President Donald Trump’s reported 28-point peace plan for ending the Ukraine war arrives at a moment when the European security order stands strained, Western consensus is fragmenting, and Moscow is recalibrating its long-war strategy. And President Trump’s 27 November deadline for Ukraine to accept it has since pushed European, Ukrainian and American officials into a tizzy for hyper-speed parleys in Geneva.
Prima facie, what emerges from this plan is an ambitious, disruptive, and highly controversial proposition that seeks not merely to end hostilities but to redesign European security architectures, recalibrate US-Russia relations, and impose a dramatic political transformation upon Ukraine. Its game-changing potential lies in how radically it departs from the post-Cold War liberal internationalist norm of territorial sovereignty and unapologetically prioritises President Trump’s realist deal-making calculus.
Trump’s strategic realignment
The plan reportedly resulted from consultations between President Trump’s personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, and high-ranking Russian interlocutors such as Kirill Dmitriev. On Sunday, a Pentagon delegation led by Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll was in Kyiv for further consultations with the Ukrainian top brass, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has since agreed to further deliberations. That the blueprint is ‘inspired’ by Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan is instructive as it offers peace by coercive bargaining, engineered around leverage rather than consensus.
The architecture of this proposal spans four pillars — peace in Ukraine, security, overhaul of European security, and the recalibration of US-Russia (and US-Ukraine) relations. These pillars signify Trump’s attempt to embed the Ukraine settlement within a broader Eurasian strategic reset, not limited to a narrow cessation-of-hostilities framework.
What distinguishes the plan from previous peace proposals is Trump’s post-Alaska summit shift from an early emphasis on immediate ceasefire toward a broad-based settlement-first posture, revealing a streak of pro-Putin inclination. President Trump positions himself as a great-power dealmaker, aiming to deliver what European diplomacy has failed to achieve: a package that re-anchors Russia in a manageable security structure while seeking to limit American commitments and unlocking potential economic linkages, including US investment in Ukraine’s rare-earth and other resources.
But at the heart of this plan lies its most incendiary demand of Ukraine, making territorial concessions: to cede territory in its Donbas region, including currently Kyiv-held areas. This not only appears closer to Russian war aims but also challenges the core Westphalian principle of sanctity of territorial sovereignty. For President Trump, territorial concessions seem a transactional pathway to end the war; for Kyiv, they represent an existential dismantling of their nation-state.
It also expects Ukraine to cut its armed forces by half, creating prospects of Finlandization of Ukraine: a neutered nation rendered permanently dependent and structurally incapable of resisting future Russian pressure tactics. Likewise, its proposed reduction of Ukraine’s long-range weapon capabilities further reinforces this strategic vulnerability, effectively insulating Russia from Ukraine’s deterrent capabilities while granting Moscow what it has sought militarily but failed to fully secure on the battlefield.
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Buffer zone for European security
For the future, the proposed plans to create an 800-mile buffer zone, potentially policed by Europeans, including British troops, constitute a profound shift in European security geography. Instead of NATO’s forward presence, it imagines a demilitarised continental corridor, separating Russian and Ukrainian forces under non-US supervision. This will be extraordinary for three reasons:
- It implicitly removes American military custodianship from the central theatre of European conflict management.
- It creates a pseudo-neutralised Ukraine, reducing its sovereignty over its volatile borders with Russia.
- It will cement a Russian sphere of influence while restricting NATO’s operational flexibility east of the Dnipro River.
In strategic studies terms, this resembles the Cold War-era Austrian State Treaty of 1955 but without Austria’s sovereign neutrality protections. In classical realist terms, it represents a forced redistribution of power: the strong dictate the terms, the weak absorb the constraints. Many European policymakers fear this effectively reverses NATO’s post-1991 eastward expansion, creating long-term vulnerabilities and undermining alliance cohesion.
More subtle — but equally transformative — are the provisions for a cultural and linguistic buffer. Its demand for recognising Russian as the second official language in Ukraine and granting official status to the Ukrainian arm of the Russian Orthodox Church will institutionalise Russia’s cultural footprint inside Ukraine. This cut directly into Ukraine’s nation-building project since 2014, which has emphasised linguistic sovereignty, cultural autonomy, and civic nationalism.
US-Russia geopolitical reset
Perhaps the most geopolitically consequential dimension is Trump’s attempt to anchor a US-Russia reset into this peace package. This includes potential restoration of diplomatic and economic ties with Russia and renegotiation of security arrangements in Europe, premised on reducing America’s long-term military liabilities while integrating Russia as a predictable — if still adversarial — actor.
Trump’s plan, therefore, reflects a belief that European security cannot be maintained without Russian participation, a notion rejected by most European governments. But such a geopolitical reset inside his peace plan also reveals how President Trump envisions building a post-liberal, multipolar Europe, shaped not by norms but by his strategic deal-making calculus.
Predictably, even in the face of pressures from the Trump administration and corruption scandals at home have weakened President Zelenskyy yet Ukrainians find this leaked Trump plan “absolutely unacceptable”. Kyiv argues this geopolitical reset freezes conflict along unfavourable lines, abandons the Ukrainian population under Russian control, and limits Ukraine’s ability to deter future Russian aggression.
European pushback has also underlined the need for Kyiv’s approval. For them, the buffer-zone-driven geopolitical reset premised on a rollback of NATO ambitions and the re-normalisation with Russia, amounts to a collapse of the post-Cold War European order. European scepticism underscores a deeper concern: that US unilateralism could reshape the continent without European consent.
Russian officials have shown muted optimism but responded with tactical ambiguity — playing down leaks while signalling interest in concessions favourable to their strategic aims. This ambiguity reflects a classic Kremlin strategy: wait for the U.S. to formalise the deal before staking out rigid positions.
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Few caveats and uncertainties
First, it is important to underline that this 28-point text remains undisclosed as of now. The reported details may represent only a negotiating draft or just a trial balloon, or some back-channel framework. Even in the best-case scenario, it will require legal vetting followed by the crafting of enforcement mechanisms. Who will be policing the buffer zone? How are violations to be examined and punished? What is the role for NATO, the EU, or the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)?
Second, the proposed 28-point peace plan of President Trump for the Ukraine war is undeniably bold. But it is also disruptive, sweeping, and intellectually incoherent even from a transactional realist perspective. It demands extraordinary concessions from Ukraine, restructures Europe’s security architecture around Russian preferences, and sidelines European allies. Far from merely freezing the war, it could redefine the future of European security architecture.
Finally, whether this constitutes strategic innovation or capitulation will depend on one’s theoretical lens. But going by President Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan, which continues to face Israeli military strikes on hapless Palestinians, replicating a similar enterprise where consensus-driven agreement and enforcement remain as yet work-in-progress, the plan risks becoming another unstable armistice, vulnerable to unilateral reinterpretation. What is undeniable is this: if enacted as it stands, then President Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine would mark the most significant geopolitical reordering of Europe since the end of the Cold War.
The author is a professor of diplomacy & disarmament, Centre for International Politics, Organization and Disarmament, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)