A U.S.-led peace plan that mirrors several key Russian demands has sent ripples across Europe, with leaders voicing concerns that it could leave Ukraine vulnerable and calling for changes to the proposals.
European leaders and key allies met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in South Africa, and said in a joint statement that the plan requires additional work, adding that they are “concerned by the proposed limitations on Ukraine’s armed forces, which would leave Ukraine vulnerable to future attack.”
The statement is signed by leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain and Norway, as well as the E.U. Commission, the E.U. Council. Japan and Canada’s leaders also signed onto the statement, which warns that “borders must not be changed by force.”
President Donald Trump has set Thanksgiving as the deadline for Ukraine to agree to the 28-point framework, which suggests that Russia could be granted more territory than it holds, limits placed on Ukraine’s army, and Kyiv prevented from ever joining NATO — Moscow’s long-sought demands.
The U.S. proposals do include a security guarantee modeled on NATO’s Article 5, which would commit the U.S. and European allies to treat a future attack on Ukraine as an attack on the entire trans-Atlantic community, according to a U.S. official, though there are few specifics on what that would entail.
Top Ukrainian and U.S. officials will meet in Switzerland to discuss “possible parameters of a future peace,” Rustem Umerov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, wrote on Telegram Saturday. Separately, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office said Saturday that the delegation has been confirmed for the talks, which “will take place in the coming days.”
The White House has described the plan as “the best win-win scenario, where both parties gain more than they must give,” saying the proposals were crafted with input from Russia and Ukraine.
However, analysts say the plan could amount to a dangerous capitulation for Ukraine, which has previously rejected plans that would require recognizing Russia’s illegal annexations of the entire eastern Donetsk region and Crimea.
“Even if parts of this plan were to be shoved down Ukraine’s throat, it would be the end of Ukraine as we know it. It’s a real capitulation,” Michael Bociurkiw, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, who was in Johannesburg, told NBC News by phone.
The U.S. was facilitating a “potentially disastrous surrender for Ukraine,” Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, said.
“And now we will see yet another panicked scramble by European leaders to head off an outcome that would be disastrous for their own security,” he said, adding that the European response towards “repeated disastrous peace plans has been in words, not action.”
“There should be nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” Ursula Von der Leyen, the European Commission President, said Friday in a post on X, adding European leaders will also meet in Angola next week.
Ukraine must have a “decisive voice in peace talks,” Polish President Karol Nawrocki said late Friday on X. “The price of peace cannot in any way be the achievement of strategic goals by the aggressor, and the aggressor was and remains the Russian Federation,” he added.
As European leaders mulled over the plan on the G20 summit’s sidelines, notably absent was Trump, who is boycotting the event over his unfounded claims that the country’s white minority is subject to hate crimes and land grabs.
While Trump initially said Vice President JD Vance would attend, he later said there would be no U.S. delegation taking part. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has an International Criminal Court warrant calling for his arrest, is also not attending.
How much Europe will actually be able to influence the plan without U.S. involvement remains an open question, and one with implications for both Ukraine’s borders and peace for the broader continent.
“They can’t influence this,” said Bociurkiw. “It makes NATO and Europe look weak, and Putin will go on and on to cause more disruptions,” he said.
“It’s like a speed train and you have Putin and Trump on it, and then you have Zelenskyy on the departure platform and Europe stuck at the check-in counter,” he added.
Giles said the military aspects of the peace plan leave Ukraine effectively defenseless against a future Russian attack.
“And since Ukraine forms the front line of the defense of Europe, this is a potentially disastrous outcome for the continent as a whole,” Giles said.
Lawmakers in Ukraine aren’t particularly happy with the plan either, with Victoria Podgorna from Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy’s political party saying it was giving Russia “amnesty for launching a brutal war.”
Zelenskyy said Friday he had spoken with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his counterparts in Germany and France, adding that he would also talk to Washington to ensure Kyiv’s “principled stances are taken into account.”
“Ukraine may now face a very difficult choice, either losing its dignity or the risk of losing a key partner, either the difficult 28 points, or a very difficult winter,” Zelenskyy said, warning his country of a “very difficult, eventful” week ahead.
His warning also came as Ukraine suffers setbacks on the battlefield and Zelenskyy tries to contain the fallout of a $100 million corruption scandal implicating his top officials.
On Saturday, the Russian defense ministry said it had captured two additional villages in eastern Ukraine, one in the Donetsk and another in Zaporizhzhia.
Russia’s gains, both on the battlefield and in the proposed plan, have drawn a positive response from the Kremlin, where Putin has said it could “form the basis of a final peace settlement,” though adding it was not “substantively” discussed with Russia.
Meanwhile, two people were killed in Russia’s southern city of Syzran in a Ukrainian strike on energy facilities, the regional governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev said Saturday on Russia’s state-backed Max messenger app.
