The Trump administration’s new push for a peace deal in Ukraine accelerates Sunday as U.S. envoys travel to Geneva to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky. Despite widespread skepticism, officials say the talks will be a flexible negotiation, not a directive to Kyiv.
U.S. officials close to the negotiation told me Saturday that the administration recognizes that “security guarantees are not strong enough yet” in Trump’s 28-point peace proposal. Trump might raise or remove a proposed 600,000-person cap on Ukraine’s army, for example. And to bolster postwar deterrence, officials are considering supplying Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles if a peace agreement is reached.
“Ukraine’s sovereignty can never be compromised. That would open the floodgates in Europe,” one key official told me Saturday. “We don’t want to see a collapse of Ukraine,” he explained, describing that as the “second coming of Yugoslavia,” whose breakup in 1991 began a decade of regional strife. Critics of the Trump peace bid argue that it would reward Moscow and undermine Ukrainian sovereignty in precisely the way the officials I spoke with claim they want to avoid.
The official said that contrary to some reports, the Trump administration was “100 percent” committed to continued U.S. intelligence support for Ukraine. The 28-point plan was “aspirational” and open to negotiation, he claimed. Trump’s public comments have not been so reassuring. He spoke Friday of a Thanksgiving deadline, but denied Saturday that the 28 points were a final, take-it-or-leave it offer.
A cautionary note: The U.S. officials spoke with me because they wanted to convince Europeans, Ukrainians and Americans that Trump’s peace proposal is not as pro-Russian as it might appear. But the best judge of that will be Zelensky. If he endorses the deal, the onus will shift to Moscow. If he rejects it, the war will likely continue into next year and beyond.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff were set to fly Saturday night to Geneva to meet the Ukrainian leader. If he agrees to a framework for negotiations, Witkoff will then take it to Russian President Vladimir Putin, though probably not immediately.
This account of the negotiations is drawn from discussions with two U.S. officials who requested anonymity because of the delicacy of the talks. It was buttressed by conversations with European officials and sources who are familiar with deliberations within Zelensky’s government.
What prompted this peace bid, the officials told me, was a sense that recent reversals on the battlefield in the Donetsk region and a corruption scandal in Kyiv have brought Ukraine to an inflection point. Russia, meanwhile, is feeling growing economic pressure and might prefer to end the war rather than fight on for the two years that might be necessary to take Donetsk completely.
The model for Trump’s Ukraine effort is his successful push for a ceasefire in Gaza. Officials liken the current moment in Ukraine to the opening created by Israel’s September bombing of Hamas officials in Qatar, which broke an impasse. Turkey played a key role as an intermediary with the Ukrainians, just as it did with Hamas in the earlier talks.
This negotiating drive began nearly a month ago, when U.S. officials started developing a new framework in consultation with Russian, European and Ukrainian contacts. The effort moved into high gear last weekend after a senior Turkish official told Witkoff that Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s secretary for national security, was ready to meet him in Florida.
According to the U.S. officials, Umerov said in the Florida meeting that Zelensky might be ready to compromise on the crucial issue of swapping land in Donetsk for a peace deal, which has been a Russian demand. Umerov also said that Ukraine might be willing to cap its army at 600,000, the officials said. After that cap roused a storm of protest Friday, an official told me it might be raised or removed altogether — since it didn’t really affect the manpower balance, which strongly favors Russia in any event.
U.S. envoys recognize that security guarantees are the critical issue in getting Ukrainian and European support. Russia won’t budge in its opposition to European troops in Ukraine as a “deterrence force” after a ceasefire. Instead, U.S. officials have considered offering the Tomahawks to Ukraine as an alternative. The officials feel confident that Ukraine wouldn’t use these preemptively against Russia, because that would cost it U.S. and European support.
Because of Ukraine’s political instability, U.S. officials included a proposal for national elections in Ukraine within 100 days after an agreement is signed, which would amount to a public ratification or rejection of the agreement. They also added a clause providing postwar amnesty, at Ukraine’s request, to reassure Zelensky and members of his government that they wouldn’t face prosecution if the current corruption scandal widens.
The draft agreement calls on Ukraine to withdraw from the roughly 25 percent of Donetsk it now holds, meeting Russia’s key demand. To reassure Ukraine that it would be secure behind the ceasefire line, the U.S. draft agreement says this withdrawal zone should be demilitarized. A U.S. official told me Saturday that, in addition, the U.S. and its allies would help Ukraine build a security “wall” along the ceasefire line, using advanced technology.
Zelensky’s initial reaction to the new peace initiative had been to propose instead a ceasefire for energy-infrastructure targets. U.S. officials thought Moscow might accept this, because it has already damaged the Ukrainian power grid so severely. But the Russians responded that this approach was a “nonstarter,” an official told me.
Zelensky now confronts the most agonizing choice of his presidency. If he says yes to giving up Donetsk, some Ukrainians will never forgive him. If he says no, this tragic war will continue. For all Zelensky’s courage, he may never have faced a more agonizing moment.
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