U.S. – Russia Ukraine Peace Plan

18 November
Scoop: U.S. secretly drafting new plan to end Ukraine war
The Trump administration has been secretly working in consultation with Russia to draft a new plan to end the war in Ukraine, U.S. and Russian officials tell Axios.
Why it matters: The 28-point U.S. plan is inspired by President Trump’s successful push for a deal in Gaza. A top Russian official told Axios he’s optimistic about the plan. It’s not yet clear how Ukraine and its European backers will feel about it.
Zoom in: The plan’s 28 points fall into four general buckets, sources tell Axios: peace in Ukraine, security guarantees, security in Europe, and future U.S. relations with Russia and Ukraine.
It’s unclear how the plan approaches contentious issues such as territorial control in eastern Ukraine — where Russian forces have been inching forward, but still control far less land than the Kremlin has demanded.
Behind the scenes: Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff is leading the drafting of the plan and has discussed it extensively with Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, a U.S. official said.
Dmitriev, who runs Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and is also deeply involved in diplomacy over Ukraine, told Axios in an interview on Monday that he spent three days huddled with Witkoff and other members of Trump’s team when Dmitriev visited Miami from Oct. 24-26.
Dmitriev expressed optimism about the deal’s chances of success because, unlike past efforts, “we feel the Russian position is really being heard.”
Barak Ravid
Scoop: Trump plan asks Ukraine to cede additional territory for security guarantee

9 January
Ukraine war briefing: Kremlin denounces European troops plan as Kyiv warns of ‘massive Russian attack’
Moscow says any Nato peacekeepers would be considered legitimate targets; US embassy and Kyiv flag ‘potentially significant air attack’. What we know on day 1,416
(The Guardian) Russia has called a plan for European troops to be deployed to Ukraine “dangerous”, dousing hopes for a speedy end to the near four-year war. European leaders and US envoys announced this week that postwar guarantees for Ukraine would include a US-led monitoring mechanism and a European multinational force to be deployed once the fighting stops. But Moscow has repeatedly warned it would not accept any Nato members sending such troops to Ukraine. “All such units and facilities will be considered legitimate military targets for the Russian armed forces,” Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, said on Thursday, repeating a threat previously made by Vladimir Putin. Describing the plan as “dangerous” and “destructive”, she accused Kyiv’s allies of forming an “axis of war”.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz said a ceasefire in Ukraine was still “quite far” away given Russia’s position. “The order must be: first a ceasefire, then security guarantees for Ukraine for a long-term agreement with Russia,” Merz told reporters on Thursday. “All of this is impossible without Russia’s consent, which we are probably still quite far from.”
The US embassy in Kyiv warned on Thursday that a “potentially significant air attack” could occur at any time within the next several days. Volodymyr Zelenskyy echoed the warning in his evening address, telling Ukrainians that “there may be another massive Russian attack” during the night, without elaborating. “It is very important to pay attention to air raid alerts,” the Ukrainian president added, advising Ukrainians to take shelter when asked.

2025

17 December
Putin warns that Russia will seek to extend its gains in Ukraine if peace talks fail
(AP) Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Wednesday that Moscow will seek to extend its gains in Ukraine if Kyiv and its Western allies reject the Kremlin’s demands in peace talks.
U.S. President Donald Trump has unleashed an extensive diplomatic push to end nearly four years of fighting following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but Washington’s efforts have run into sharply conflicting demands by Moscow and Kyiv.

