Volodymyr Zelenskyy has framed the 28-point US peace plan to end the war in Ukraine as an impossible choice: between losing national dignity or losing the support of its most important ally.
The plan, which has been widely decried as a Kremlin wish list, would allow Russia to keep Crimea, as well as Luhansk and Donetsk and other territory in the Donbas that Ukraine has successfully defended for nearly four years. It would halve the size of Ukraine’s army, ban it from launching long-range missiles and end its hope of joining Nato. In return, Ukraine would receive as yet unspecified security guarantees.
For Zelenskyy, such demands are unpalatable but he may end up having to swallow at least some of them.
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Nearly four years on from Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian president faces “a triple threat at home and abroad”, said Colin Freeman in The Telegraph. There have been “huge losses on the front lines as winter draws in” and “growing anger” over a scandal in which officials allegedly stole millions from the state nuclear energy provider. Now Donald Trump is pushing a “controversial” peace plan, most of which appears “calculated to be unacceptable to Kyiv”.
“Having Zelenskyy in a bind, though, is one thing,” said Freeman. “Getting him to sell the deal to the Ukrainian public is another, as it tears up red lines that Kyiv has drawn in very thick blood.” Any peace agreement would require constitutional changes voted through by a supermajority in Ukraine’s parliament. This appears unlikely given the reaction of the Ukrainian public and politicians to Trump’s 28-point plan.
The power-company scandal, as well an unsuccessful attempt to curb the independence of two national anti-corruption watchdogs earlier this year, have “delivered a devastating blow to Zelenskyy’s international reputation and to the Ukrainian cause at large”, said Leonid Ragozin on Al Jazeera. He is “emerging out of it as a lame duck who will do what he is told by whoever is pulling the strings”, which, right now, looks to be the US president.
“Yet this very vulnerability” makes Zelenskyy “even less likely to yield to the Trump administration”, said Yaroslav Trofimov in The Wall Street Journal. “No Ukrainian president – and especially not a weakened Zelenskyy – has a mandate to agree to anything like this,” Nico Lange, a former senior German defence official, told the paper. “If he does, he would not be president any more when he comes home.”
What next?
The Trump administration has given Ukraine until Thursday to agree to the deal – or risk losing all US support and “imperilling Ukraine’s troops, who rely deeply on American intelligence sharing” and “US weapons”, said Siobhan O’Grady in The Washington Post.
But, in the rush to exploit Ukraine’s weakness, Trump may have “inadvertently strengthened Zelenskyy at home, at least for the time being”, said Cassandra Vinograd and Andrew E. Kramer in The New York Times. “The 28-point plan has shifted” the nation’s focus away from domestic scandal and allowed the president to “reprise his most successful role: as rally-er in chief”.
