U.S. unveils a peace plan for Ukraine amid Zelensky’s corruption scandal. Key concessions included.
The White House presented a 28-point peace plan to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday that includes new elements, including a robust, NATO-like security guarantee for Kyiv that Zelensky said is vital to any peace deal.
The plan also demands concessions from Ukraine, including giving Russia territory it has not conquered militarily. The deal would require Ukraine to shrink the size of its military from its current 850,000 to 600,000, enshrine in its constitution that it will not seek to join NATO, and give « de facto recognition » of Russia’s conquest of « Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk, as well as of the areas of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia it has illegally seized, with the conflict in these regions frozen on the current front line », according to the .
The White House is pressuring Ukraine to sign the deal before Thanksgiving or lose U.S. support. Currently, although the U.S. doesn’t sell arms to Ukraine directly; we arrange deals with EU nations to sell Ukraine U.S. weapons. The States also give Ukraine vital intelligence support that many analysts believe it could not do without. A cut off of that intelligence sharing would complicate the defense of Ukraine enormously.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, told reporters, “We have to understand that in this war, there is one aggressor and one victim, and we haven’t heard of any concessions on the Russian side,” she told reporters.
The most intriguing part of the plan is the « security guarantee » that Zelensky demanded as part of any peace agreement with Russia.
The 28-point plan U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll presented to Zelensky on Thursday, which was also obtained by Axios, says simply that « Ukraine will receive reliable security guarantees.