15 December
US officials say Washington has agreed to give Ukraine security guarantees in peace talks
(AP) — The U.S. has agreed to provide unspecified security guarantees to Ukraine as part of a peace deal to end Russia’s nearly four-year war, and more talks are likely this weekend, U.S. officials said Monday following the latest discussions with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Berlin.
The officials said talks with President Donald Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, led to narrowing differences on security guarantees that Kyiv said must be provided, as well as on Moscow’s demand that Ukraine concede land in the Donbas region in the country’s east.
Trump dialed into a dinner Monday evening with negotiators and European leaders, and more talks are expected this weekend in Miami or elsewhere in the United States, according to the U.S. officials…
US promises Ukraine ‘Article 5-like’ security, but it’s a limited time offer
Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are hashing out security package details in Berlin
(Politico) The U.S. is offering Ukraine security guarantees similar to those it would receive as part of NATO, American officials said Monday.
The offer is the strongest and most explicit security pledge the Trump administration has put forward for Ukraine, but it comes with an implicit ultimatum: Take it now or the next iteration won’t be as generous.
Europe ready to lead ‘multinational force’ in Ukraine as part of US peace plan
Proposal is part of new package of security guarantees, backed by the White House, that could mark breakthrough in reaching agreement
(The Guardian) In a statement, the leaders of the UK, France, Germany and eight other European countries said troops from a “coalition of the willing” with US support could “assist in the regeneration of Ukraine’s forces, in securing Ukraine’s skies, and in supporting safer seas, including through operating inside Ukraine”.
The proposal was part of a new package of security guarantees, backed by the White House, that could mark a breakthrough in reaching a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv, US and European leaders have said. But they added that significant differences remained over the future status of the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia.
Under the proposal, Ukraine would have western support to maintain a standing army of 800,000 troops, the US would lead a “ceasefire monitoring and verification mechanism” to provide early warning of any future attack, and the European countries would also sign a “legally binding commitment, subject to national procedures, to take measures to restore peace and security in the case of a future armed attack”. Europe would also back Ukraine’s accession to the European Union.
… US officials said on Monday they were still “brainstorming” the future status of the occupied territories of Ukraine under a peace deal, adding that they were considering these areas becoming an “economic free zone”. But they said there remained significant differences on the control and status of the territories taken by Russia.
“Ultimately, if we can get that defined, then it will really get to [Russia and Ukraine] to work out the final issues of sovereignty and to see if there’s a deal that can be done between them,” said a US official briefed on the talks.
The two sides were also not in agreement on the future operations of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is located in Ukraine but is under Russian control. US officials said they wanted the two sides to split the power produced by the plant “50/50”. US negotiators claimed they had resolved “90%” of the disputes between the Russian and Ukrainian sides.
Zelenskyy described the talks with the US side as “not easy” but said they had made headway. He said Russia was using its relentless strikes as leverage in negotiations and noted that not a single power station in Ukraine had been spared attack.

11 December
Ukraine hopes to entice Trump with a ‘free economic zone’ in latest peace plan
The president has yet to respond to the revised proposal, which suggests that both Russia and Ukraine would vacate a demilitarized zone in the Donbas.
Ukraine’s latest peace plan proposes a demilitarized “free economic zone” in the Donbas region where American business interests could operate — an attempt to bring President Donald Trump on board, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Trump, who sounded skeptical about the prospects for a breakthrough in Oval Office comments on Wednesday, “is aware of” the latest 20-point plan Ukraine sent to the White House Wednesday, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Thursday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also spoke to reporters about the proposal Thursday, suggesting that control of the buffer zone in eastern Ukraine still needs to be worked out but that, under the new proposal, troops from both Russia and Ukraine would be barred.
That, Zelenskyy said, marked “a compromise” from the original 28-point peace plan authored by the U.S. with Russian input, under which Russian troops would control the region. But, he noted that Ukraine would only withdraw its forces after receiving meaningful security guarantees from allies against future aggression from Moscow.
During a visit to Washington this week, U.K. Defence Secretary John Healey told reporters that the so-called Coalition of the Willing is “ready to do the heavy lifting in Europe, alongside the contribution to security guarantees that President Trump has talked about from the U.S. But we’re ready to step in, and we will help secure that peace long-term and protect the deal that President Trump is looking to negotiate.”
He sketched an outline of some of the work being done, including some 200 military planners from more than 30 nations who have already participated in “reconnaissance visits to Ukraine, and we have the troops ready. “
Over the last several months, Trump has repeatedly ruled out Ukraine’s future membership in NATO, the longstanding transatlantic security alliance that deems an attack on any member nation an attack on all.
The revised Ukraine peace plan, however, removed language from an initial version barring Ukraine from ever joining the alliance, according to the two people familiar with the proposal. It also calls for elections in Ukraine, something Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have been pushing for, the two people said.

