His 28-point “Peace Plan” is nothing but an outrageous demand for surrender
By Marco Levytsky, Editorial Writer
U.S. President Donald Trump’s 28-point “Peace Plan” for Ukraine is nothing but an early Christmas gift to his bosom buddy, Russian dictator and mass murderer Vladimir Putin.
This is a backroom deal concocted by Trump’s personal envoy Steven Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian businessman with close ties to Putin. Like most of the other Trump appointees, Witcoff is totally unsuited for his position having had no previous diplomatic or other foreign policy experience. This is evident in the draft of the plan which was leaked out to many global media outlets. Not only does it mirror Russia’s maximalist demands, it was written by Russians. Several observers and media outlets have pointed out that Trump’s plan contains phrasing that appears to have been directly translated from Russian. Linguists and journalists noted odd constructions in English that match Russian syntax. According to U.S. Senators critical of the plan, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio even admitted to senators that this was actually a Russian plan that the U.S. had agreed to pass along to Ukraine. Rubio on November 22 denied this, writing in a social media post that, “the peace proposal was authored by the U.S. It is offered as a strong framework for ongoing negotiations It is based on input from the Russian side. But it is also based on previous and ongoing input from Ukraine.” He has also claimed that great progress has been made in talks with Ukraine, but has offered no details,
And so, this plan was delivered to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy only after Witkoff and the Russians agreed on it and the White House approved it. Since then, Trump has put intense pressure on Zelenskyy to approve this capitulation, even to the point of issuing an ultimatum that if the Ukrainian president does not accept it by November 27, the U.S. will cut off all aid, including the intelligence sharing that has been so valuable in air defence as well as in targeting military infrastructure and oil refineries in Russia.
Ukraine has rejected this proposal just as it has rejected all the others that were all aimed at forcing the embattled country to capitulate to Putin’s maximalist demands.
“Ukraine needs peace. And a real peace – one that will not be broken by a third invasion. A dignified peace – so that the conditions are with respect for our independence, our sovereignty, and the dignity of the Ukrainian people,” Zelenskyy wrote on his Telegram account, November 19. However, in a national address on November 21, Zelenskyy admitted that Ukraine faces a “very difficult choice: either losing its dignity, or risking the loss of a key partner.’”
To begin with, the document calls for Ukraine to concede the entire provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk to Russia – including key Donetsk cities such as Kramatorsk and Slovyansk that are still under Ukrainian control –and behind heavily fortified defence lines. Despite being under Russian control, the areas in Donbas from which Ukraine would withdraw would be considered a demilitarized zone under a “lease” agreement, with Russia not able to position troops there. The “lease” idea mirrors Trump’s business-style approach to international deals, Moscow would effectively pay a “land tax” to offset Ukraine’s losses from Donbas, a mineral-rich region. Just how these wishes will be enforced and for how long is an open question.
Kyiv would also be expected to agree to reducing or halting US military assistance. Any future deployment of Western troops to Ukraine – as envisaged by the Franco-British-led “coalition of the willing” – would also be banned. The size of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be limited to 600,000 personnel. In addition, Ukraine must agree to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO must agree to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future. The front line in the regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – which Russia also claims to have annexed — would reportedly be frozen at current positions. These Russian territorial gains, as well as its 2014 annexation of Crimea, would all be recognized by the U.S. Kyiv would also have to stop receiving some Western weapons, and forgo hosting foreign troops.
The deal also requires Ukraine to recognise Russian as an official state language and to grant formal status to the Russian Orthodox Church, prompting further concerns about creeping attempts to Russify the country.
Russia, in the meantime, will benefit from the lifting of Western sanctions and even the restoring of its membership in the G8, giving Moscow a path back into global economic and diplomatic circles. In addition, the Trump peace plan does not impose any reparations on Russia, sparing Moscow from paying for any of the hundreds of billion dollars of war damages it has inflicted on Ukraine. While the plan does include discussion of the return of abducted Ukrainian children, U.S. funding for tracking them has been cut, raising doubts about enforcement.
Europeans have expressed great concern. EU High Representative Kaja Kallas has stated that Brussels would not accept any peace initiative negotiated without Kyiv’s knowledge. “We have always supported a lasting and just peace, and we welcome any efforts to achieve it,” Kallas said. “But for any plan to work, Ukrainians and Europeans are needed.”
The Europeans have presented a 28-point counterproposal that explicitly seeks to roll back or dilute the pro‑Russian concessions embedded in Trump’s proposal, particularly territorial handovers and military restrictions on Ukraine. Moscow has rejected these while continuing to terrorize civilians with continuous bombing attacks
As far as Trump’s plan itself is concerned, never before in history has such a draconian and grossly unconscionable deal been arbitrarily imposed upon an innocent victim who has valiantly stood up to a vicious and unhuman aggressor by a ‘self-appointed mediator,’ that is to say Trump, who has subordinated any sense of decency that remained in his body in order to shamelessly gratify that very same aggressor.
The proposed “deal” rewards this aggressor for genocide, for the deliberate murder of civilians, including the deliberate targeting of schools and hospitals, for the horrendous torture of prisoners of war and other Ukrainians in the occupied territories, for blocking global food supplies and countless other crimes against humanity. And it leaves Ukraine wide open for future Russian aggression by limiting its armed forces, Ukraine’s ability to muster support from other democracies, degrading its cultural identity, and forcing it to abandon its defensive fortifications in return for an ambiguous demilitarized zone and unspecified “lease” agreements that are laughable. Does anyone really expect Russia to honour both the demilitarization requirement and pay rent to boot?
In fact, both Trump and Putin are pathological liars and sociopaths who cannot be trusted to adhere to any agreement. Look only to the Budapest Memorandum by which Ukraine gave up the world’s third biggest nuclear arsenal in return for “guarantees” of its sovereignty and territorial integrity pledged by Russia, the U.S. and the United Kingdom. This has now been callously violated by both Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America.
It is very clearly apparent that Trump has nothing but contempt for democratic Ukraine and blatantly favours dictatorial Russia. What’s left of the Free World can never agree to such a despicable betrayal. And trying to modify it as the EU’s alternative proposes is just a sop to make this betrayal a little less despicable.
What’s left of the Free World must realize that Trump’s true intentions are simply to fight Putin’s war for him. We cannot follow his lead or even try to modify his most extreme demands. Canada, the EU and all other countries that still maintain democratic values must continue to support Ukraine in its war against Russia until a just peace for Ukraine can be made. But the one on offer now is not such a proposed just peace and not worthy of being considered as an honest attempt to reach one. To accept what now has been proposed to end the war, would thrust the world into an apocalypse of unprecedented magnitude.
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