Looked at coldly, Trump’s 28-point Russia–Ukraine “peace plan” reads less like a diplomatic proposal and more like a legal instrument to formalise a Ukrainian defeat and rescue a structurally weakening Russia from the long-term costs of its own choices. It is framed as a blueprint to stop the bloodshed, restore stability and let the world “move on,” but the distribution of obligations and benefits is strikingly one-sided. Ukraine is asked to surrender territory, constrain its sovereignty and accept deep internal changes; Russia is essentially asked to sign promises not to repeat what it has already done, with no serious enforcement attached. For a war that began as naked aggression, the aggressor walks away with land, status and economic relief, while the victim is told to make “realistic” concessions in the name of peace. That is the core asymmetry baked into the text and the reason it is widely read as capitulation disguised as settlement.
At the level of concrete provisions, the pattern is quite clear. Ukraine is expected to cede Crimea outright, accept full Russian control over the so-called “people’s republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk, and swallow a frozen front line in other occupied regions that effectively rewards the current territorial faits accomplis. It is asked to renounce NATO membership permanently, cap the size of its armed forces around a fixed ceiling, and accept restrictions on foreign forces and infrastructure on its territory. On top of that come domestic concessions: recognition of Russian as a second official language, relaxation of restrictions on the Russian Orthodox Church, broad amnesty arrangements and accelerated elections under externally defined conditions, which are widely understood as a mechanism to replace the current leadership with someone more acceptable to Moscow and Washington alike. Russia, by contrast, is not compelled to disgorge any territory, dismantle any key military infrastructure, pay any serious reparations or submit to inspection regimes that would meaningfully reduce its ability to rearm. Its “concessions” are mostly declarative: promises not to invade, to respect borders, to sign non-aggression pacts and to accept vaguely defined “security guarantees” for Ukraine that contain no automatic triggers or enforcement mechanisms. In negotiation theory terms, one side gives up hard assets and binding options; the other gives up little more than reputational capital it has already burned.
This imbalance is precisely why the plan is such a boon for Russia at this particular moment in its historical trajectory. Short-term macro numbers can make Moscow look more resilient than it actually is: war spending has pumped up GDP, defence factories run at full tilt, and energy exports have been partially re-routed through grey networks. But structurally, the Russian economy is being hollowed out. Sanctions have cut it off from key technologies and capital; the central bank is stuck juggling inflation, capital flight and fiscal strain; the budget is increasingly dependent on volatile hydrocarbons and ad hoc levies on business. At the same time, demographic decline is accelerating: low fertility, excess mortality, war casualties and skilled emigration are shrinking the very cohorts needed to sustain growth and military power. Under any sober long-term projection, Russia’s capacity to wage a high-intensity, high-tech conflict is not improving over the next decade; it is degrading. Time, in other words, is not on Moscow’s side. A settlement that locks in present gains, secures sanctions relief and readmission into elite clubs like the G8 is therefore enormously valuable: it converts a temporary coercive advantage, bought at extreme cost, into durable geopolitical winnings before the underlying economic and demographic rot fully shows.
Seen from Kyiv and from European capitals, this is exactly what makes the proposal so toxic. It does not leverage Russia’s structural weakness to extract real concessions or to build a robust security architecture; instead, it bails Russia out just when a longer war of attrition would begin to reveal the limits of its model. Ukraine is asked to accept a permanently truncated sovereignty without credible guarantees that the nightmare will not resume. The so-called “security guarantees” are not backed by treaty-level mutual defence commitments, stationed forces, automatic sanctions or peacekeeping deployments; they are political promises sitting on the shifting sands of Western domestic politics. The plan also explicitly rules out NATO membership, which is the only proven hard shield in Europe against renewed aggression by a nuclear-armed neighbour. The net effect is a Ukraine stripped of its most effective future deterrent, nudged into internal political re-engineering under pressure, and left facing an adversary that has just seen its strategy validated and its economy slowly re-opened. That is not security; that is a managed vulnerability.