9 December
Trump lambasts ‘weak’ and ‘decaying’ Europe and hints at walking away from Ukraine
US president recycles far-right tropes on European immigration and presses Zelenskyy to accept his peace plan
New Trump doctrine identifies ‘weak’ Europe’s problem: not enough racism
Peter Beaumont
(The Guardian) Donald Trump has hinted he could walk away from supporting Ukraine as he doubled down on his administration’s recent criticism of Europe, describing it as “weak” and “decaying” and claiming it was “destroying itself” through immigration.
In a rambling and sometimes incoherent interview with Politico, a transcript of which was released on Tuesday, the US president struggled to name any other Ukrainian cities except for Kyiv, misrepresented elements of the trajectory of the conflict, and recycled far-right tropes about European immigration that echoed the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
Trump called for Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to accept his proposal to cede territory to Russia, arguing that Moscow retained the “upper hand” and that Zelenskyy’s government must “play ball”.
His envoys have given Zelenskyy days to respond to a proposed peace deal under which Ukraine would be forced to accept territorial losses in return for unspecified US security guarantees, according to the Financial Times, which reported on Tuesday that the US leader was hoping for a deal “by Christmas”.

David Ignatius: The outlines of a sustainable Ukraine peace deal inch into view
Trump’s tilt toward Russia isn’t helping, but there’s still a path to a reasonable endgame.
(WaPo) Trump’s tilt toward the Kremlin in the National Security Strategy released by the White House last week has complicated negotiations. He seems to want to stand equidistant between a democratic Europe and an autocratic Russia, “to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states,” the document says. That evenhandedness between friend and foe makes no sense, strategically or morally — and it genuinely worries Europe.

6 December
Russia unleashes massive drone and missile attack on Ukraine as diplomatic talks continue
(AP) — Russia unleashed a major missile and drone barrage on Ukraine overnight into Saturday, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he had a “substantive phone call” with American officials engaged in talks with a Ukrainian delegation in Florida, aimed at ending the nearly 4-year war.
Russia used 653 drones and 51 missiles in the wide-reaching overnight attack on Ukraine, which triggered air raid alerts across the country and came as Ukraine marked Armed Forces Day, the country’s air force said Saturday morning.
Ukrainian forces shot down and neutralized 585 drones and 30 missiles, the air force said, adding that 29 locations were struck.

5 December
The Ukraine ‘peace plan’ clearly points to Trump corruption. Where’s the outrage?
By Thom Hartmann – Commentary
(Raw Story) I don’t know why this wasn’t above-the-fold news all across the country over the past few days as the details of the “peace plan” Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff took to Vladimir Putin this week came out.
Kushner, it appears, had added in a provision that would have forced both Ukraine and Russia to take actions that would specifically benefit Saudi Arabia, a country that is paying the presidential son-in-law at least $25 million a year.
Can you imagine what the response would have been if George Marshall, while negotiating the 1948 Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after WWII, had been personally taking millions from, say, Saudi Arabia, and thus inserted a provision ensuring that country could permanently benefit from the peace plan?
The brutal kingdom of Saudia Arabia owns agricultural land in many far-flung places, from alfalfa farms in Arizona to 400,000 acres in Western Ukraine devoted to growing grain for export. The only way to get that grain to the Black Sea where it can enter world markets is via barges down the Dnieper River, which cuts across Ukraine.

3 December
Europeans accuse Putin of feigning interest in peace after talks with US envoys
The remarks reflected the high tensions and gaping gulf between Russia on one side and Ukraine and its European allies on the other over how to end a war that Moscow started when it invaded its neighbor nearly four years ago.
A day earlier, Putin accused the Europeans of sabotaging the U.S.-led peace efforts — and warned that, if provoked, Russia would be ready for war with Europe.
Unclear where peace talks go now
Where the peace talks go from here depends largely on whether the Trump administration decides to increase the pressure on Russia or on Ukraine to make concessions.
A U.S. peace proposal that became public last month was criticized for being tilted heavily toward Moscow because it granted some of the Kremlin’s core demands that Kyiv has rejected as nonstarters.
The Ukraine peace deal has stumbled yet again over an inevitable obstacle: Putin
Andrew Roth, Global affairs correspondent
Russian leader’s rejection of latest peace proposal was predictable and shows the Kremlin continues to hold the trump card

26 November
‘Traitor’: US representatives call for Trump envoy Witkoff to be fired after leaked Kremlin call
Republicans and Democrats warn Witkoff ‘cannot be trusted’ after reportedly advising officials on peace plan
… In a recording obtained by Bloomberg of a 14 October phone call between Witkoff and Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy aide, Witkoff said peace would require Moscow gaining control of Donetsk and potentially additional Ukrainian territory.
“Now, me to you, I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done: Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere,” Witkoff said, according to Bloomberg’s transcript. “But I’m saying instead of talking like that, let’s talk more hopefully because I think we’re going to get to a deal here.”
Witkoff also gave Ushakov tactical advice, including how the Russian leader should approach the issue with Trump. It included suggestions about scheduling a Trump-Putin phone call before the planned visit of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to the White House.
On Wednesday, Ushakov appeared to confirm the call’s authenticity to Russian state television, suggesting the leak was meant to “hinder” negotiations. During the conversation, Ushakov said Putin would congratulate Trump and call him “a real peace man”.

