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

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.