The White House presented a 28-point peace plan to Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday that includes new elements, including a robust, NATO-like security guarantee for Kyiv that Zelensky said is vital to any peace deal.
The plan also demands concessions from Ukraine, including giving Russia territory it has not conquered militarily. The deal would require Ukraine to shrink the size of its military from its current 850,000 to 600,000, enshrine in its constitution that it will not seek to join NATO, and give "de facto recognition" of Russia's conquest of "Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk, as well as of the areas of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia it has illegally seized, with the conflict in these regions frozen on the current front line," according to the Washington Post.
The White House is pressuring Ukraine to sign the deal before Thanksgiving or lose U.S. support. Currently, although the U.S. doesn't sell arms to Ukraine directly; we arrange deals with EU nations to sell Ukraine U.S. weapons. The States also give Ukraine vital intelligence support that many analysts believe it could not do without. A cut off of that intelligence sharing would complicate the defense of Ukraine enormously.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, told reporters, “We have to understand that in this war, there is one aggressor and one victim, and we haven’t heard of any concessions on the Russian side,” she told reporters.
The most intriguing part of the plan is the "security guarantee" that Zelensky demanded as part of any peace agreement with Russia.
The 28-point plan U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll presented to Zelensky on Thursday, which was also obtained by Axios, says simply that "Ukraine will receive reliable security guarantees."
But alongside it, the U.S. presented the Ukrainians with another draft agreement.
Zoom in: It states that any future "significant, deliberate, and sustained armed attack" by Russia on Ukraine "shall be regarded as an attack threatening the peace and security of the transatlantic community," and the U.S. and its allies will respond accordingly, including through military force.
The document includes lines for signatures from Ukraine, the U.S., the EU, NATO and Russia. A senior White House official said Russia was briefed on the draft, but it's unclear if President Vladimir Putin's signature will ultimately be required.
The security rider will not go over well with Donald Trump's "America First" base, as it would commit the United States to war with Russia if Moscow were to carry out a "sustained armed attack."
The plan does not call for any "reassurance force" of NATO troops on the ground that would trigger a war if Ukraine were attacked. The U.S. was not enthusiastic about that idea, broached by the EU.
“We don’t want to see a Ukrainian capitulation, and one can well imagine that the Ukrainians, who have resisted in a heroic way against a brutal Russian invasion for more than three years now, will refuse, in any form, a capitulation,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot told reporters.
The peace plan is being presented to Ukraine at a time when President Zelensky has come under heavy fire for a corruption scandal that involves some of his closest friends and aides.
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The $100 million embezzlement scheme involved kickbacks from contractors in the energy sector, aimed at bypassing Ukrainian bureaucracy and enriching Zelensky cronies. The president has not been implicated in the scheme, but it has galvanized the political opposition.
As the most significant corruption scandal of Mr. Zelensky’s tenure unfolds, opponents who had lain low are coalescing into the first major anti-Zelensky movement since the invasion began in 2022. These adversaries include Ukraine’s independent anticorruption agencies, opposition parties, political activists and media outlets.
With the handshake forgotten and the gloves now off, Mr. Zelensky’s critics are speaking in once-unthinkable terms, including accusing presidential allies of betraying the country. Many Ukrainians have reacted with disgust to accusations that his allies enriched themselves while the country’s soldiers are dying in a fight for national survival.
“The country has finally seen what the expression ‘blood money’ means,” Mr. Poroshenko’s political party said in a statement about the corruption scandal. Mr. Zelensky’s wartime cabinet, the statement said, is “unprofessional and corrupt.”
A weakened Zelensky will not be able to make any deal that would relinquish unconquered Ukrainian territory. In fact, it's unlikely that Zelensky could make any agreement, given the crisis in Ukrainian governance.
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