Duelling peace plans show relief for Ukraine remains a long way off

Ukrainian servicemen fire a howitzer toward Russian troops on the front line in Donetsk on Sunday.Anatolii Stepanov/Reuters

Less than a week after the existence of a 28-point peace plan for Ukraine was first leaked, there are now two peace plans, one of which has been deemed unacceptable to Kyiv and its allies, while the other has drawn only stony silence from the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, the Thursday deadline that U.S. President Donald Trump gave for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept the first proposal – or continue fighting the Russian invasion of his country without U.S. assistance – seems to be fading away as Washington and Kyiv continue to negotiate.

The original 28 points, drafted by Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, in partnership with Kirill Dmitriev, a businessman close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, were the subject of intense weekend talks between U.S. and Ukrainian teams who met in Geneva. There are reports that the 28 points have since been whittled down to 19.

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Ukrainian officials had initially expressed displeasure at the Witkoff-Dmitriev proposal, which they said had been formulated without Kyiv’s involvement. After the Geneva talks, which were led by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Andriy Yermak, Mr. Zelensky’s chief of staff, the U.S. and Ukrainian delegations announced they had crafted “an updated and refined peace framework.”

Ukrainian soldiers prepare for a combat mission in Donetsk last Thursday.Anatolii Stepanov/Reuters

By Monday, it was Moscow that was complaining about being left out of the process. “We have not seen any plan yet,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian state media, adding that he had read reports suggesting that “some adjustments were made to the text previously sent to Moscow.”

An alternate peace plan, published over the weekend by Britain, France and Germany – all allies of Ukraine that had been left out of the Witkoff-Dmitriev process – hints at where the gaps lie and why many observers believe peace is no closer than it was a week, or a year, ago.

The European leaders took the 28 points Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Dmitriev had agreed upon and made more than a dozen revisions. The main differences between the two plans:

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff face the Ukrainian delegation in Geneva on Sunday.FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images

Where the original proposal calls for Ukraine to withdraw its troops from the parts of the southeastern Donbas region still under its control – and says the U.S. will recognize Russia’s claim to roughly 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory – the European plan states that “negotiations on territorial swaps will start from the Line of Contact.” (This change, which would essentially freeze the conflict on its current front lines, likely makes the deal unpalatable to the Kremlin, which believes its forces have the momentum on the battlefield and will eventually capture Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, the last major Donbas population centres still held by Ukrainian troops.)
Where the Witkoff-Dmitriev plan calls for the size of Ukraine’s military to be capped at 600,000 soldiers, the European plan raises that figure to 800,000. Either number would still leave Ukraine with one of the largest armies in Europe, though the latter barely requires any change from the 900,000 Ukrainians currently in uniform. (Russia is estimated to have about 1.3 million active soldiers.)

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Where the original proposal calls for Ukraine to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join the NATO military alliance – and for NATO to formally commit to never admitting Ukraine – the European offer says only that “Ukraine joining NATO depends on consensus of NATO members, which does not exist.” It’s a game of semantics, but a crucial one, as Europe does not want to give Moscow veto power over who joins the alliance in the future.
The next clause takes the existing Witkoff-Dmitriev wording of “NATO agrees not to station troops in Ukraine” and adds “in peacetime.”
The European proposal also removes a clause stating that “all parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war” and replaces it with a very different one: “Provision will be made to address the suffering of victims of the conflict.”

There are other differences, but those five are enough to ensure that Mr. Putin will dismiss the London-Paris-Berlin version out of hand.

U.S. President Donald Trump greets Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska in August.ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images

What was unclear as of Monday is how many of the European proposals were adopted by Mr. Rubio and his team as revisions to the original plan and whether Mr. Trump will accept any changes to a deal he initially pushed to have Kyiv accept without any revisions.

Even if Mr. Trump insists on the original document, it remains far from clear that Mr. Putin is ready to sign it.

Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who resigned in 2022 shortly after the start of the invasion of Ukraine, called the current peace push “dead on arrival,” since Mr. Putin will see the U.S. willingness to give in to the Kremlin on so many key points – at least in the original Witkoff-Dmitriev text – as evidence that Russia is winning the war.

“To Putin, this proposal is proof of his victory. If the U.S. is offering terms like these, then in his view it has surrendered and is ready to accept his demands,” Mr. Bondarev wrote in an opinion piece published Friday by The Moscow Times.

Portraits of Ukrainian military members on The Wall of Remembrance of the Fallen for Ukraine in Kyiv on Monday.ROMAN PILIPEY/AFP/Getty Images

On Monday, Mr. Zelensky used a video speech to the International Crimean Platform, a body that seeks to reverse Russia’s 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea, to call for Ukraine’s allies to keep international law at the centre of the peace negotiations. It came across as a plea for the world to support the European peace proposal rather than the Witkoff-Dmitriev draft.

“It is extremely important to uphold the principles on which Europe was founded: that borders cannot be changed by force, that war criminals cannot escape justice and that the aggressor must pay in full for the war he started,” Mr. Zelensky said.

Mr. Trump sounded a much more cavalier note in a Monday morning post on his Truth Social network.

“Is it really possible that big progress is being made in Peace Talks between Russia and Ukraine??? Don’t believe it until you see it, but something good just may be happening.”