Last week, US president Donald Trump set a hard deadline for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to agree to the details of a 28-point draft peace deal with Russia. If he refused, Trump said, the Ukrainian leader would be left “to fight his little heart out”.
By Monday, that deadline, Thanksgiving Day – Thursday of this week – was gone. The 28-point plan, which was widely criticised as a series of one-sided concessions to Russian president Vladimir Putin, had been shrunk to closer to 20 points.
Some of the most sensitive elements, including limits on the size of the Ukrainian military and a proposed ban on basing Nato troops inside Ukraine, were set aside for future negotiation. So was the question of where the new boundaries between Russia and Ukraine would be drawn.
But the price of the changes, made during a series of meetings over 11 hours in Geneva led by secretary of state Marco Rubio, is clear. Putin, some Trump administration officials predict, is likely to dismiss the new draft out of hand, which would lead to a long and drawn-out negotiation – just what Trump was trying to short-circuit.
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As Rubio said when he was leaving Geneva on Sunday: “Well, obviously the Russians get a vote here, right?”
They do, of course, and whether this latest effort amounts to anything may hinge on the Russian reaction.
As the weekend played out, there were reminders everywhere that the players view the negotiation through entirely different lenses. To some in the Trump administration, it is about finding middle ground by writing out each side’s demands, then making hard compromises. To Putin, it is about restoring lands that have deep cultural, political and military import to Russia and, by his account, have for more than a millennium.
And for the Ukrainians and the Europeans, it is about demonstrating that nations that seize land by force are not ultimately rewarded for their aggression – and deterring Russia from attempting another invasion.
This account of how the US peace plan touched off a firestorm in the United States and Europe is based on interviews with a half-dozen officials, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
By any measure, the administration’s roll-out of the new plan was maladroit at best. The White House was taken by surprise by the leak of its details, first described by Axios. Rubio downplayed the proposal last Wednesday as “a list of potential ideas”, while Trump, US vice-president JD Vance and Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, embraced it.
The leak left European allies angry about being left out, yet again. Ukrainians who had been courting Trump, hoping to stabilise the relationship with Washington and re-establish a pipeline of US-made, European-purchased weapons, were angry; Zelenskiy said the country might have to choose between its “dignity” and its most powerful ally.
Trump attacked the Ukrainians on social media on Sunday, the same day Rubio was trying to win them over by amending the agreement.
Now, after a weekend of emergency interventions, an amended plan seems to be coming a bit more into focus, even if its ultimate success seems like a stretch.
On Monday, Leavitt insisted that after Rubio’s negotiations in Geneva, “we feel as if we’re in a very good place.” But she acknowledged that the deal would need to be approved by Putin and his representatives – and she made no predictions about how that would go.
Zelenskiy said on social media that many of the “right elements” were now accounted for in the framework, and that he would discuss “the sensitive issues” with Trump.
Administration officials say the impetus for the new negotiations grew from Trump’s increasing frustration about his inability to end a nearly four-year-long war.
Shortly after the Gaza Strip ceasefire deal in September, Trump met Rubio, along with Vance; Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy for just about everything; and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who has no formal role in the US government but whom the president relies on for complex negotiations.
Trump told the men that they should seek to build on their accomplishment in the Middle East with a deal for Ukraine and Russia. That led to secret meetings in Miami with Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s Harvard University-trained economic envoy and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund. That meeting was followed by a quiet visit from Rustem Umerov, Zelenskiy’s national security adviser.
People familiar with those meetings said Trump’s aides believed that the combination of Ukraine’s unfolding corruption scandal and Russia’s incremental battlefield gains put new pressure on Zelenskiy to cut a deal. But the one they ultimately drafted contained a lot more input from the Russians than from the Ukrainians.
“We began almost three weeks ago with a foundational document that we socialised and ran by both sides, and with input from both sides,” Rubio told reporters in Geneva.
And then, naturally, it leaked. The specifics outraged the Europeans, who had been kept in the dark even though they are funding Ukraine’s arms and designing a security guarantee for the country. German chancellor Friedrich Merz had a tense phone call with Trump on Friday night, emphasising that the proposed agreement lacked any enforceable way of deterring the Russians.
“If Ukraine loses this war and possibly collapses, it will have an impact on European politics as a whole, on the entire European Continent,” Merz said after the Group of 20 summit in Johannesburg, which Trump and other US officials boycotted.
Republican leaders were equally blistering about the leaked proposal, including senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former majority leader, who said in a statement that “Putin has spent the entire year trying to play president Trump for a fool.”
In Kyiv, the secretary of the US army, Daniel Driscoll, a friend of Vance’s, presented the proposal to sceptical Ukrainian officials. Vance, who berated Zelenskiy in February in the Oval Office and has pushed hard for withdrawing US aid from Ukraine, spoke with Ukraine’s leader by phone on Friday about the proposal.
By Saturday, Rubio was in damage-control mode. He headed to Geneva to meet Ukrainian and European officials. Witkoff, Kushner and Driscoll also flew there.
While Trump had embraced the proposed deal as the near-final word, Rubio was talking about it as an opening gambit.
From his plane to Switzerland, he called senators Mike Rounds and Jeanne Shaheen, who were leading a bipartisan delegation to a security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and talked at length about the origins of the 28-point proposal.
The senators then held a news conference and told reporters that they heard Rubio describe the document as one largely composed by the Russians, rather than as an American creation. “It is not our recommendation,” Rounds paraphrased Rubio as saying. “It is not our peace plan.”
Rounds said Rubio had “made it clear that it was an opportunity to have received” the plan. “You now have one side being presented, and the opportunity for the other side to respond,” Rounds said.
When their comments were reported, it seemed like confirmation that the Russians had played a major role in composing the language. Suddenly, Rubio found himself denying that he had ever told the senator that the document was essentially a Russian draft. He called back to Rounds, and others, insisting that they had misinterpreted his remarks.
But he soon confirmed that the drafting began with a weighing of Russian demands.
“We began from the early stage of this process with our understanding of the Russian position as had been communicated to us in numerous ways,” he said in Geneva on Sunday. He said that included verbal and informal written proposals sent to the State Department that are called “nonpapers” He insisted the same was done with the Ukrainians, though it is unclear when that happened.
By Sunday night, Rubio appeared to have wrestled back control of the negotiations.
He excised – for now – sections that would forever bar Ukraine from joining Nato and that banned Nato member states from forming a security force inside Ukraine that would deter Russia from launching a new invasion.
A White House official added that a previous provision requiring Ukraine to cede territory to Russia had been revised. But now comes the hard part: Those are exactly the provisions that Putin cares about most.
Russia experts have assessed that there are no signs yet that Putin is ready to end the full-scale invasion of Ukraine he started in February 2022, or that he would abide by a permanent ceasefire. Putin has rejected every immediate ceasefire proposal offered by Trump this year.
The fighting, meanwhile, has continued. Early Tuesday, loud explosions were heard across Ukraine’s capital, with local authorities saying air defences were firing to fend off a large Russian attack.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
