Trump is desperate to end Russia's long-running war with Ukraine. So far, Trump and his officials have tried to end the war through several meetings. With those meetings largely unsuccessful, it remains to be seen whether Trump will be able to end the war by going the Russian way.
Trump's efforts and Russia's deception
The US-backed 28-point peace plan to end the Russia-Ukraine war is based on documents provided by Moscow. The documents were submitted to the administration of US President Donald Trump in October by Russian officials, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The documents, which were informally handed over to Washington in October, set out Moscow's various conditions for ending the war, the sources said.
One condition was the handover of some territory in eastern Ukraine to Russia. Trump had met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House just before that. Reuters contacted the US State Department and the Russian and Ukrainian embassies in Washington for comment. However, there was no immediate comment.
However, Trump is optimistic about the plan. He wrote on social media that his special envoy Steve Witkoff would meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll to discuss the plan. However, it is still unclear why the Trump administration relied on Russian documents to draft its peace plan.
Sources say that after seeing the Russian conditions in the plan, some senior US officials, including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, said that the Ukrainians might not accept all of them. According to the source, after Russia submitted the documents to the US, Marco Rubio called Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. They discussed the documents there.
Marco Rubio also told reporters that he had received many documents informally during a meeting held in Geneva this week. Another point is that when the 28-point plan, or parts of it, was being prepared from the Russian documents, sources say, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump's envoy Witkoff and top Russian official Kirill Dmitriev were discussing it.
A handful of officials in the US State Department and the White House are also aware of these discussions. The Russian influence on Trump's plan became even clearer in a Bloomberg report on Tuesday. It said that Witkoff called Kremlin official Yuri Ushakov about the Trump-Putin talks. According to the call transcript, Ushakov and Witkoff hinted at a possible 20-point plan.
The plan was later expanded upon during Witkoff's and Jared Kushner's discussions with Dmitriev. Like many US administration officials, Ukraine's allies in Europe were unprepared for the 28-point peace plan. This led to extensive diplomatic activity. Washington-Kiev talks began in Geneva on Sunday. According to ABC News, nine points were dropped from the 28-point plan after those talks.
Earlier on Saturday, a group of senators from both the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States said that Rubio had referred to the 28-point plan as a Russian “wish list” rather than a US proposal. However, the White House and the US State Department have strongly denied that Rubio made such a statement.
Later on Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said that they supported the revised plan, which was drawn up after the latest talks, as a framework for a peace agreement. However, Zelensky wants to reach an understanding with Trump through a meeting on the most sensitive issue of the agreement – the cession of Ukrainian territory to Russia.
The current form of Trump’s plan, as it has emerged after the talks in Geneva, “requires a comprehensive review,” Kremlin official Ushakov said on Wednesday. He also said that the US and Russia did not discuss the revised plan this week in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
According to Ushakov, representatives of Russian intelligence agencies in Abu Dhabi met with Ukrainian representatives. There, they discussed "some very sensitive issues." Among them was the prisoner exchange issue.
Russian officials in Abu Dhabi also met with US Army Secretary Driscoll. Later, Ushakov told Russian television journalist Pavel Zarubin that the revised plan had been sent to Russia. However, it had not yet been discussed. This plan requires significant review and discussion. Some aspects of the plan have been taken positively. However, many others will need to be discussed among experts.
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