about this war? The wire I've got says ten. Not nine. Ten.

I've got a car in the garage that needs a fan belt. I've taken it in four times this year, and four times I've driven it home with the same belt still on it, because something else came up first—the brakes, the battery, whatever it was that week. I'm not telling you that's the same thing. I'm asking you: is it?

Because back in September—the fourth, the fifth, somewhere in there—the same two men made almost this same trip. The president confirmed it himself on a Friday: Kushner and Witkoff, the Kremlin first, Kyiv after. And the day they landed in Moscow, Mr. Putin ordered a three-day pause on strikes against Kyiv. Three days. State media said so. I wrote that down too. The two men got back on the plane the very next day and flew to Kyiv themselves, to sit with Mr. Zelenskyy.

So here's a fair question. After that three-day pause ran out in September, did the fighting stop? I don't have a page that says it did. Do you?

And this week—the tenth time—does the item I'm holding say anything about a pause? I've read it three times. Abu Dhabi, the Kremlin, then Ireland. No three days. No cease-fire. Just the three cities and the two men. I checked twice because I didn't want to put a word on the page that wasn't on the wire.

The fighting itself—and I want to get this part exactly right, so let me read it back slow—has now run longer than the Soviet Union's whole war against Nazi Germany. I read that one over twice myself before I believed it. That's not the ten trips. That's just how long the thing the ten trips are about has been going on.

Oh—before you go. One more thing, and then I'll let you get back to your evening. The item I've got open says this is the tenth meeting between Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Putin, in person, over this one war. Not a phone call. Not a committee. The tenth sit-down. And in ten sit-downs, near as I can tell from my own notes, nothing has happened that only had to happen once.