What I'm Reading - The Trump peace plan edition
November 21: Five reads that piqued my interest this week
Impatient Trump looks to sell out Ukraine
US President Donald Trump's latest ‘plan’ for peace in Ukraine is a Russian wishlist that would neuter Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and cede the entire Donetsk region to Russia.
If this plan were agreed, or forced upon Ukraine, Ukraine could not have a military consisting of more than 600,000 people, would never be allowed to join NATO, not be allowed to field the Coalition of the Willing (NATO troops) in exchange for ill-defined security guarantees that few would trust.
Russia would be invited to rejoin the G7 and readmitted into the global economy, as well as be reprieved for all war crimes. The list in full is a death sentence for Ukraine if it were adopted.
Signalling that his patience has run out, Trump reprised his February dressing down of Ukraine’s President Volodymr Zelensky and said Ukraine did not hold any cards.
‘I said you don’t have the cards, I thought he should have made this deal a year ago, two years ago,’ Trump said in the White House.
Usually, Trump’s negotiating trademark has been to start with a shock and awe offer and work back. But this time the Russian wishlist, which Russia co-drafted, is being put forward to Kyiv as close to take it or leave it proposition.
US Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll told European ambassadors and Western officials at a volatile meeting in Kyiv late on Friday that he was ‘optimistic that now is the time for peace’ — but warned that Washington would show little flexibility. ‘We are not negotiating details,’ he said, according to a senior European official in the meeting at the Kyiv residence of US Chargé d’Affaires, Julie Davis. A top European official described the tone of the meeting as ‘nauseating’.
…
Davis told the group gathering in the mansion that ‘as much as we can support Ukraine continuing the war, there are limits’, said one ambassador present.
‘There are strong indications that Russia has a strong industrial base and it is a matter of time until Ukraine has to cut a deal,’ she said, according to the ambassador.
Driscoll showed up late and laced his comments with profanities, according to people present. ‘We need to get this shit done,’ he said. ‘The US Armed Forces love Ukraine and stand behind Ukraine, but it is the honest US military assessment that Ukraine is in a very bad position and now is the best time for peace,’ Driscoll continued. He added that ‘security guarantees are part of this’ US deal and would be discussed with European and Ukrainian leaders in the coming days.
The 28 points, explained
Laurence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London dissects what the 28 points in the proposed peace plan mean for Ukraine, and how they favour Russia.
Russia is expected not to invade neighbouring countries, and NATO will not expand further.
[No membership of NATO for Ukraine, and also in this formulation, any other potential candidates, has been a feature of Trump plans from the start. What is ‘an expectation not to invade.’ It imposes no obligations. A simple ‘will not’ would suffice.]
The size of the Armed Forces of Ukraine will be limited to 600,000 personnel.
[This is more than envisaged under previous Russian proposals - in 2022 it was 85,000 - but why is it needed for a sovereign country? There is no mention of limitations on particular classes of weapons - aircraft, tanks etc. There are no restrictions envisaged on Russian forces.]
U.S. guarantee:
The United States will receive compensation for providing the guarantee.
[What does this mean? From whom, in what form and how much? A security guarantee is a promise to act in certain contingencies. It doesn’t cost much to make the promise. This plays to Trump’s transactional view of alliance security but it is a weird insertion in a peace treaty]
▪️ If Ukraine invades Russia, it will lose the guarantee.
[Of course unlikely but remember that the Russian pretext for the full-scale invasion was that Ukrainian forces were ‘invading’ the Luhansk enclave]
▪️ If Ukraine, without cause, launches a missile at Moscow or Saint Petersburg, the security guarantee will be considered void.
[But Rostov would be OK? And what would be sufficient cause to justify a missile launch? Another weird clause]
Frozen assets will be used as follows:
US$100 billion of frozen Russian assets will be invested in U.S.-led efforts for Ukraine’s reconstruction and investment. The United States will receive 50% of the profits from this initiative.
Europe will add US$100 billion to increase the investment available for Ukraine’s reconstruction. European frozen assets will be unfrozen.
The remaining frozen Russian assets will be invested in a separate U.S.–Russia investment vehicle that will implement joint projects in designated areas. This fund will aim to strengthen relations and increase shared interests to create a strong incentive not to return to conflict.
