It’s been a rough few weeks for Ukraine. Russian bombardment of civilian housing has intensified, a corruption scandal took down President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, and the Trump administration has resumed back-door dealings with the Kremlin aimed at making money in Ukraine instead of peace.
A week ago, President Donald Trump demanded Ukraine accept a “peace plan” of suspect origin by Thanksgiving or risk losing U.S. military support and intelligence-sharing. As the holiday deadline passed, it became clear the ultimatum for Ukraine’s virtual surrender to Russian domination hadn’t been authored by U.S. diplomats, rather by the Kremlin and presented as a fait accompli to Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff.
Two days before Thanksgiving, Bloomberg published the leaked transcript of a phone call in which Witkoff coached Russian foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov on how to flatter Trump and secure the territorial and sovereignty capitulations Russian President Vladimir Putin demands in exchange for ending his war in Ukraine.
Disclosure of the 28-point “peace plan” raised hackles across global political landscapes. The terms proposed U.S. recognition of Ukraine’s Russian-occupied and illegally annexed Crimean peninsula as territory of Russia. Kyiv would be obliged to surrender four other provinces of Eastern Ukraine, including territory Putin’s forces failed to conquer in nearly 12 years of stealth invasions and full-scale war. Those spoils have come at a loss of a million dead and injured young Russian men.
Ukraine would have to renounce its sovereign right to join NATO. Deployment of the 32-nation Western alliance’s troops into Ukraine as part of a post-war stabilization force would be prohibited. The Kyiv government would also be required to cut its current armed forces by a third, to 600,000. Security guarantees that Russia would not rearm and invade again would rely on the Putin government’s word — like the vow made by the Russian government in 1994 when Ukraine surrendered its Soviet-era nuclear weapons, a Kremlin promise in the Budapest Memorandum broken twice so far by Putin.
When word spread a week ago that the new U.S. proposal was capitulation to Putin’s aggression and violation of the post-World War II order, European leaders attending the G20 summit in Johannesburg, South Africa — which Trump snubbed — scrambled to Geneva to have their say at hastily assembled talks between Ukrainian negotiators and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Two U.S. senators at a security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, told journalists that Rubio had said the controversial proposal “was not the (U.S.) administration’s plan,” that it was the “wish list of the Russians.”
A State Department spokesperson called the assertions by Sen. Angus King (I-ME) and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) “blatantly false.” Rubio later revised his denial of a U.S. hand in the widely condemned proposal crafted by the Kremlin to say that the initial draft was a starting point for the negotiations and that a significantly trimmed version was raising hopes for a potential plan for ending the full-scale war that Putin launched nearly four years ago.
Few details have emerged of what changes were made after Rubio’s consultation with Ukrainian and European officials who support Ukraine’s independence and role as a bulwark against Russian threats to their own territory. Russia is now surrounded by NATO-member nations, many of them former Warsaw Pact allies under Soviet domination.
Shock and opposition to the Kremlin-inspired proposal subsided somewhat among U.S., European and Ukrainian officials after revisions to the plan now said to contain just a few sticking points. Those remaining areas of contention, however, are among the most unlikely to be endorsed by Moscow as they aim to dismantle Ukraine’s sovereignty, including the Kyiv government’s inherent right to decide what alliances and international organizations it chooses to join. They have been nonstarters for the Kremlin and are likely to continue to be provisions Putin will not accept. His aspirations to conquer Ukraine and turn it back to a Soviet-style vassal of the Russian Federation have not changed throughout the years since Russian mercenaries invaded Ukraine’s Donetsk region in 2014.
Putin is unlikely to relent on his demands for territorial concessions from Ukraine, which Zelensky cannot unilaterally agree to in any case. The vast majority of Ukrainians, having suffered horrific casualties among troops as well as civilians, remain committed to defending their land. According to the Ukrainian Constitution, any changing of borders would have to be submitted to a referendum. Zelensky has refused to cede territory and despite the recent corruption and other scandals his approval ratings have remained between 50% and 70% — a standing that would be the envy of any U.S. president even in peacetime.
The turmoil over the retrograde 28-point plan hasn’t so much subsided as it has been overshadowed by the shooting of two West Virginia National Guard soldiers just blocks from the White House. Trump has turned his ire on the tens of millions of immigrants in the United States, legal and undocumented, naturalized citizens and foreigners granted asylum.
Also distracting the U.S., European and Ukrainian negotiators pursuing a new peace plan is the resignation of Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff and the second-most powerful official in Ukraine. The barrel-chested man always towering over the diminutive Zelensky was a trusted adviser and the president’s chief negotiator in talks to end the war.
It remains unclear whether Yermak was himself complicit in a long-running embezzlement scheme or made to take the fall for failing to prevent corruption that cost the war-ravaged government $100 million in kickbacks to officials on energy industry contracts. The corruption racket involving several other high-ranking officials tarnished the Zelensky government’s image as the righteous defenders of a struggling democracy.
Putin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov trumpeted the downfall of Yermak as a consequence of U.S. and European financing provided to Ukraine for the war.
“All this corruption was and is connected to the money the Americans and Europeans provided for the war — that’s a fact,” Peskov said, suggesting Russia’s Western adversaries might be rethinking their future collaboration with Ukraine.
Despite the image setbacks for Ukraine and the unflinching Russian demands in the latest peace proposal, the Europeans are expected to stick by Zelensky as he rebuilds a Cabinet that suffered other casualties in recent months as several top lieutenants were ensnared in the kickback schemes.
The leaders of France, Germany and Britain took the lead in talks in Geneva with the Ukrainians and Rubio to draft a more equitable approach to move Putin from his inflexible demands stated to Trump during their August summit in Alaska. The Europeans claimed success in removing language from the original plan that would have curbed Ukraine’s sovereignty and left it vulnerable to future incursions by Russian forces. The diplomats succeeded in unifying those at the hurried talks to counter Witkoff’s acquiescence to Putin’s submitted plans for strong-arming Ukraine into submission.
Trump has said he would be sending Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner to Moscow to discuss, among other matters, a White House proposal to unfreeze at least $200 billion in Russian hard-currency assets in European banks, currently under the stewardship of Belgium.
Among the original 28 points of the Russian-influenced U.S. ceasefire plan is a proposal by Trump to invest the Russian funds in American construction projects to rebuild shattered Ukraine housing and infrastructure. The Trump administration would take 50% of the profits from the construction, a proposal likely to harden the already reluctant Belgians from releasing Russia’s impounded assets.
Ukraine’s European Union allies want those funds provided to Ukraine as a loan to sustain the embattled and cash-strapped Kyiv government. A French official involved in the talks called the U.S. proposal “scandalous” in comments to Politico and predicted it would be “rejected by everyone.”
Putin, who has said little about Trump’s musings on his potential uses for the Russian funds, warned the European Union governments last week that there would be retaliatory measures if the EU seizes Russia’s frozen deposits for a reparations loan to Ukraine. The Kremlin said that move was akin to “theft of someone else’s property.”
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