America has dumped a messy, sordid “peace plan” on Ukraine

ON NOVEMBER 20TH Pentagon officials traveled to Kyiv to present Volodymyr Zelensky with a much-ballyhooed peace proposal, hatched mostly in secret in the preceding weeks. A flurry of briefings and leaks has yet to clarify what the document actually represents: a comprehensive plan, a roadmap for further discussions or a preliminary brainstorming sheet. An American official in Kyiv nonetheless said it would be pursued “aggressively”, and some have suggested that Ukraine’s embattled president would be pushed to sign some version of it even before Thanksgiving on November 27th. For now the working document, which emerged from talks between Steve Witkoff, a special envoy of Donald Trump, and Kirill Dmitriev, an envoy of Vladimir Putin, looks like a smorgasbord of Russian and American ideas. A senior source close to the Kremlin said some of the wording looked “pretty absurd”, but that the document would “likely find favour” in the Kremlin.

As well it might. The proposal offers plenty of carrots for Russia: the cancelling of Western sanctions; a welcome back into the G8 club of powerful economies; de facto recognition of control over land it has occupied; and the gift of swathes of fortified territory in Ukraine’s Donbas region that it has been trying and failing to conquer for over 11 years. Ukraine gets mostly sticks. Its army would be cut to 600,000 soldiers, about 25% below current strength. The country would have to accept permanent neutrality rather than NATO membership. Frozen Russian assets, currently earmarked for reparations, would in part be diverted to a new fund spent on joint American-Russian projects. The plan would ban NATO troops on Ukrainian soil, ruling out the reassurance force that Europe has spent most of the past year developing. The current text includes no military limitations on Russia at all. A senior Ukrainian official described it as a “bad version” of the Istanbul agreement, sketched out in March 2022, which would have given Russia less Ukrainian territory.

It could have been even worse. The document improves on an earlier draft, leaked to the press on November 19th, that bore more marks of Mr Dmitriev’s influence. The current version appears to have benefited from the input of Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, who had issued only a lukewarm endorsement of the initial plan. Still, the biggest change—a promise of a security guarantee for Ukraine similar to that of NATO’s Article 5, in the event of renewed Russian attack—matters less than it seems. Few Ukrainians believe Mr Trump, who has subjected their country to repeated blackmail and threats in the past ten months, would honour such a pledge.  As if to underline the point, on November 21st senior American officials hinted that if Mr Zelensky does not accept the proposal’s terms, America might halt its supply of intelligence, which is vital to Ukraine’s battlefield operations.

Viewed from Kyiv, the proposal looks both punitive and unrealistic. It demands new elections in Ukraine within 100 days of its signing, but if Mr Zelensky were to accept such a deal it is unlikely he would last even that long. It is hard to see how he could get such an agreement approved by Ukraine’s parliament. Some aspects are so controversial that they could touch off mass protests. Indeed, that may be Russia’s intent. There are obvious parallels with the Minsk accords of 2015, which froze the conflict that began with Russia’s invasion of Crimea and Donbas the year before, but which neither side expected to last.

The timing is particularly cynical. The Americans are presenting Mr Zelensky with the new proposal just as he is trying to contain a massive corruption scandal. The uncovering of a $100m money-laundering and bribery scheme involving Energoatom, the state nuclear company, has become the biggest crisis the president has faced since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Two members of his senior negotiating team are battling to save their jobs; they seem especially vulnerable to American pressure. That America chose this moment to unveil the plan may not be a coincidence.

Ukraine is not the only party that risks being steamrollered by Mr Trump’s incoherent vision. European allies were by all accounts blindsided by the proposal, which gives them no role other than shelling out funds. Europe is meant to provide $100bn for Ukraine’s rebuilding, for example, while America lays claim to half of any profits from reconstruction investments and takes a stake in Ukraine’s lucrative gas infrastructure. European influence, such as it is, remains Ukraine’s best hope for resisting the worst of America’s conditions; the country also has a group of sympathetic senators in Washington. But the European Union will need to act far more quickly and decisively than it yet has if it expects to stay in the conversation. It has spent years dithering over seizing $235bn in frozen Russian assets, which Mr Trump now appears to covet.

The Ukrainian president has so far downplayed the American document as a “vision” of Mr Trump’s, to be amended by Ukrainian negotiators. But he is walking a tightrope. Mr Zelensky has little choice but to formally welcome the proposal and keep talking to the Americans. The fear is that the American president will start pressing him harder. And the Kremlin, too, will get a chance to make adjustments, opening up fresh traps. The draft as it stands is “unworkable”, says a senior Ukrainian official. “At least for now.”

Ukraine’s negotiation position hinges on its ability to stabilise its own situation. The country cannot defend its interests effectively while Russia is advancing and its politics are in disarray. The front lines have been moving faster in the past two months than at any point in the previous two years, driven by Ukraine’s severe shortage of infantry and a surge in Russian drones. In the rear, Ukraine’s energy system is critically damaged and heavily reliant on its remaining nuclear power plants, and winter is only just beginning. “Right now, we are holding on, just about,” says a Ukrainian intelligence source. “In two months’ time, who knows? The deal on offer won’t get any better by then either.”■