Trump’s 28-point ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine seems to have crashed before take off, to nobody’s surprise. It must be the first peace plan to be negotiated without the involvement of one of the participants in the conflict, something one would have thought an essential element. More than that, the plan itself appears to have been largely written by the other participant, who is also the aggressor. President Zelensky was, according to reports, given until next Wednesday to agree to it. This is the day before Thanksgiving. Trump apparently wanted to announce he had ended the war in Ukraine to help his polling numbers.
If you haven’t read all 28 points, you can find them HERE. It is a document that will leave a permanent stain on America's reputation unless it's rapidly withdrawn. Under Donald Trump, the US has gone from a shining city on a hill to a fly-blown shanty town after an earthquake.
It is amazing to me that anyone outside Russia could read the terms as anything other than total surrender. How it ever got published, I really don't know.
This morning, with claims emerging that the American Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told some senators that the plan did not represent the US position, a spokesman for the US State Department had to tell journalists that the “plan was authored by the United States, with input from both the Russians and Ukrainians." Nobody believes it. One senator described it as a Russian "wish list.” It seems incredible that any Ukrainian would have contributed anything to the plan; it’s so one-sided.
However, despite talk of a 26 November deadline, Trump now says it doesn’t constitute a ‘final offer.’
[Q]: Is this your final offer to Ukraine? President Trump: No, not by far. No, we'd like to get to peace. It should have happened a long time ago. The Ukraine war with Russia should have never happened.— Anton Gerashchenko (@antongerashchenko.bsky.social) 22 November 2025 at 17:35
If the plan represented an opening offer, why give a deadline for acceptance? His comments followed an almost universal rejection of the plan. European leaders are being careful not to dismiss it out of hand, but privately, they must be infuriated that we are back to Trump’s original thinking from February.
I understand the whole thing was negotiated in secret between Trump's golfing partner and real estate developer Steve Witkoff, and the Russian diplomat Kirill Dmitriev. The Russian obviously ran rings around Witkoff, a man that one anonymous European diplomat suggested needed to see a psychiatrist.
The German Chancellor, Fredrick Merz, told journalists that "Ukraine's fall would destabilize the whole continent." He said an end to the war is only possible with the full consent of Ukraine, adding, "Wars cannot be ended in a way that great powers decide over the heads of those directly affected by the aggression. This war can only be stopped with the consent of Ukraine and Europe."
Starmer picked out one aspect of the plan, point No 5, which offered vague assurances that "Ukraine will receive reliable security guarantees" and was careful not to rubbish the whole thing. He said that "matters for Ukraine must always be decided by Ukraine."
The first thing you can say is that the plan looks totally amateurish. No country’s leader could agree to it as written. In fact, there are requirements in the plan for several other bodies like NATO and the G7 to also agree to important parts of it. And on the surface, it provides Russia with everything it has been demanding while Ukraine gets virtually nothing, not even all the territory it holds right now!
Trump seems strangely blind to the fact that the deal is bent so heavily towards Russia that it makes the USA and him look extremely weak and is bound to reinvigorate all the allegations surrounding what he calls the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. This is the central charge in the 2019 Mueller Report, that Putin helped him win in 2016, which he maintains is a ‘hoax’. The purported deal only reinforces the idea that it isn't a hoax and Trump is in fact a Russian puppet.
There were suggestions that the US would try to force Ukraine to accept the deal by blocking the supply of weapons and intelligence if it refused. I think this could be disastrous. If Europe carried on alone -as they almost certainly would - and Russia responded by launching attack on (say) Poland, a NATO member, then America would either be drawn into a wider conflict or it would be the end of NATO as a credible threat.
Professor Timothy Snyder, speaking on his Substack blog thinks there are at least five fundamental things that are wrong with the so-called 'plan' as it is now framed.
The first is that it makes nuclear war a lot more likely. By forcing Ukraine to accept terms that amount to defeat by capitulation, the rest of the world draws the conclusion that you need to build nuclear weapons to hold off a Russia invasion. Second, it is destabilising to the international order to change borders by force and endorsing the plan would be rewarding Russia for attacking Ukraine, normalising armed conquest.
Third, if the terms of the settlement leave Russia in a stronger position, then Russia will have been encouraged in every possible way, legal, moral, psychological, and economic, to continue fighting wars in Europe.
Fourth, in order to have peace, you have to have a Ukraine that can defend itself afterwards, that can belong to international institutions, that is truly sovereign and can rebuild itself. The plan has no provision for Ukraine to join the EU or attract foreign investment.
Finally, Snyder says, everything we know about history teaches us that you can't get to a durable peace settlement without involving the people who are concerned.
"[The Ukrainians] have not been consulted in this settlement. It is a Russian-led settlement translated into English by Americans. There are good reasons why this can't work. If you leave important people out, then you don't understand the issues. If you leave important people out, you don't have all the necessary information.
"And also, if you leave important people out, you may create conditions where they have no choice but to fight anyway, and then you haven't solved the problem. The next most important people are the allies. If Ukraine is to be defended and reconstructed, rebuilt, such that there is peace, then Ukraine's other allies have to be brought into the story, and they have not been."
Trump desperately wants the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel committee should publicly make it absolutely clear that there can never be a prize for imposing an unjust peace on a helpless victim and rewarding the aggressor.
