Oleksandr Kyselov,
The Trump administration’s proposals for peace in Ukraine sound like a real estate deal, where the United States gets a payoff for handing over Ukrainian land. But with Kyiv’s leverage shrinking, the country may be forced to swallow a grim deal.
On 21 November, Ukrainians found themselves staring at a peace proposal that demanded near-immediate acceptance. The leaked twenty-eight-point peace plan, drafted by Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff [1] and Russian official Kirill Dmitriev [2], reads like a real estate transaction. Russia gets the land, the United States takes its cut, Europe foots the bill, and Ukraine can choose between surrendering now or surrendering later. Under pressure, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, addressed the nation bluntly: “Loss of dignity or of a key partner. Twenty-eight difficult points or an extraordinarily difficult winter.”
Stunned European leaders — taken aback by the initiative’s provisions — scrambled to improvise counterproposals. Amid outrage in the White House over the leak, emergency talks in Geneva produced a revised nineteen-point framework, deferring the hardest questions to future high-level dialogue. Trump declared “tremendous progress” and announced Witkoff’s sixth visit to Moscow this year.
The Trump administration’s proposals for peace in Ukraine sound like a real estate deal, where the United States gets a payoff for handing over Ukrainian land. But with Kyiv’s leverage shrinking, the country may be forced to swallow a grim deal.
On 21 November, Ukrainians found themselves staring at a peace proposal that demanded near-immediate acceptance. The leaked twenty-eight-point peace plan, drafted by Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff [1] and Russian official Kirill Dmitriev [2], reads like a real estate transaction. Russia gets the land, the United States takes its cut, Europe foots the bill, and Ukraine can choose between surrendering now or surrendering later. Under pressure, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, addressed the nation bluntly: “Loss of dignity or of a key partner. Twenty-eight difficult points or an extraordinarily difficult winter.”
Stunned European leaders — taken aback by the initiative’s provisions — scrambled to improvise counterproposals. Amid outrage in the White House over the leak, emergency talks in Geneva produced a revised nineteen-point framework, deferring the hardest questions to future high-level dialogue. Trump declared “tremendous progress” and announced Witkoff’s sixth visit to Moscow this year.
Continue @ ESSF.
No comments