Pushing for peace: is Trump appeasing Moscow?

After days of frantic diplomacy, Donald Trump claimed this week that his negotiators had made “tremendous progress” towards ending the Ukraine War. The Ukrainian leadership indicated that it had accepted the “core terms” of a US-backed peace plan – and Trump said that his envoy, Steve Witkoff, would be dispatched to the Kremlin for talks with Vladimir Putin next week. However, significant doubts remained, both about the exact terms of the deal, and about Russia’s position. On Wednesday, Russian officials indicated that the deal was not acceptable.

Last week, Trump had piled great pressure on Kyiv to sign up to a 28-point plan that the US had drawn up following Witkoff’s talks with Russian envoys in Miami. That proposal echoed Moscow’s maximalist war aims, by calling for Kyiv to cede the rest of the Donbas region, and to limit its army to 600,000 personnel. It caused alarm among Ukraine’s European allies, whose 19-point counter-proposal is believed to form the basis of the deal Kyiv later accepted.

Pro-Russia bias

Effectively, the US-Russia peace plan amounted to a demand for Ukraine’s “outright surrender”, said The Times. It would have handed over Ukraine’s “fortress belt” in the Donbas, which it has spent years defending, and denied it meaningful security guarantees. If Zelenskyy had bowed to Trump’s ultimatum to agree to its terms by Thanksgiving, 27 November, or lose access to US weapons and intelligence, he’d surely have had to resign.

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This peace plan was reportedly leaked by Moscow, said The Economist – and AI analysis suggests it was translated from the original Russian. Either way, it again “betrayed” Trump’s pro-Russia bias, and his indifference to Ukraine; as did his dismissive suggestion that Zelenskyy can “fight his little heart out” if no deal is struck, and his grousing on social media that “UKRAINE ‘LEADERSHIP’ HAS EXPRESSED ZERO GRATITUDE FOR OUR EFFORTS.”

Sobering question

There was a “grim familiarity” to events last week, said The Guardian. As in August, when Trump hosted Putin in Alaska, Kyiv and its European allies had been excluded from talks which would decide their future, and were left scrambling to improve a Moscow-friendly deal.

Europe’s leaders were confronted with a sobering question, said Michael D. Shear in The New York Times: was the US about to force Ukraine to “capitulate”, to the detriment of Nato and the benefit of Putin – “all without even bothering to consult with them”? It looked that way for a while; but by Tuesday, the crisis had been averted by European leaders who have honed their “how-to-handle-Trump playbook” during a year of similar episodes. Rather than lashing out, they “embraced” the plan to keep Trump onside, while insisting that it was only a starting point for negotiations. “The goal was to slow the process and eliminate some of the provisions they saw as crossing Europe’s red lines.”

The Europeans succeeded in shrinking the 28-point plan to 19 points, said Roger Boyes in The Times. But several of Russia’s key demands remained: no Western military presence in Ukraine, no Nato membership. And the fundamental questions – how to divide the land, and security guarantees against future invasions – remained apparently unresolved. As usual with Trump’s “drive-by diplomacy”, nothing adds up.

‘Miserable choice’

With the knotty questions about territory yet to be resolved, Russia is “trying to pour cold water on the prospects of an imminent peace breakthrough”, said Samuel Ramani in The Daily Telegraph. It continues to bombard Ukrainian cities; its officials have dismissed the new proposals as “not constructive”.

For Kyiv, the risk now is that Putin will talk Trump into backing favourable terms for Russia, said Tim Ross et al in Politico. That would leave Zelenskyy with a “miserable choice”: either take an offer “cooked up by Trump and Putin”, or hope that his European allies finally make good on their bold promises of help.

Sooner or later, though, he’ll have to make a deal, said Gideon Rachman in the FT. During four years of war, Ukraine has sustained hundreds of thousands of casualties. Millions of its citizens have fled abroad, and its economy lies in ruins. A bad settlement could imperil its future as a “genuinely independent” nation. But make no mistake: “the continuation of the war is also deeply damaging to Ukraine”.