Why Does Steve Witkoff Keep Taking Russia’s Side?
Trump’s envoy isn’t promoting peace. His interventions are helping Vladimir Putin.
By Anne Applebaum
Pay attention to the dates, because the timing matters. Steve Witkoff spoke with Yuri Ushakov, a Russian official, on October 14. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky held a meeting with President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on October 17. Trump had been hinting that he would offer to sell Tomahawks, long-range cruise missiles, to the Ukrainian army. But he did not.
Why not? Perhaps because Ushakov listened to Witkoff’s advice and persuaded Russian President Vladimir Putin to call Trump on October 16. Witkoff, in other words, may have helped block that sale. And that would make Witkoff responsible for prolonging the war.
Report: US envoy coached Putin aide on how Russian leader should pitch Trump on Ukraine peace plan
(AP) — President Donald Trump’s chief interlocutor with the Russian government last month advised a senior aide to Vladimir Putin on how the Russian leader should go about pitching the U.S. president on a peace plan aimed at bringing an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to a transcript of the call published by Bloomberg News on Tuesday.
Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, according to a transcript of the Oct. 14 call published by the news service, advised Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov that Putin should call Trump to congratulate him for the Gaza peace deal, say Russia had supported it and that he respects the president as a man of peace.
The Bloomberg report came as Trump on Tuesday said a proposal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine has been “fine-tuned” and announced he’s sending Witkoff to meet with Putin.
The White House did not dispute the veracity of the transcript, and Trump described Witkoff’s reported approach to the Russians in the call as “standard” negotiating procedure.

