The Trump administration has been something of a pendulum in its position on the war in Ukraine, swinging between pro-Ukraine and pro-Russia positions over the past year. This week, it is swinging hard toward Moscow.
Earlier this week, Axios reported on a new 28-point Trump administration plan to end the war in Ukraine, echoing the 20-point plan that led to last month’s ceasefire in Gaza. The plan was formally presented to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday by US Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll in Kyiv.
The points, published by the Financial Times on Friday, include several serious concessions that are red lines for the Ukrainians. Those include ceding territory not currently under Russian control, land that would give Russia full control of the disputed Donbas region. The Ukrainian military would also be capped at 600,000 troops, down from 900,000 today, under the plan. And Ukraine would have to enshrine in its constitution that it would not seek NATO membership and would be prohibited from hosting foreign troops on its soil, effectively scuttling Europe’s main plan to secure the peace. Europe’s main plan to fund Ukraine’s postwar rebuilding would also be hampered by the provision giving the US 50 percent of the funds from frozen Russian assets.
The plan does vaguely gesture toward security guarantees for Ukraine, leaves open the door to EU membership, and includes reassurances about Ukrainian sovereignty. But this plan would still be viewed by Ukraine as effectively surrender.
The government “must reject it. Ukrainian society won’t accept this,” Olena Halushka, a civil society activist with the International Center for Ukrainian Victory, told Vox.
There are indications that the US is dialing up the pressure on Ukraine to accept, however. Ukrainian officials told the Financial Times that the Americans want Zelenskyy to sign the deal by Thanksgiving and that the whole process should be wrapped up by early December. US officials have also reportedly suggested that they will cut military aid and intelligence sharing if Ukraine doesn’t take the deal.
Zelenskyy said he was willing to work with the Americans on the plan, but on Friday, he said Ukraine was facing “one of the most difficult moments in our history” and was facing a painful choice between “the loss of dignity, or the risk of losing a key partner.”
In short, readers in the US may feel like they’ve seen this all before several times since President Donald Trump took office. But everyone involved is indicating that this time feels different, and they’re taking it very seriously.
Everything is moving very quickly, and there’s still a lot of uncertainty around the deal that we can separate into five main questions.
1. Where did this plan even come from?
There’s clearly some churn behind the scenes in US-Russia diplomacy. Notably, Keith Kellogg, Trump’s official Ukraine envoy who has been considered one of the more pro-Kyiv figures in the administration, quit just after news of the deal leaked. And Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov hasn’t been seen in weeks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s initial statement was extremely equivocal and vague.
The agreement appears to have been cooked up by Trump’s all-purpose envoy Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, who has been in talks with the Americans over the war. After Axios posted its story, Witkoff — perhaps confusing his tweets and his texts — posted on X that the reporters “must have got it from K,” presumably Kirill. The plan, as published by the Financial Times, includes a number of factual and spelling errors, suggesting the work of amateur diplomats.
Witkoff has gotten over his skis in talks with the Russians before, and there was some initial skepticism from observers about whether Trump even knew about this “Trump plan.”
But whether or not the White House was actually involved in drafting it, the administration appears to have gotten behind it now. “The president supports this plan,” spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Thursday. “It’s a good plan for both Russia and Ukraine, and we believe that it should be acceptable to both sides, and we’re working very hard to get it done.”
What about Vladimir Putin? Dmitriev may be talking to Axios, but according to statements from the Russian president’s office and foreign ministry, they have not received any new proposals from the Americans. The Kremlin is keeping its cards close to the vest.
2. What makes this time different?
Zelenskyy has had to manage Trump’s periodic pro-Putin turns before, but this one comes at a particularly inopportune moment for the Ukrainian president, who last week fired two top officials amid the fallout from a growing corruption scandal. He’s also facing growing calls to dismiss his chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, effectively Ukraine’s second-in-command. The affair comes a few months after Zelenskyy tried to sideline his government’s main anti-corruption watchdogs and had to back down in the face of mass protests.
All this has damaged Zelenskyy’s standing in Ukraine — the president was elected on an anti-corruption platform and has been ruling without elections since his term ended last year — and undermined Ukraine’s wartime political unity at a time when the government badly needs to keep the US and European allies onside.
3. Can Trump’s mind be changed again?
The Ukrainians and their European allies have managed to sway Trump in the past. The president was reportedly struck during a meeting in August by an analogy comparing Ukraine giving away its Eastern Donetsk region to Trump giving away Eastern Florida. The new deal would require Ukraine to give away Donetsk, so the analogy apparently didn’t stick.
EU leaders, who were not involved in the negotiation process and were blindsided by the announcement, are scrambling to respond, and talks are planned to coordinate a response to the US position.
What’s a little unclear right now is the extent to which this is a list of take-them-or-leave-them demands for Ukraine. Some officials suggest it’s merely the starting point for negotiations.
4. What happens when Ukraine says no?
Zelenskyy cannot accept this deal as it’s currently written. If the White House follows through on the threat to cut off aid to Ukraine, it would be an extremely serious blow to the Ukrainian war effort, but not necessarily a fatal one. Europe has already replaced the US — which hasn’t allocated any new aid for Ukraine since January — as the country’s main military funder, and Ukraine increasingly produces many of its weapons, particularly drones, domestically. There are some US-made systems, such as Patriot missiles, that have no European equivalent that Ukraine badly needs. And if the US were to cut off intelligence sharing, it would hamper Ukraine’s ability to both fend off missile attacks and to strike targets within Russia.
Halushka said that the 28-point plan is a challenge to Europeans and that it increases the urgency of a plan to use frozen Russian sovereign assets to fund a long-term economic assistance plan for Ukraine.
Only Europe, she said, can “make the American capitulation demands irrelevant.”
Ukraine may view the 28 points as effectively surrender, but there may be red lines in it for Russia as well. The plan specifies “de facto” rather than official international recognition of the Ukrainian territory held by Russia, and it would require Russia to effectively relinquish its claims to the disputed regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, both of which it annexed two years ago. Russia probably also wants a Ukrainian military smaller than 600,000 troops, which would still be the largest active military in Europe after Russia.
Despite the enormous death toll and economic costs borne by Russia and its slow rate of battlefield progress, Putin clearly believes he is winning the war, an impression likely bolstered by recent events on the ground. The Russian leader views this as an existential civilizational struggle for his country and would no doubt prefer to dictate his own terms to the Ukrainians and the West rather than have Trump take credit for striking a deal.
In short, even as heavily tilted toward Russia as it is, the 28-point plan may still not be enough to satisfy either side.
