Ukraine on a platter

This Thanksgiving, Putin is thankful for Trump and his plan for Ukraine's surrender.

CREDIT: Tom Janssen, The Netherlands

The Trump administration’s 28-point “peace plan” for Ukraine that emerged this week doesn’t just reward Russian aggression. It doesn’t merely compromise Ukrainian sovereignty. It systematically dismantles Ukraine’s ability to exist as an independent nation while handing Putin everything he’s been demanding since he invaded Ukraine in 2022 - and couldn’t win on the battlefield despite three years of trying.

Ukraine understands it will have to make concessions to end the war with Russia. But there’s a profound difference between negotiated concessions that preserve sovereignty and a diktat that dismantles a nation’s ability to defend itself while rewarding the aggressor for three years of war crimes.

Trump is holding a gun to Zelensky’s head, giving him until Thursday - Thanksgiving Day - to sign away his country’s future or lose all American support.

This isn’t a peace plan. It’s a surrender document.

The evolution of betrayal

Trump’s journey to this moment reveals just how thoroughly Putin has played him.

In February, Trump orchestrated Zelensky’s public humiliation in the Oval Office, adopting Putin’s revisionist history wholesale and insisting Ukraine “started the war.” When Trump shouted “You don’t have the cards!” at Zelensky, Moscow celebrated. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev exulted that “the insolent pig finally got a proper slap down.”

Then came September’s unexpected pivot. After UN meetings with Zelensky and European leaders, Trump suddenly called Russia a “paper tiger” fighting “aimlessly for three and a half years.” He declared Ukraine could “WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.” He suggested NATO nations should shoot down Russian aircraft violating their airspace. He admitted his disappointment: “I thought the war would be easy to end because of my relationship with Putin, but unfortunately that relationship didn’t mean anything.”

For a brief moment, it appeared Trump had finally seen Putin’s manipulation - the pattern of escalating attacks after each conversation, the empty promises, the systematic gaslighting of American efforts at peace.

That apparent awakening now looks like exactly what it probably was: genuine frustration with Putin that evaporated the moment the Russian leader picked up the phone and offered Trump soothing reassurances. Putin knows his mark. A little flattery, a few promises, and Trump’s rage transforms back into eager partnership.

Drafted in the Kremlin

The plan’s origins tell you everything you need to know about who really won this round. It emerged from an October meeting in Miami between Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Kirill Dmitriev - a sanctioned Russian official and Putin confidant who leads one of Russia’s largest sovereign wealth funds. Let that sink in: A sanctioned Russian operative helped draft what Trump is calling American policy.

Senior officials at the State Department and National Security Council were blindsided. Special Envoy Keith Kellogg, who had been working with Ukrainians on peace negotiations, was completely cut out. Even Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s involvement remains murky at best.

This shadow diplomacy produced a document that reads like it was translated directly from Russian - because in essence, it was. The plan resurrects the maximalist demands Moscow made in Istanbul in 2022, when Russian forces held more territory and the Kremlin still believed it could steamroll Ukraine in weeks. Except now, after three years of catastrophic Russian military failures, Trump is offering Putin those same terms as a starting point.

The surrender terms

Let’s be brutally clear about what Trump is demanding Ukraine accept:

Ukraine must cede not just Crimea and the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, but also the parts of Donetsk still under Ukrainian control - including the strategically vital “fortress belt” of entrenched defensive positions that have been the key obstacle to Russian advances. Surrendering these defenses would leave Putin a highway to Kyiv.

Ukraine must slash its military from 800,000-850,000 troops to just 600,000. Russia faces no such limits.

Ukraine must constitutionally ban itself from joining NATO. The plan explicitly forbids NATO troops on Ukrainian soil, killing any prospect of the European peacekeeping force that might actually deter Putin from reinvading once he’s rebuilt his decimated forces.

Ukraine must hold elections within 100 days - a timeline military and legal experts say is technically impossible, designed to produce a chaotic, illegitimate result that Russia can exploit and manipulate.

And in perhaps the most grotesque provision, Ukraine must “reject and prohibit all Nazi ideology and activities” - adopting Putin’s propagandistic lie that Ukraine’s democratically elected government is run by Nazis.