For Europe, the signal is corrosive on several levels. Normatively, it tells every actor on the continent that borders can indeed be changed by force if one is sufficiently determined, nuclear-armed and patient. The entire post-Cold War settlement was based on the idea that the use of force to annex territory inside Europe was off limits. By blessing the outcome of Russia’s invasion through an American-branded “peace deal,” the West would be rewriting that informal contract. Strategically, the plan shifts risk from Washington onto Europe. The United States gets to cut aid, claim a diplomatic win and pivot attention elsewhere, especially towards competition with China and domestic priorities. Europe, by contrast, is left living next to a Russia that has tasted success and a Ukraine that is insecure, resentful and only partially integrated into Western structures. Over time, this increases the probability of renewed conflict, grey-zone coercion, energy blackmail and political interference. What is sold as a stabilisation could instead become the starting point for a more unstable, more nervous European order, where every small crisis carries the shadow of unfinished business in Ukraine.
Inside Ukraine itself, the domestic political economy of accepting such a deal would be explosive. Millions of citizens have fought, suffered and lost relatives in a war explicitly framed as resistance to occupation and national erasure. Asking them to accept formal abandonment of occupied territories, sweeping amnesties for those who committed atrocities, and externally brokered compromises on language and church is not a pathway to reconciliation; it is an invitation to profound disillusionment and fragmentation. Elections held under those conditions, especially with Western aid implicitly conditioned on “pragmatism,” are unlikely to generate a strong, legitimate mandate. The result risks being a dangerously disoriented polity: too constrained militarily to defend itself confidently, too traumatised to accept the new facts as normal, and too divided to present a coherent front. States configured like this often become arenas for ongoing proxy contests and internal radicalisation rather than pillars of regional stability.
From a broader geopolitical-economic perspective, the Trump plan teaches all the wrong lessons to other actors. It shows that if you are large enough, nuclear-armed and willing to endure sanctions, you can launch a war of conquest, absorb enormous human and economic costs, and still end up with improved territorial depth and restored economic access if you hold out until Western unity frays. Countries with revisionist agendas will study this carefully. It complicates deterrence in East Asia, where Beijing is already weighing costs and benefits of coercive strategies in the Taiwan Strait. It affects calculations in places like the South China Sea, the Caucasus and the Balkans, where local leaders track very closely whether the “rules-based order” actually punishes land grabs or eventually accommodates them. Once you embed the idea that Western red lines can be negotiated away when domestic fatigue sets in, you make the global environment harsher, not safer.
And then there is the raw moral and symbolic dimension, which can be best described in the language of a “spit” in Europe’s face. For a decade, European leaders have told their citizens that supporting Ukraine is not only an act of solidarity but a defence of their own security and values. They have sold higher energy prices, budgetary strain and refugee inflows as the necessary price of standing up to naked aggression. To now pivot to an arrangement that rewards that aggression, restores much of Russia’s status and leaves Ukraine effectively exposed would undermine not just foreign policy credibility but domestic social trust. Populations are not stupid; they will see the dissonance between the rhetoric of “never again” and the reality of letting a war of conquest crystallise into accepted borders. That cynicism is fertile ground for extremists who argue that Western promises are empty and that only raw power matters.
So if we step back from all the noise, the logic chain looks depressingly simple. Russia, with a broken growth model and worsening demographics, has a shrinking window in which it can still project hard power aggressively. Its war against Ukraine is expensive and risky, but it has produced tangible territorial gains. A settlement that locks those in and dismantles much of the sanctions regime turns a reckless gamble into a strategic win and buys Moscow breathing space before its structural weaknesses really bite. Ukraine is forced to trade permanent vulnerability and territorial loss for a peace that can be revoked by Russian decision alone. Europe is saddled with higher long-term security risk and a degraded security order. The U.S. secures a short-term political “win” and resource savings while exporting future instability to its allies. Calling such a package a “peace plan” does not change its underlying nature. It is, functionally, a codified capitulation for Ukraine, a lifeline for a failing Russian system and a deeply costly precedent for Europe’s future.