[I can’t believe that Russia will agree to any of this. They want their assets back. Equally Ukraine wants them as reparations for all the losses they have suffered - and even then it will not be enough. What is with the US making a profit from this?]
Must have got this from K
The unprofessionalism of the Trump Administration continues to provide rich insights into its inner workings.
After Axios dropped the news of the peace plan online, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s negotiator, suggested that the reporter Barak Ravid ‘must have got this from K’ in a post that he published publicly on X, in response to Ravid’s own post on X distributing his scoop.
What he did not count on was that one of his most frequent sources, Witkoff, would undermine this exclusive by getting away trade secrets. The envoy accidentally tweeted under Ravid’s story what looked to be an intended direct message to a third party: ‘He must have got this from K.’
I saw the tweet and screenshot it before Witkoff, realising his technical whoops, deleted it. ‘K,’ I assumed, referred to Kirill, the only on-the-record source for Ravid’s story — an unintended disclosure by Witkoff, another frequent source for Ravid’s stories, that the Russian was preemptively selling something he didn’t yet own, having worked out how American media is a helpmeet to politics. More interesting was that Dmitriev’s freelancing was not being met with unmixed delight by a fatuous and impressionable US diplomat.
Russia pounces on Zelensky’s weakness
While in any other week this may have looked like another example of Trump reverting to type or regurgitating the thoughts of the last person who spoke to him, this time it’s different.
The peace plan comes as Trump’s own patience with his failure to resolve the war is running thin, but also as tougher US sanctions are due to come into effect against Russia.
But most worryingly, and dangerously, the Russians and the Trump Administration have lobbed this out at a dire time for Ukraine and at Volodomyr Zelensky’s weakest point in his Presidency.
His failure to root out corruption and confront it head-on could cost Ukrainians dearly.
The reaction from Ukrainian civil society has been overwhelmingly negative. People have variously dismissed the plan as one-sided and tantamount to Ukraine’s abject surrender. It comes as Zelenskyy is under immense pressure at home after a corruption scandal involving his former business partner and at least two of his ministers.
The plan also failed to win over senior European commentators. Constanze Stelzenmüller of the Brookings Institute described its drafting as “appalling” and said its substance was ‘outrageous’.
If enacted, it would lead to Russia becoming the ‘apex predator in Europe’, she observed. ‘Truly marks the complete enshittification of diplomacy,’ she added on X.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, an ally of the US president, expressed opposition to the Trump Administration plan.
‘Ukraine being asked to halve the size of its army is unacceptable. I am waiting to see a counter-proposal from Zelensky’s government,’ he posted on X.
But there’s a cost to Trump, too
But there is a cost to the US President as well, as Washington Correspondent Alex Raufoglu sets out.
The emergence of a Russia-leaning proposal – advanced through an unconventional diplomatic backchannel – now sets up a tense Trump-Zelensky confrontation.
But the episode is also exposing a deeper fault line inside the US administration: the clash between the State Department’s institutional approach and Trump’s preference for personal, transactional diplomacy.
But the biggest gamble belongs to Trump. By publicly endorsing a draft Kyiv views as a blueprint for surrender, he risks a rupture with Ukraine and key European allies in pursuit of a pre-election narrative: only Trump can end the war.
That wager now enters its most delicate phase. The coming days will test whether Kyiv or Washington’s competing factions blink first – and what price the administration is prepared to pay to declare victory.
And that’s my list for this edition.
🎙️ This week I was on the other side of a podcast mic, speaking to the Latvian Institute of International Affairs with my good friend Sandis Šrāders from the Institute for a discussion on European and global security, moderated by Sigita Struberga from the Riga Security Forum. I shared my views on how democracies picture our combined security threats across both the Indo-Pacific and the Euro-Atlantic, and also how we could try to define the security environment we are in and calibrate our settings and public messaging accordingly. I would welcome your feedback.
You can watch it on YouTube or find it on your podcast apps. I have embedded the links for Spotify and Apple below.
Please do send me anything that’s caught your eye. I enjoy knowing what you’ve been reading.
Some of you have started to offer me copies of your books etc. Please email me at latika@latikambourke.com for a forwarding address for hard copies.