Trump presents Ukraine with a ‘very tough choice’https://en.majalla.com/node/328426/politics/trump-presents-ukraine-%E2%80%98very-tough-choice%E2%80%99
Zelensky said he’s being asked to decide between Ukraine losing its dignity or losing a key partner
AFP
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky (L) looks on during a meeting with US Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll in Kyiv, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 20 November 2025.
Ukraine faces a difficult decision in the days ahead as the Trump administration pushes the country to embrace a 28-point peace plan that would see it make major concessions to Russia—including relinquishing control of territory that Russian forces don’t currently occupy.
“Right now, Ukraine is under some of the heaviest pressure yet,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday in an address to his nation. “Right now, Ukraine may find itself facing a very tough choice. Either the loss of our dignity or the risk of losing a key partner. Either the difficult 28 points, or an extremely hard winter—the hardest yet—and the dangers that follow,” he said.
The Trump administration has reportedly warned that Ukraine could lose US intelligence and military assistance if Zelensky doesn’t accept the peace proposal, which would likely worsen Ukraine’s battlefield position. President Donald Trump has said he wants Kyiv to agree to the deal by Thanksgiving Day, giving Ukraine little time to negotiate.
Still, it remains unclear how flexible the United States, Ukraine, Russia, and European Union are, especially amid seeming contradictions within US diplomatic efforts.
The Trump administration’s 28-point peace proposal would give Russia much of what it has sought, including limits on Ukraine’s military size, political concessions by Ukraine, and “de facto” US recognition of Russian control over Crimea and the Donbas—the eastern Ukrainian region made up of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts—including territory that is still under Ukrainian control.
The plan, which was hashed out in late October by US envoy Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian envoy and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, was first reported on by Axios last week.
Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio, and Daniel Driscoll hold closed-door talks with Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak (not pictured) on ending Russia's war in Ukraine, in Geneva on 23 November 2025.
A separate, second document reportedly said that the United States would offer Ukraine a security guarantee modelled on NATO’s Article 5 collective defence mechanism. If Russia attacked Ukraine, the United States would be obligated to respond, including potentially with “armed force.”
But since last week's 28-point peace plan surfaced it appears Ukraine's European allies produced an amended version of the plan after rejecting parts which favoured Russia's war aims.
On Monday, Zelensky welcomed the proposed changes, saying, "Now the list of necessary steps to end the war can become doable..." Zelensky said on Telegram. "Many correct elements have been incorporated into this framework."
For its part, a Kremlin official rejected the amendments on Monday as "completely unconstructive" and, later, in the early hours of Tuesday, Kyiv's mayor Vitali Klitschko said a wave of Russian missile and drone attacks hit an apartment building in the capital and disrupted electricity and water supplies.
The 28-point peace plan and its favourable terms for Russia indicate that Trump's approach to diplomacy remains volatile and difficult to predict
European allies believe that Kyiv's acceptance of its terms would weaken Ukraine's ability to defend itself against further Russian aggression, as well as hand over populated cities. European Union members have been firm in support of Ukraine, with top EU diplomat Kaja Kallas saying Thursday that "the pressure should be on the aggressor."
Moscow has more reasons to favour the document, with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday saying that it could be "the basis for a final peace settlement." Still, with Russia having suffered more than 1 million casualties in the war, the offer of any security guarantees to Ukraine may be unacceptable to the Kremlin.
The US Congress's role in the deal is also unclear. Though the plan stipulates that it would be "legally binding," it's not clear if this means that any eventual agreement would be akin to a ratified treaty.
If a deal is reached and it amounts to little more than Trump offering his signature or issuing an executive order that could easily be undone by a future US president, then any security guarantees offered to Ukraine would carry little weight. Putin has a history of violating past agreements with Ukraine, so Kyiv is likely to desire security guarantees from Washington with a firmer legal basis.
The plan appeared to catch both Ukraine and its European allies by surprise, and it prompted a diplomatic scramble that's seen Zelensky hold talks with top officials on both sides of the Atlantic in recent days. Kallas on Thursday said Europe had not been informed of the effort. The White House also did not inform key US lawmakers, but it responded to criticisms that the plan favoured Russia.
