Trump didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, but he’s a lock for the Kremlin’s Employee of the Month.
Source: Andy Borowitz (Facebook), 22 November 2025
The 28-point Russia–Ukraine peace plan—put on the table this week by Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s emissary, and Kirill Dmitriev, a Kremlin aide equally inexperienced at diplomacy—grants Kyiv two favors but otherwise amounts to a Moscow wish list.
It is worth noting that neither Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky nor any European leader was consulted in the backroom drafting. Spokesmen for Russian President Vladimir Putin say, a bit improbably, that they haven’t seen the deal either. Even if its outlines were acceptable to both sides, several of its planks are ambiguous, requiring extensive negotiation. Still, Trump has demanded that Ukraine accept the plan before Thanksgiving.
This timetable seems unlikely, as does the notion that peace is now at hand.
The plan allows Ukraine to apply for membership to the European Union—a significant point, given that, in some ways, the war began back in 2014, when Putin deposed a Ukrainian president who was on the verge of striking a deal with the EU. The plan also commits $100 billion in seized Russian assets to rebuild war-torn areas of Ukraine.
However, the rest is a shambles. It hands much of Ukrainian territory to Russia—including Crimea and the eastern Donbas districts of Luhansk and Donetsk. It reduces the size of the Ukrainian army to 600,000 troops (it currently has about 880,000), while putting no cap on the number of Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders. It demands that Ukraine revise its constitution to prohibit membership in NATO, bars NATO troops from being stationed in Ukraine, and forbids Ukraine from attacking Moscow or St. Petersburg with missiles (a peculiar clause—as Lawrence Freedman asks, “But [attacking] Rostov is OK?”), without barring Russia from firing missiles at cities in Ukraine.
Finally, Ukraine must hold elections within 100 days (nothing about how security might be kept at polling stations in areas still under dispute), all combatants and politicians are granted amnesty (so much for war-crimes trials), and Russia “will be reintegrated into the global community,” complete with restored membership in the G8 and the dropping of sanctions.
A few other articles seem to favor Ukraine at first glance, but not so much upon scrutiny. For instance, “Russia is expected not to invade neighboring countries” (italics added), which sounds like a courteous request, not a legal demand. (By contrast, the same plank—in fact, the same sentence—states, “NATO will not expand further.”)
Another: “Ukraine will receive reliable security guarantees,” but there isn’t a hint on what Moscow would find acceptable in this department. Similarly, “Russia will codify a non-aggression policy toward Europe and Ukraine,” thus allowing Putin to load the codification with whatever loose language and loopholes he’d like.
The plan calls for the creation of a “humanitarian committee” to oversee an “all for all” exchange of prisoners, detainees, and kidnapped children. That’s good, but there’s nothing about who appoints the committee members or how the trades are enforced; for instance, who sends police into Moscow homes to retrieve Ukrainian babies and adolescents? Even assuming the best of intentions (a dubious assumption), this will take a while to formalize.
Similarly, the plan says that Donetsk will be turned into a “demilitarized zone,” with no Ukrainian or Russian troops allowed to enter. Again, fine, but who supplies the armed peacekeepers to enforce this rule—and why should Moscow accept it, given that the deal recognizes Donetsk as Russian territory?
These are not small points. Article 28, the plan’s final plank, states, “Once all parties accept this memorandum, a ceasefire will take effect immediately after both sides withdraw to the agreed points for the start of the agreement’s implementation.” In other words, all of the plan’s ambiguities, loose ends, and remaining disputes have to be settled—and then troop withdrawals have to be completed, not merely started—before a ceasefire takes hold.
This is the opposite of the 20-point peace plan that Trump helped impose on Israel and Hamas in Gaza. It shrewdly demanded a ceasefire and hostage exchange as the deal’s first steps. It is not at all clear that details about the remaining points will ever be negotiated, much less implemented (in fact, most of those points seem politically dead on arrival), but the important thing—Trump and his Arab partners realized—was to stop the killing and to keep it stopped for as long as possible.
The Russia–Ukraine plan does the opposite: It imposes a ceasefire after agreement and action on all the other steps toward a peace—and an unjust peace at that.
The main problem with the plan is that, like its American authors, it fails to recognize the true nature of the war: namely, that Ukrainians are fighting for their sovereignty as an independent nation, while Putin is fighting for the restoration of the old Russian empire, which entails, among other things, the total subjugation of Ukraine.
