Where do the peace negotiations for Ukraine stand?
Rights — di Luigi Mastrodonato
After the first draft plan heavily skewed in Russia's favour, a new draft agreement has emerged that Ukraine finds acceptable.
Where do the peace negotiations for Ukraine stand?
After the first draft plan heavily skewed in Russia's favour, a new draft agreement has emerged that Ukraine finds acceptable.
For several days now, Ukraine has been back at the centre of international diplomacy. US President Donald Trump, who had promised to end the war within 24 hours of his election, has launched a negotiating offensive mirroring what he already did with the Gaza Strip.
Washington put forward a 28-point plan drawn up in concert with Russian officials, which Ukraine found deeply objectionable, as it effectively amounted to an unconditional surrender. The plan has since been rewritten with the involvement of Ukrainian officials and with several points from the previous draft removed, but its new form is unlikely to be welcomed by the Kremlin. Reaching a final agreement remains an open question, even as the Trump administration continues to insist that we have never been this close to the end of the conflict.
The first version of the peace plan
Last week reports began to emerge of a peace plan for Ukraine drawn up by officials from the Trump administration, just days after the UN Security Council approved a similarly flawed plan for the Gaza Strip. The plan was developed by Donald Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Kremlin adviser Kirill Dmitriev. It was heavily tilted in Russia's favour.
Divided into 28 points, its key provisions included recognition of the annexation of Crimea, which took place in 2014, and of other regions seized by Russia, such as Donbas, Donetsk and Luhansk. The document also called for a downsizing of the Ukrainian army, a reduction in US military assistance to the country, and the recognition of Russian as an official state language.
The conditions set out in the plan were, broadly speaking, those Russia has always demanded and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has categorically rejected. Zelensky was incensed at having been excluded from the new negotiations, at a time when he is already in serious difficulty following the corruption scandal that has engulfed his government. Several European countries, including France, Germany and the United Kingdom, also challenged their exclusion from the talks, pressing for a revision of the draft plan.
The second version of the peace plan
In the end, a new round of talks took place in Geneva, Switzerland, which saw the inclusion of Ukrainian officials alongside their American counterparts, and which led to the drafting of a new text.
The draft is divided into 19 points. Information about it is very sparse, but according to anonymous disclosures from Ukrainian and US officials, a whole series of provisions considered hostile to Kyiv no longer appear in the text. The downsizing of the country's armed forces has been almost entirely dropped, in the sense that Ukraine would be permitted to retain the 800,000 troops very close to the approximately 880,000 currently deployed. Restrictions on the deployment of NATO contingents in Ukraine are also said to have been removed, and the possibility of the country joining the Atlantic Alliance has been raised. There are no details on what has been decided regarding the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia or the security guarantees needed to prevent Ukraine from coming under attack again after a potential signing of the agreement.
JUST IN — President Trump on peace negotiations: "We're having good talks. We started with Russia... Ukraine is doing well. I think they're pretty happy about it, they'd like to see it end. And we won't know for a little while, but we're making progress."
Negotiations are, in any case, not over. Ukraine's Foreign Minister, Andrii Sybiha, announced a new meeting with US delegates to iron out some details of the new draft peace agreement. On the other side, it remains to be seen how Russia will react to the wholesale reworking of the first version of the text, the one it had directly contributed to drafting. If in that case the negotiated terms were unacceptable to Kyiv, the current terms now seem unlikely to satisfy the Kremlin, at least from what is leaking out. On 26 November, however, a Russian adviser told state television that the country had welcomed certain aspects of the new US plan to end the war, while stating that further efforts were needed. A message perhaps directed at Washington's envoy, Steve Witkoff, who in recent hours has found himself in the eye of the storm in the United States over his overly accommodating stance towards Russia.