"The idea that the United States of America is not engaging with both sides equally in this war to bring it to an end is a complete and total fallacy," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Monday.
Yet despite the alarm that the peace plan was met with in some European capitals, Zelensky said that he would continue to "work calmly" with the United States on the plan.
Top US military officials, including US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, were in Kyiv last week as part of the Trump administration's effort to revive the peace process, which has largely been stalled since Trump and Putin's August summit in Alaska.
Driscoll spoke with a group of European ambassadors in Kyiv on Friday, where he sent the message that "things will only get worse in the long term" for Ukraine, said a European diplomat who was briefed on the meeting. The diplomat spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak on the record.
Driscoll, along with US Vice President JD Vance, also met with Zelensky on Friday. "We agreed to work together with the US and Europe at the level of national security advisors to make the path to peace truly doable," Zelensky said in a post on X after their meeting.
We spoke for almost an hour with U.S. @VP JD Vance and @SecArmy Dan Driscoll. We managed to cover a lot of details of the American side's proposals for ending the war, and we're working to make the path forward dignified and truly effective for achieving a lasting peace. I'm... pic.twitter.com/h3uVlnxv2H
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) November 21, 2025
"Ukraine has always respected and continues to respect US President Donald Trump's desire to put an end to the bloodshed, and we view every realistic proposal positively. We agreed to maintain constant contact, and our teams are ready to work 24/7," he continued.
The Trump administration's pressure comes at a tough moment for Zelensky on both a domestic political level and in terms of developments on the battlefield. Zelensky is dealing with a corruption scandal while Russia is simultaneously considered to be on the verge of seizing the city of Pokrovsk—which, if captured, would mark the most significant victory for Russian forces since the seizure of Avdiivka in early 2024.
The pressure Zelensky is facing on multiple fronts is seemingly a large part of the reason the Trump administration chose this moment to drop the new plan and launch a full-court press approach, believing that the Ukrainian leader would have little choice but to embrace what's being offered.
The reported threat to possibly cut off US support appears to be yet another lever the Trump administration is using to push Zelensky. Should the United States withdraw intelligence support from Ukraine, it would have "battlefield implications," said a second European official, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the press.
Still, US military support for Ukraine is not the game-changer it was in 2022, when US shipments of Javelin anti-tank missiles and other weapons helped Kyiv blunt Russia's offensive. Europe has stepped up arms production for Ukraine since the start of the war, with the total value of European weapons sent to Ukraine now exceeding the value of US arms sent, according to the Kiel Institute, a think tank based in Germany. Ukraine's own production has also accelerated; as of early 2024, the country assembled over 90% of its drones domestically.
A Ukrainian soldier loads dummy grenades onto a drone for target practice, as members of the Ukrainian National Guard prepare for an expected spring counter-offensive against Russian invasion forces in the region of Dnipro, Ukraine.
A shutoff of US intelligence could prove more serious. Ukraine lost ground when a similar intelligence shutoff occurred in March. Still, since then, European nations have stepped up efforts to get access to key intelligence sources, like satellites, that the United States previously supplied to Ukraine.
Ukraine also recently announced plans to import US natural gas to cover its cold winter months, and relies on the purchase of US air defence missiles to protect Ukrainian energy infrastructure and cities.
On the other hand, if Zelensky were to refuse to bend to US pressure, he could see an upswing in public approval similar to Ukrainian domestic society's reaction to the fraught February Oval Office meeting between Zelensky and Trump.
Trump, who has been impatient for a Ukraine-Russia peace deal since returning to Washington for a second term, has fluctuated in his approach to the process in the time since that February meeting and at various points has appeared to lose patience with Moscow as Russia continues to pummel Ukraine with airstrikes and push for more territory.
Conversely, since a positive meeting in Rome in April and a subsequent sit-down at the NATO summit in The Hague in June, Trump's relationship with Zelensky appeared to be improving. At the United Nations General Assembly in late September, Zelensky suggested that Trump had undergone a "big shift" and no longer trusted Putin. But the 28-point peace plan and its favourable terms for Russia are indicative of the myriad ways in which Trump's approach to diplomacy remains volatile and difficult to predict.