A Kremlin spokesman said as much on Friday, when he said that any peace deal must address the war’s “root causes.” Putin has made clear a number of times that he regards, as the war’s main root cause, the insistence by the government in Kyiv—which he denounces as an illegitimate “neo-Nazi dictatorship”—that Ukraine exists as a nation with its own history, culture, and language.
The best way to end the war is for Trump to realize this fact—and to convince Putin that the West will not let this imperial dream come true. Short of that, all the rest, including the 28-point peace plan, is at best a distraction and at worst a recipe for democratic Ukraine’s surrender.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Ukrainian people today. The current moment, he said, is “one of the most difficult” for the country. “Ukraine may soon face an extremely difficult choice. Either the loss of dignity or the risk of losing a key partner. Either 28 complicated points or the hardest winter yet—and the risks that follow,” Zelensky said.
Zelensky’s use of the word “dignity” recalled Ukraine’s 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” that ousted Russian-aligned president Viktor Yanukovych and turned the country toward Europe.
Zelensky was responding to a 28-point “peace” plan President Donald J. Trump is pressuring him to sign before Thanksgiving, November 27. The plan appears to have been leaked to Barak Ravid of Axios by Kirill Dmitriev, a top ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and reports say it was worked out by Dmitriev and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff. Ukrainian representatives and representatives from Europe were not included. Laura Kelly of The Hill reported on Wednesday that Congress was blindsided by the proposal, which Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet of The Hill suggest Russia may be pushing now to take advantage of a corruption scandal roiling Ukraine’s government.
Luke Harding of The Guardian noted that the plan appears to have been translated from Russian, as many of the phrases in the text read naturally in that language but are awkward and clunky in English.
The plan is a Russian wish list. It begins by confirming Ukraine’s sovereignty, a promise Russia gave Ukraine in 1994 in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons but then broke when it invaded Ukraine in 2014.
The plan gives Crimea and most of the territory in Ukraine’s four eastern oblasts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk to Russia, and it limits the size of the Ukrainian military.
It erases any and all accountability for the Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians, including well-documented rape, torture, and murder. It says: “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.”
It calls for $100 billion in frozen Russian assets to be invested in rebuilding and developing Ukraine. Since the regions that need reconstruction are the ones Russia would be taking, this means that Russian assets would go back to Russia. The deal says that Europe, which was not consulted, will unfreeze Russian assets and itself add another $100 billion to the reconstruction fund. The plan says the U.S. “will receive 50 percent of the profits from this venture,” which appears to mean that Europe will foot the bill for the reconstruction of Ukraine—Russia, if the plan goes through—and the U.S. and Russia will split the proceeds.
The plan asserts that “Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy,” with sanctions lifted and an invitation to rejoin the Group of Seven (G7), an informal group of countries with advanced economies—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, along with the European Union—that meets every year to discuss global issues. Russia was excluded from the group after it invaded Ukraine in 2014, and Putin has wanted back in.
According to the plan, Russia and “[t]he US will enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centres, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities.”
The plan requires Ukraine to amend its constitution to reject membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It says “[a] dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the US, to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation to ensure global security and increase opportunities for cooperation and future economic development.”
Not only does this agreement sell out Ukraine and Europe for the benefit of Russia—which attacked Ukraine—it explicitly separates the U.S. from NATO, a long-time goal of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.
NATO grew out of the 1941 Atlantic Charter. Months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. They agreed that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.
The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, communism backed by the Soviet Union began to push west into Europe. In 1949, France, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a military and economic alliance, the Western Union, to work together, but nations understood that resisting Soviet aggression, preventing the revival of European militarism, and guaranteeing international cooperation would require a transatlantic security agreement.
In 1949 the countries of the Western Union joined with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the twelve original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries reaffirmed “their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”
They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment and said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “gravely undermined global security.”
They did so in the face of Russian aggression.
Putin invaded Crimea in 2014 after Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych, earning economic sanctions and expulsion from what was then the G8. But Crimea wasn’t enough: he wanted Ukraine’s eastern oblasts, the country’s industrial heartland. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the U.S. presidency against Donald Trump in 2016, would never stand for that land grab. But Trump was a different story.
According to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, in summer 2016, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort discussed with his business partner, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, “a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, the plan was for Trump to say he wanted peace in Ukraine and for him to appoint Manafort to be a “special representative” to manage the process. With the cooperation of Russian and Russian-backed Ukrainian officials, Manafort would help create “an autonomous republic” in Ukraine’s industrialized eastern region and would work to have Russian-backed Yanukovych, for whom Manafort had worked previously, “elected to head that republic.”
