The Trump regime’s 28–point peace plan for Ukraine at last addresses Russia’s legitimate interests. The only losers, if negotiations win Moscow’s acceptance, will be the warmongers.
“What Is This? Peace in Our Time?”
Patrick Lawrence / The Floutist
(November 28, 2025) — All has been fluid and very few things clear since the Trump regime’s draft of a 28–point peace plan intended to settle the war in Ukraine was leaked (in varying versions) last week. The Europeans quickly put together a 19–point counter-draft they seem to think supersedes the Trump plan.
The Ukrainians seem to think they negotiated a new document, based on the Europeans’ plan, with the United States in Geneva last weekend. There have been talks in the European capitals, talks in Kiev, talks on the sidelines of various multi-sided summits.
All manner of assertions and all manner of reporting have flowed in the course of these undertakings, as you may have noticed. The shared project is to subvert the Trump plan, which we must count a serious endeavor to address Russia’s interests in the cause of an enduring settlement, in favor of another that, in essence, allows the Kiev regime and its backers in London, Paris, and Berlin to continue pretending Moscow has no legitimate interests and, so, the war must go on.
It is important to pay attention to all these developments, but not overmuch. The Europeans and the Ukrainians have been prone to lots of huffing and puffing since the Trump regime began its efforts to bring the war to a close and restore relations with Russia to something resembling sanity. But the Euros and their Ukrainian client have never managed to blow anyone’s house down, and I do not see they have any chance of doing so now. This is simply the kind of thing in which the losers of a war indulge when they are unwilling to accept they are the losers.
The Ukrainians did not negotiate a new plan with the United State in Geneva last week, as The Times of London, Le Monde, and other European dailies have reported. They negotiated something or other—we do not know what—with Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, and that is a very different matter:
Rubio is a neoconservative warmonger whose place in Trump’s national-security lineup has been questionable from the first. Volodymyr Zelensky was due in Washington just before Thanksgiving for talks at the White House, but that encounter was abruptly canceled. We have to conclude Trump and he who purports to serve as Ukraine’s president had nothing to talk about just now.
Daniel Driscoll, the Army secretary, is to go to Kiev this week for talks, not his first, with Zelensky. So far as one can make out, Driscoll will do the talking and Zelensky the listening. More important, Steve Witkoff, the New York property investor serving as Trump’s special envoy, is due in Moscow in the week to come for talks with President Putin and other top-level officials.
It is very safe to conclude the Trump regime’s original plan will be the basis of these exchanges. Witkoff helped develop the 28–point document during consultations with a senior Russian official last month. Trump has on no occasion indicated he has stepped back from this proposal in favor of any of the alternatives that have since floated around. And the Kremlin made it clear this week that the Russian leader expects the 28 points to be the point of departure in Witkoff’s talks with Putin.
There are any number of reasons you may not like, or may even condemn, the Trump regime’s draft plan to advance toward a settlement of the war in Ukraine. You may be among those many all across the Western capitals who simply cannot accept defeat on the reasoning—is this my word?—that the West never loses anything, and it certainly cannot lose anything to “Putin’s Russia.”
You may think that President Trump and those who produced this interesting document, which became public in the course of some days last week, have once again “caved” to the Kremlin. The outstanding contribution in this line comes from the ever-mixed-up Tom Friedman, who argued in last Sunday’s editions of The New York Timesthat Trump is to be compared with Neville Chamberlain and Trump’s plan with the much-reviled British prime minister’s “appeasement” of Hitler via the Munich Agreement of September 1938.
I cannot think of a klutzier interpretation of history or a more useless comparison, given it sheds not one sliver of light on what the document to hand is about.
Or you may stand on principle and attempt the well-worn case that Ukraine is a liberal democracy—let me write that phrase again just for fun—Ukraine is a liberal democracy, altogether “just like us,” and must be defended at all costs in the name of freedom, the rights of the individual, free expression, free markets, etc.
Or you may think this is no time for the United States and its European clients to relent in their unceasing effort to destabilize the Russian Federation. Those of this persuasion cannot, of course, acknowledge that Ukraine is nothing more than a battering ram in this dreadful cause, at this point much-bloodied. This dodge tends to swell the ranks of those professing the defense of democracy against autocracy as their creed.
Anyone paying attention to the reactions to the Trump plan among the trans–Atlantic policy cliques and the media that serve them has heard all of this and more this past week. I find it all somewhere between pitiful and amusing.
Pitiful because those who so wildly overinvested in the corrupt, Nazi-infested regime in Kiev prove incapable of acknowledging that Ukraine lost its war with Russia long ago, and this attempt to subvert Russia now proves a bust. Amusing because those who so wildly overinvested in the corrupt, Nazi-infested regime in Kiev now squirm at the thought that the victor will have more to say about the terms of peace than the vanquished.
Whad’ya mean we don’t get to dictate a settlement just because we’re the losers? This, in a single sentence, is the position shared across the West and in Kiev. It was Washington’s position before Trump replaced the Biden regime. Trump’s latest sin—and this plan counts as another in many quarters—is that what he and his people now propose favors simple realities over elaborate illusions.
Those asserting that the Trump plan caters to the Kremlin are not altogether wrong, to put this point another way. They are merely wrong in their objections. These 28 points, with many elaborations—No. 12 is followed by 12a, 12b, 12c and so on—indeed give Russia a lot of what it has spent years attempting to negotiate.
The missed point is plainly stated: It is a very wise and fine thing finally to recognize the legitimacy of Russia’s perspective. It was the West’s long refusal to do so that produced this war. These past three years this… this miscalculation, this blindness to reality, this hubris has destroyed Ukraine and resulted in the deaths of some hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides. At this point what will serve Russia’s interests will also serve Ukraine’s and the interests of anyone who thinks an orderly world is a good idea.
A couple of things to note before briefly considering the contents of the Trump plan. I am working from a copy of the text apparently leaked to the Financial Times last Thursday, 20 November, a week before Thanksgiving.
One, this is a working document, nothing more. Trump’s people, notably Rubio and Witkoff, have had extensive negotiations with Ukrainian and European delegations since advancing the White House plan. These are to continue.
Trump earlier gave the Kiev regime until Thanksgiving to accept or reject its terms. But the Trumpster also stated that if things went well this deadline would be superseded. Now it has been, and no one has shut any doors—not such that this has been public knowledge. All is subjective.