24 – 26 November
Trump says he’s sending his envoys to see Putin and Ukrainians after fine-tuning plan to end war
(AP) — President Donald Trump said Tuesday his plan to end the war in Ukraine has been “fine-tuned” and he’s sending envoy Steve Witkoff to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll to meet with Ukrainian officials.
Trump suggested he could eventually meet with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but not until further progress has been made in negotiations. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday evening aboard Air Force One, Trump said resolving the war was difficult, and described what had been a 28-point plan as a work in progress. “That was not a plan — it was a concept,” Trump said.
Trump’s plan for ending the nearly four-year war emerged last week. It heavily favored Russia, prompting Zelenskyy to quickly engage with American negotiators. European leaders, fearing for their own future facing Russian aggression but apparently sidelined by Trump in drawing up the proposal, scrambled to steer the negotiations toward accommodating their concerns.
The president played down the element of his plan that would require Ukraine to cede territory to Russia, suggesting that Russian forces were already likely to seize the land they’re seeking.
“The way it’s going, if you look, it’s just moving in one direction,” Trump said. “So eventually that’s land that over the next couple of months might be gotten by Russia anyway.”
At the center of Trump’s plan is the call on Ukraine to concede the entirety of its eastern Donbas region, even though a vast swath of that land remains in Ukrainian control. Analysts at the independent Institute for the Study of War have estimated it would take several years for the Russian military to completely seize the territory, based on its current rate of advances.
Trump pushes Ukraine, Russia on peace deal, but key issues are unresolved
By Michael Birnbaum, Robyn Dixon, Siobhán O’Grady, Francesca Ebel and Catherine Belton
with Benjamin Soloway
(WaPo) President Donald Trump projected optimism on Tuesday that negotiations to end Russia’s war in Ukraine were making progress, saying there were “only a few remaining points of disagreement” after a week of breakneck talks, but he said he would meet with the leaders of the warring countries only once they were in the final phases of a deal.
The decision to push off a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dashed Kyiv’s hopes that the Ukrainian leader could use a one-on-one meeting with Trump in the coming days to reset the dynamic of negotiations that many Ukrainians feel have been tipped in Moscow’s favor. A senior Ukrainian official said earlier Tuesday that Zelensky hoped to meet Trump as soon as the Thanksgiving weekend.
Trump’s declaration appeared aimed at spurring both sides into compromise even as the trickiest details of a deal remained unresolved. Ukrainians have said that only Zelensky is empowered to resolve questions about whether to surrender additional Ukrainian territory to Russia, a key Russian demand that remains politically toxic in Ukraine.
Ukraine makes significant changes to US ‘peace plan’, sources say
Some of Russia’s maximalist demands have been removed from original 28-point proposal, it is understood
Ukraine has significantly amended the US “peace plan” to end the conflict, removing some of Russia’s maximalist demands, people familiar with the negotiations said, as European leaders warned on Monday that no deal could be reached quickly.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy may meet Donald Trump in the White House later this week, sources indicated, amid a flurry of calls between Kyiv and Washington. Ukraine is pressing for Europe to be involved in the talks.
US Army secretary takes unlikely role as key negotiator in push to end Russia-Ukraine war
(AP) — In a matter of days, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll vaulted from being the leader of a military bureaucracy — where he’s been cutting red tape to quickly buy inexpensive drones — to a key negotiator in the Trump administration’s push to end the Russia-Ukraine war.
The boyish Iraq War veteran, former venture capitalist and friend of Vice President JD Vance went from presenting President Donald Trump’s plan to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv to sitting down with Russian officials in the United Arab Emirates on Monday and Tuesday, heading up the latest phase of talks on a possible deal to halt the fighting.
Ukraine makes significant changes to US ‘peace plan’, sources say
Some of Russia’s maximalist demands have been removed from original 28-point proposal, it is understood
(The Guardian) Ukraine has significantly amended the US “peace plan” to end the conflict, removing some of Russia’s maximalist demands, people familiar with the negotiations said, as European leaders warned on Monday that no deal could be reached quickly.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy may meet Donald Trump in the White House later this week, sources indicated, amid a flurry of calls between Kyiv and Washington. Ukraine is pressing for Europe to be involved in the talks.
During negotiations on Sunday in Switzerland – led by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak – the plan was substantially revised. It now includes only 19 points. Kyiv and its European partners say the existing frontline has to be the starting point for territorial discussions.
… But in the clearest sign yet the original 28-point plan – widely seen as favourable to Moscow – still falls short of several key Kremlin demands, Putin’s top foreign policy aide on Monday said Moscow would seek to “rework” parts of it.
“We were given some sort of draft … which will require further reworking,” said Yuri Ushakov, adding that “many provisions” of the plan appeared acceptable to Russia, but others would “require the most detailed discussions and review between the parties”.
Disarray over leaked US-Russia peace plan is ideal scenario for Putin
Vladimir Putin said on Friday the proposals ‘could form the basis of a final peace settlement’, but experts say he will not agree to it without amendments in his favour.
Pjotr Sauer
Ukraine has been cornered into weighing terms it cannot accept and faces threat of losing its most important ally
The Kremlin has barely lifted a finger in recent days. It hasn’t needed to.
The 28-point US-Russia peace proposal, leaked to the media last week, has thrown Washington, Kyiv and European capitals into disarray, creating precisely the conditions Vladimir Putin has long sought: a negotiating table sharply tilted in the Russian president’s favour, with Ukraine cornered into weighing terms it cannot accept and the threat of losing its most important ally hanging over its head.