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018. Putin has been determined to control that land ever since. And now it appears Russia is pushing Trump to deliver it.
This plan, complete with its suggestion that the U.S. is no longer truly a part of NATO but can broker between NATO and Russia, would replace the post–World War II rules-based international order with a new version of an older order. In the world before NATO and the other international institutions that were created after World War II, powerful countries dominated smaller countries, which had to do as their powerful neighbors demanded in order to survive.
Source: Heather Cox Richardson, Notes of an American, 21 November 2025
Donald Trump’s “peace plan” for Ukraine has caused an international firestorm—perhaps because its origins are surrounded by mystery.
We know the plan is the love child of Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff and Vladimir Putin’s emissary, financier Kirill Dmitriev. But what did Trump know about it? (Apparently not much.) Where does Marco Rubio stand? Did Vladimir Putin greenlight this plan on the Russian side? Does he want it implemented? Can it be implemented? What exactly is in it, and how is it being revised? It’s the proverbial Winston Churchill line about Kremlin politics as a “bulldog fight under a rug”—only now with Jared Kushner under there, holding a leash.
There is widespread agreement that the 28-point proposal is devastating for Ukraine: it would lose the entirety of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces (including the roughly 15 percent of these territories currently in Ukrainian hands) and the occupied parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhia provinces. The part of the Donetsk province currently controlled by Ukraine is to be converted, after Ukrainian withdrawal, into a “neutral demilitarized buffer zone” de facto recognized as Russian but off-limits to Russian troops. What does that mean? Who will police that zone, especially considering that the proposal rules out NATO troops in Ukraine? Those details are, we imagine, currently being filled in.
The plan also includes a proposed cap on the Ukrainian military that is outrageous in principle since it infringes on Ukrainian sovereignty. The one positive spin may be that the 600,000 cap does not include the National Guard and many other types of troops. And while it’s a substantial reduction from the current 900,000 troop size of the Ukrainian armed forces, that number is elevated precisely because the country is currently at war. Moreover, in their spring 2022 peace talk proposal, the Russians had demanded an 85,000 cap.
Still, many other provisions of the plan are infuriating not only for Ukraine but for the civilized world in general. There is, among other things, the failure to name Russia as the aggressor even once, and Russia’s proposed reintegration into the G-7 and other international structures. And yet some strongly pro-Ukraine analysts, such as expatriate Russian journalist Michael Nacke, argue that the proposal has some equally unacceptable elements for Vladimir Putin. Most notably, it stipulates a guarantee of Ukrainian security similar to NATO’s Article 5: an attack on Ukraine would be treated as an attack on the entire transatlantic structure.
Maybe Russia regards this clause as meaningless and believes NATO will never go to war with Russia over Ukraine. It is also worth noting that Putin has continued to insist that Russia intends to achieve all the goals of the “special military operation”—which would include the demilitarization of Ukraine and its de facto relegation to a Russian satellite. Nacke, like a number of other commentators, believe that whatever Ukraine does, Putin will not sign the Trump peace plan.
So the plan may not be a Kremlin wish list. But it does have a distinct Russian flavor. It’s possible that, as investigative journalist Christo Grozev has suggested, the Russian side of the plan comes not from Putin but from the “dovish” Kremlin faction concerned primarily with trade and improved relations with the West.
In this interpretation, the plan represents not so much a proposal for Ukrainian surrender as Trump administration amateur hour: a plan that was cooked up by a real estate developer and a financier that won’t be acceptable to either side. Will current attempts to revise it yield a better version? They’re happening as we hit send on this email. So stay tuned.
Source: Cathy Young, “Moscow’s Mule,” The Bulwark, 24 November 2025
“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.
Anton La Guardia, diplomatic editor at The Economist, posted: “State Department is backpedalling on Rubio’s backpedal. If for a moment you thought the grown-ups were back in charge, think again. We’re still in the circus. ‘Unbelievable,’ mutters one [of the] disbelieving senators.”
Later that day, Erin Banco and Gram Slattery of Reuters reported that the proposal had come out of a meeting in Miami between Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Dmitriev, who leads one of Russia’s largest sovereign wealth funds. They reported that senior officials in the State Department and on the National Security Council were not briefed about 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.”
[…]
Source: Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 23 November 2025
This!