Putin’s payday

In return for Ukraine’s national suicide, Russia gets everything:

International recognition of conquered Ukrainian territory. All sanctions lifted. Full reintegration into the global economy. Readmission to the Group of Eight, from which it was expelled for seizing Crimea. And - most obscenely - amnesty for Russian forces’ atrocities, including the systematic targeting of civilians, the war crimes for which four Russian commanders have already been charged by the International Criminal Court, and the kidnapping of Ukrainian children for which Putin himself faces charges.

The plan even ensures Russia benefits from reconstruction, with $100 billion in frozen Russian assets going toward rebuilding the most brutalized parts of Ukraine - which happen to be under Russian occupation, meaning Moscow effectively controls how the money gets spent.

The “security guarantees” offered to Ukraine are a sick joke. Vague promises of a “decisive coordinated military response” if Russia reinvades - the same empty threats that have failed to deter Putin for three years. One provision states these guarantees become “invalid” if Ukraine fires missiles at “Moscow or St. Petersburg without cause” - a loophole so massive that Russia can define “cause” however Putin wishes.

Why should anyone trust these paper promises? The answer is simple: no one should, and no one does - except apparently Donald Trump.

The cynical timing

Moscow’s timing is brutally calculated. This plan arrives at Ukraine’s moment of maximum vulnerability: Russian forces are days from taking Pokrovsk, Ukraine faces severe manpower shortages and soaring desertion rates, and Zelensky is politically weakened by a corruption scandal engulfing his inner circle.

Putin correctly assessed that the upcoming midterm elections next year, Trump’s ravenous hunger for a Nobel Peace Prize, Europe’s funding anxieties, and Ukraine’s battlefield struggles have created the perfect storm to resurrect the surrender terms Ukraine has rejected for three years. Russia is presenting the same impossible demands, betting Trump will eventually be ground down into accepting them as “necessary compromises.”

Putin himself couldn’t hide his satisfaction, declaring the plan “could form the basis for a final peace settlement.” Translation: This is such a favorable starting point that even modest revisions would still represent a historic Russian victory.

Even Trump’s Republican allies are recoiling in horror. Senator Roger Wicker, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee: “This so-called ‘peace plan’ has real problems, and I am highly skeptical it will achieve peace. Ukraine should not be forced to give up its lands to one of the world’s most flagrant war criminals.”

Senator Mitch McConnell was also withering: “Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool. Rewarding Russian butchery would be disastrous to America’s interests. A capitulation like Biden’s abandonment of Afghanistan would be catastrophic.”

An impossible choice

Trump’s ultimatum strips away any pretense of negotiation: Sign by Thursday or America walks away. “He’ll have to like it, and if he doesn’t like it, they’ll just have to keep fighting, I guess,” Trump told reporters with characteristic callousness. “At some point, he’s going to have to accept something.”

Zelensky’s response laid bare the obscenity of Trump’s demand: “Now is one of the most difficult moments in our history. Ukraine may find itself facing a very difficult choice. Either the loss of dignity, or the risk of losing a key partner.”

This is the choice Trump offers: Immediate territorial surrender and permanent vassalage to Russia, or abandonment by the United States. Not war versus peace, but two different paths to national destruction.

What Trump fundamentally refuses to understand - or more likely, simply doesn’t care about - is that this isn’t a real estate transaction where you split the difference and everyone walks away satisfied. Zelensky is fighting for Ukraine’s survival as a democratic nation. By absorbing Russia’s military assault, Ukrainian forces stand on the frontlines for all of Europe against a revanchist dictator who has made clear his ambitions extend far beyond Ukraine’s borders.

European capitals aren’t just alarmed - they’re watching the collapse of seven decades of American security guarantees in real time. As one European diplomat bluntly put it, “They’re just trying to figure out what it’s going to be like to be in a world where you can’t count on the United States for anything.”

A legacy of capitulation

Trump’s 28-point plan will stand as one of the most shameful documents in American diplomatic history. It rewards Putin for war crimes. It validates his revisionist history. It demonstrates to every authoritarian on earth that aggression works if you’re willing to wait out American attention spans. It tells Taiwan, the Baltics, Poland, and every other nation relying on American security commitments that those promises are worthless when tested.

And it confirms what Zelensky understood back in that February Oval Office ambush: that he stands alone as the last leader willing to refuse Trump’s bullying and Putin’s blackmail, because he simply cannot afford to do otherwise.

Trump will get his deal - or Ukraine will get its abandonment. Either way, Putin wins. And American credibility dies. That’s not peace. That’s capitulation with a presidential seal. And history will remember exactly who authored Ukraine’s betrayal.