Timothy Snyder: Russian Unreality and American Weakness
Notes from a bizarre moment of diplomatic history
After making his general argument, he concludes:
“One way to criticize the text is to imagine that it is intended as a peace settlement and then note some shortcomings. But this is to normalize a document that obviously has other purposes than peace: namely, imperialism and profiteering. The fundamental problem of this text is its deliberate and characteristically Russian unreality. The text begins from the world as it is not. It acts to make the United States and Europe and Ukraine much weaker by drawing them to endorse things that are not true and forgetting things that are true. This is how Russian diplomacy works. It lulls you to a mental realm in which you then do harm to your own interests without seeing the alternatives”.
He then proceeds to annotate the full text, point by point.
Letters from an American November 23, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
“Do I understand correctly that there is now a dispute within the administration about whether this ‘peace plan’ was written by Russians or Americans?” foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum asked last night on social media.
Applebaum was referring to confusion over a 28-point plan for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine reported by Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler of Axios last week. After the plan was leaked, apparently to Ravid by Kirill Dmitriev, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin who is under U.S. sanctions, Vice President J.D. Vance came out strongly in support of it.
But as scholar of strategic studies Phillips P. OBrien noted in Phillips’s Newsletter, once it became widely known that the plan was written by the Russians, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to back away from it, posting on social media on Wednesday that “[e]nding a complex and deadly war such as the one in Ukraine requires an extensive exchange of serious and realistic ideas. And achieving a durable peace will require both sides to agree to difficult but necessary concessions. That is why we are and will continue to develop a list of potential ideas for ending this war based on input from both sides of this conflict.”
And yet, by Friday, Trump said he expected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to sign onto the plan by Thanksgiving: next Thursday, November 27. Former senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said: “Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool. Rewarding Russian butchery would be disastrous to America’s interests.”
Yesterday a group of senators, foreign affairs specialists gathered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the Halifax International Security Forum, told reporters they had spoken to Rubio about the plan. Senator Angus King (I-ME) said Rubio had told them that the document “was not the administration’s position” but rather “a wish list of the Russians.” Senator Mike Rounds (R-SC) said: “This administration was not responsible for this release in its current form.” He added: “I think he made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives,” Rounds said. “It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan.”
But then a spokesperson for the State Department, Tommy Pigott, called the senators’ account of the origins of the plan “blatantly false,” and Rubio abruptly switched course, posting on social media that in fact the U.S. had written the plan.
This morning, Bill Kristol of The Bulwark reported rumors that Vice President J.D. Vance was “key to US embrace of Russia plan on Ukraine, Rubio (and even Trump) out of the loop.” He posted that relations between Vance and Rubio are “awful” and that Rubio did, in fact, tell the senators what they said he did.
Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, posted: “Foreign nations now have to deal with rival factions of the U.S. government who keep major policy initiatives secret from each other and some of which work with foreign powers as the succession battle for 2028 begins, is how one diplomat put it.”

European countries propose radically different Ukraine peace plan to US
Document omits some of Washington’s pro-Russia points and calls for Kyiv’s sovereignty to be respected
(The Guardian) As discussions began in Geneva, Donald Trump said Ukraine had shown “zero gratitude” for US efforts to end the conflict. In a conciliatory response, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he was personally grateful to the US president for the military assistance Washington had given, beginning with Javelin missiles, which had saved Ukrainian lives.
Trump’s hostile rhetoric came after a confusing weekend in which the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, admitted the White House plan was conceived in Moscow, only to then insist the US was its author.
Having been blind-sided by Washington’s initiative, Ukraine’s European allies published their Kyiv-friendly plan on Sunday. It says negotiations over territory should take place after a ceasefire is agreed and should start from the line of contact – the existing frontline.
It says both parties would agree how any truce would be monitored “under US supervision”. Unlike the White House text, the European alternative does not call for Kyiv to withdraw from cities it controls in eastern Donbas. Nor does it rule out Ukraine’s membership of Nato, but points out there is no consensus over its membership.
There are further eye-catching proposals. They include that Russia give the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which would split power 50-50 between Moscow and Kyiv. Ukraine’s army would be capped during peacetime at 800,000 soldiers, 200,000 more than in the US draft.
Frozen Russian assets would also be used to reconstruct Ukraine, rather than being partly given to US investors. If Moscow were to respect a “sustainable peace”, sanctions imposed since 2014 would be gradually eased and Russia would be brought back into the G8.
In Geneva, US and Ukraine officials report progress on ending Russia’s war but offer few specifics
(AP) — Top U.S. and Ukrainian officials said Sunday they’d made progress toward ending the Russia-Ukraine war but provided scant details after discussing the American proposal to achieve peace that has sparked concerns among many of Washington’s European allies that the plan is too conciliatory to Moscow.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said high-stakes talks in Geneva were “very worthwhile” and constituted the most productive day in “a very long time.”
“I feel very optimistic that we can get something done,” Rubio said.
But he offered very little information on what was discussed. He also downplayed a Thursday deadline set by President Donald Trump for Ukraine to respond to the plan, saying simply that officials want to see fighting stop as soon as possible and that officials could keep negotiating Monday and beyond. He said that higher-level officials may eventually have to get involved.

