On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin spoke on the phone for an hour and a half. It was a conversation that Sergei Naryshkin, the chief of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service would later describe as “deep and meaningful.” The same day, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth briefed NATO partners on the cornerstones of the US’ new Ukraine policy.
This come on the heels of a leak by the Ukrainian online news outlet strana.today, that last week published the details of what it claimed was a US “100-day peace plan” for Ukraine. The plan has not been officially confirmed.
But how does Trump’s administration envisage peace? Here’s an overview.
Territorial concessions to Russia?
If the leaked information from strana.today is to be believed, a ceasefire in Ukraine should be in place by April 20. It will freeze the war along the frontline in eastern Ukraine, but require the complete withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the Russian region of Kursk.
The plan apparently also forsees forcing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to recognize Russian sovereignty over Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories. So far, Zelenskyy has rejected this demand.
However, on Wednesday, at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at NATO headquarters, Hegseth suggested that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders, before Russia illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula, was an “unrealistic objective” that would only “prolong the war and cause more suffering.”
So, it is quite probable that the US will call on Ukraine to formally recognize the territories it has lost to Russia.
Closing the door on NATO membership?
Hegseth has also laid out that any lasting peace had to include “robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again.”
He said that these should be supported by “capable European and non-European troops.” According to strana.today, these troops would monitor a demilitarized buffer zone along the frozen frontline after a ceasefire has been reached.
The Trump administration does not see US troops on Ukrainian soil. Hegseth also said that the US did not “believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement” and suggested that if troops were “deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as a part of a non-NATO mission.” He did not elaborate on what this might look like.
If the plan turns out to be official, Ukraine could be looking at strict neutrality in the future.
Trump has ‘genuine interest’ in peace
After Donald Trump’s phone call with his Russian counterpart on Wednesday evening, he expressed his willingness to engage in peace negotiations. Zelenskyy, with whom the US president spoke on the phone afterwards, said that they had had “very substantive negotiations” and expressed his gratitude for the US president’s “genuine interest” in “how we can work together to bring real peace closer.” He said that it was important that any agreement would “strengthen” the security of Ukraine.
According to the leaked details on strana.today, the first direct talks between Putin and Zelenskyy would take place around March 1. Trump also wants to set up an international peace conference in the near future, and arrange for a peace plan to be mediated by prominent global powers. The details would then have been drawn up by May 9.
After his phone call with Putin, Trump told reporters that the two would visit each other, and suggested they meet in Saudi Arabia for talks.
US marginalizes EU
The US’ NATO partners seem to have been taken completely by surprise by Trump’s latest behavior. They had hoped that the details of his peace plan would be revealed and discussed at the Munich Security Conference, which begins on Friday. But Trump apparently did not coordinate his phone call with Putin with any of his European allies.
In the European Union, as well as in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, there is growing concern that future negotiations about a lasting peace plan for Ukraine will bypass the EU and Ukraine entirely. According to strana.today, the EU will be asked to cover a large part of the reconstruction costs, amounting to almost $500 billion (€480 billion) but it is unclear how much political say it will have in the matter.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said that Europe should not be forced to “sit at the kid’s table.” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock also warned against decisions being made “over Ukraine’s head.”
Experts criticize US peace plans
Many Western and Ukrainian security experts are critical of the leaked plans, and the US public stance, both of which would mean abandoning a number of positions — most of which, until recently, were thought to be Western consensus — in favor of Russia.
The German military expert Carlo Masala told the German Bild daily that Putin would effectively have “won this war” because he had “succeeded in getting the [US] to withdraw from this conflict.”
Former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev, who lives in exile and is a vocal critic of Putin, told the German TV news channel ntv that Trump wanted “to end the war quickly by giving Putin what he wants.” He added that the US president and his closest allies “simply have no idea about Putin.”
The date May 9, leaked by strana.today as the deadline for concluding a peace plan is also significant. In Russia, it is the day that commemorates the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany in 1945.
This article was originally published in German.