Secret US-Russia Talks Led to Plan That Blindsided Ukraine
Takeaways by Bloomberg AI
– The 28-point plan to Ukraine was the result of negotiations between Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterpart Kirill Dmitriev, excluding Ukraine and its allies.
– European officials are racing to present a counter-proposal to US officials in Switzerland to give Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy more time to end the war.
– The plan would force Ukraine to cede land, reduce its military, and forbid it from joining NATO, with Ukraine and its European allies seeking to correct course with discussions on territorial swaps and a security agreement.
The controversial 28-point plan dropped suddenly by the Trump administration to Ukraine as a take-it-or-leave it proposition mere days ago was mostly the result of several weeks of negotiations behind the scenes between Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterpart Kirill Dmitriev that excluded not only Ukraine and its allies but even some key US officials.
Faced with a Thanksgiving holiday deadline, European officials are racing to buy Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy more time with their own counter-proposal on how to end the war that will be presented to US officials on Sunday in Switzerland.

22 November
The Murky Plan That Ensures a Future War
Who will benefit from the White House’s 28-point proposal for Ukraine?
By Anne Applebaum
The 28-point peace plan that the United States and Russia want to impose on Ukraine and Europe is misnamed. It is not a peace plan. It is a proposal that weakens Ukraine and divides America from Europe, preparing the way for a larger war in the future. In the meantime, it benefits unnamed Russian and American investors, at the expense of everyone else.
The plan was negotiated by Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer with no historical, geographical, or cultural knowledge of Russia or Ukraine, and Kirill Dmitriev, who heads Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and spends most of his time making business deals. The revelation of their plan this week shocked European leaders, who are now paying almost all of the military costs of the war, as well as the Ukrainians, who were not sure whether to take this latest plan seriously until they were told to agree to it by Thanksgiving or lose all further U.S. support. Even if the plan falls apart, this arrogant and confusing ultimatum, coming only days after the State Department authorized the sale of anti-missile technology to Ukraine, will do permanent damage to America’s reputation as a reliable ally, not only in Europe but around the world.
The central points of the plan reflect long-standing Russian demands. The United States would recognize Russian rule over Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk—all of which are part of Ukraine. Russia would, in practice, be allowed to keep territory it has conquered in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. In all of these occupation zones, Russian forces have carried out arrests, torture, and mass repression of Ukrainian citizens, and because Russia would not be held accountable for war crimes, they could continue to do so with impunity. Ukraine would withdraw from the part of Donetsk that it still controls—a heavily reinforced and mined territory whose loss would open up central Ukraine to a future attack….
Conclusion: For a decade, Russia has been seeking to divide Europe and America, to undermine NATO and weaken the transatlantic alliance. This peace plan, if accepted, will achieve that goal. There is a long tradition of great powers in Europe making deals over the heads of smaller countries, leading to terrible suffering. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, with its secret protocols, brought us World War II. The Yalta agreement gave us the Cold War. The Witkoff-Dmitriev pact, if it holds, will fit right into that tradition.
Comment posted on LinkedIn by Martin Schorsch
The proposal contains many questionable elements, but one point stands out because of its implications for international law:
Point 26 — “All parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future.”
The fact that such an amnesty is simply asserted as part of a political package directly contradicts the foundations of international criminal accountability.
The Nuremberg Trials marked the beginning of a rules-based international order — the principle that certain crimes cannot be set aside for political convenience.
The timing is hard to ignore: this is being presented almost exactly on the 80th anniversary of the opening of the Nuremberg Trials.
If the foundations laid in 1945 still mean anything, it is that war crimes cannot be written away by political decree.

US senators say Rubio told them Trump’s Ukraine peace plan is Russia’s ‘wish list’
(AP) The senators said they spoke to Rubio after he reached out to some of them while on his way to Geneva for talks on the plan. Independent Maine Sen. Angus King said Rubio told them the plan “was not the administration’s plan” but a “wish list of the Russians.”
The bipartisan group of senators, who are veteran legislators and among those most focused on foreign relations, stood together at the press conference as they relayed Rubio’s message on the call.

Trump’s Devastating Plan for Ukraine
The White House is giving Putin permission to try again.
By Phillips Payson O’Brien
(The Atlantic) For all the recent talk about Donald Trump growing more sympathetic toward Ukraine, and of the president being more willing to pressure Russia for concessions, nothing of the sort turned out to be true. According to multiple news outlets, Trump has blessed a 28-point plan to end the war between the two countries. The plan was negotiated by his envoys in conjunction with a top Vladimir Putin confidant. The deeply troubling details now circulating show what Trump wants: to help the Russian president—who started the war by launching an unprovoked invasion in 2022—and to weaken Ukraine, perhaps fatally.
For months now, Trump has been obscuring his own intentions in a blizzard of contradictory statements and gestures—moves that in some cases seemed to offer U.S. assistance to Ukrainians’ efforts to maintain their freedom and democracy. In October, Trump imposed modest sanctions on the Russian oil industry, ostensibly to bring Putin to the negotiating table.
In recent months, Trump has been under bipartisan pressure to support a bill, proposed by Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal, that would enable the White House to impose devastating sanctions on countries and companies that do business with Russia. Graham, normally a Trump ally, has described the bill as a “sledgehammer” to use against Russia. But the president did not appear to want such a tool and long danced around whether he would support a vote on the bill.
America has dumped a messy, sordid “peace plan” on Ukraine
Volodymyr Zelensky has no choice but to play along and try to improve it
(The Economist) In recent months, Trump has been under bipartisan pressure to support a bill, proposed by Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal, that would enable the White House to impose devastating sanctions on countries and companies that do business with Russia. Graham, normally a Trump ally, has described the bill as a “sledgehammer” to use against Russia. But the president did not appear to want such a tool and long danced around whether he would support a vote on the bill.
Then, just this week, Trump told reporters that the Graham-Blumenthal bill would be “okay with me.” The statement came as the president was poised to sign off on the 28-point plan, which threatens to transform Ukraine into a Russian vassal state. In other words, Trump was publicly offering hope to pro-Ukrainian voices while privately getting ready to reward Putin.
If Trump forces Ukraine and its allies in Western Europe to accept a peace deal that ratifies Russia’s territorial gains—giving Putin even more than he was able to conquer, and requiring no real concessions of him at all—it will amount to a complete rehabilitation of the Russian president in the international sphere.

Trump Was Told By Europeans That His Ukraine Plan Needs Work
Takeaways by Bloomberg AI
– European leaders told the US that its peace plan for Ukraine needed “additional work” in response to a plan that offers concessions to Russia.
– The US plan includes terms such as land concessions to Russia, capping the size of the Ukrainian army, and stopping Ukraine from joining the NATO military alliance.
– European leaders are pushing back against the plan, with a senior European military official saying there’s a real chance they fail to convince Trump to change his stance, and are working on a counter-proposal to be discussed in the coming days.
European leaders and other allies told the US that its peace plan for Ukraine needed “additional work,” in a rushed bid to try and slow walk a Trump administration determined to give concessions to Russia and impose terms by Thanksgiving.
European leaders, joined by Group of Seven members Canada and Japan, pushed back against the notion that Ukraine’s borders could be shrunk or that the armed forces could be limited to 600,000 personnel.
They issued a statement at a Group of 20 summit in South Africa that President Donald Trump blew off but where many of them were headed when the controversial details of the 28 point-peace plan were leaked. The US set a Thursday ultimatum yet Trump indicated in an NBC interview that this wasn’t his “final offer,” hinting at some flexibility on timing
In Johannesburg, the panicked leaders sought to buy President Volodymyr Zelenskiy time and scrambled to get on a call, exchange notes and come up with a counter-proposal that wouldn’t alienate an impatient US.
Their challenge was to find the right formulation of words in response to a plan that offers hard-to-swallow land concessions to Russia, caps the size of the Ukrainian army, stops it from ever joining the NATO military alliance and saddles the European Union with the cost of reconstruction.
In short, it appeared like everything Russia would want in a grueling war of attrition entering its fourth winter. A senior European military official said there’s a real chance the group fails to convince Trump to change his stance.
The next stop is a meeting of top national security officials in Geneva on Sunday, in a zig-zag of last-minute diplomacy.

19 November
David Blair: The recurring nightmare of Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine
The US president imposed sanctions and talked tough – but behind the scenes he was negotiating with Putin
(Telegraph UK) Seldom has there been a more glaring and cynical contrast between public words and private actions. Even as Donald Trump was voicing his exasperation with Vladimir Putin and sanctioning Russia’s biggest oil companies, the emissaries of both leaders were continuing to bargain over the future of Ukraine.
The emergence of a 28-point peace plan, apparently agreed between Russia and America, lifts the veil on these contacts. Within 24 hours of Mr Trump imposing US sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil on Oct 23, Putin’s envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, was flying to Miami to spend three days closeted with Steve Witkoff, his American counterpart, from Oct 24 to 26.