Moral Inversion: Towards Understanding the Operative Vocabulary of the Ukraine War
- john raymond
- 5 minutes ago
- 6 min read
The 28-point “peace plan” now being pushed at Ukraine is not a mistake, not naïve, and not merely amateurish. It is the visible tip of a long project: to invert the moral frame of the war so that Ukraine, not Russia, is blamed for the continued killing, letting Trump finally abandon Ukraine.
For years, Trump and Putin have been working toward this exact moment. Every “I can end it in 24 hours,” every complaint that Ukraine “could have made a deal,” every flirtation with land swaps and “both sides” concessions has been about one thing: preparing Western audiences to believe that if Ukraine refuses a Russian-written capitulation, Ukraine is the problem, not the regime that invaded.
This is the core concept of moral inversion. Once you see it, the Alaska summit, the land-swap rhetoric, and the current ultimatum are not separate episodes; they are chapters in the same script.
Moral inversion as an operating system
Moral inversion is not a slogan. It is an operating system for information warfare.
In a normal moral frame, the aggressor is expected to stop aggression and go home. Under inversion, the victim is pressured to surrender, and refusal is presented as stubbornness, extremism, or a lust for war. The aggressor becomes the pragmatic adult in the room; the victim becomes the obstacle to peace.
Trump’s rhetoric has been systematically aligned with that inversion.
He has repeatedly claimed he could end the war “within 24 hours” if only he sat down with Putin and Zelensky, implying that the problem is not Russian objectives but the failure of leaders—especially Zelensky—to be “reasonable.”
He has blamed Ukraine for not preventing the invasion, saying Kyiv “could have made a deal” and “should never have started it,” explicitly shifting causal blame from the invader to the invaded.
He has accused Zelensky of “prolonging the killing field” by refusing to cede Crimea—openly asserting that the killing continues not because Russia is still on Ukrainian soil, but because Ukraine will not surrender Ukrainian land.
This is the vocabulary of inversion: “deal,” “peace,” “end the killing,” but always on the condition that the victim accepts the aggressor’s terms. The latest plan simply writes that vocabulary into a legal-looking document.
The Alaska summit as the rehearsal
The Alaska summit in August 2025 was not a failed peace initiative; it was one more rehearsal for the current gambit.
Trump flew Putin to U.S. soil, met him at Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson, and left with no ceasefire, no withdrawal, and no concessions from Russia—only vague talk of an “understanding,” while Ukraine was pointedly excluded from the talks.
From the Kremlin side, Kirill Dmitriev later stated that the new ceasefire concept would be built on “principles” agreed by Trump and Putin in Alaska and then turned into a written proposal. Those principles are now recognizable in the 28-point text: territorial concessions, limitations on Ukraine’s army, permanent NATO exclusion, and a path to sanctions relief and G8 re-entry for Russia.
Even before Alaska, Trump framed his diplomacy in the inversion register. He floated “land swaps,” implying that Ukraine should trade away territory for peace, while Putin kept maximalist aims. After Alaska, the Kremlin’s envoys spoke openly of rebuilding U.S.–Russia relations and joint mega-projects like the “Putin-Trump tunnel” as symbolic of a new partnership.
In other words: Alaska was not about forcing Putin to accept defeat; it was about establishing a shared narrative between Trump and Putin that Russia’s “security concerns” must be met through Ukrainian concessions, and then normal relations can be restored.
The current plan is that understanding, formalized.
The 28-point text as a moral trap, not a diplomatic offer
On paper, the plan pretends to “confirm” Ukrainian sovereignty and offer “reliable security guarantees.” In substance, it demands that Ukraine:
Accept Russia’s control over Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk as de facto Russian.
Freeze the front along current lines in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
Limit its army and permanently renounce NATO membership.
Accept Russia’s reintegration into the G8 and sanctions relief.
At the same time, it promises Russia long-term economic cooperation, joint ventures in energy and resources, and a path back into the Western economic system—exactly the regime-security prize Putin has always sought.
Putin’s response has been precise: he calls the proposal a possible “basis” for a settlement, signaling that it broadly aligns with Kremlin aims. That is the tell. The content tracks Moscow’s maximalist demands; the remaining “negotiation” is about timing and cosmetics.
The real weapon, however, is not any individual clause. It is the structure: a purely Russia text fronted by Trump, handed to Ukraine with a deadline and an ultimatum that if Kyiv refuses, U.S. support will collapse. Trump’s public message is that if Zelensky will not sign, he can “fight his little heart out” without American help.
That is the moral trap. Ukraine must say no to political suicide. The refusal is then fed back into the information space as proof that Zelensky “prolongs the killing field” and blocks peace.
The long preparation of Western audiences
This is why the fixation on whether the text is “amateurish” misses the point. Yes, analysts like William Spaniel can laugh at the drafting, the legal sloppiness, the ignorance of NATO procedure, and the internal contradictions. None of that matters to the operation.
The throughline is not bureaucratic competence; it is audience conditioning.
Over years, Western publics have been exposed to a steady sequence of propositions:
The war is tragic but fundamentally a “quarrel” that could be ended quickly.
Trump personally could end it in 24 hours; therefore, if it continues, others are to blame.
Ukraine “could have made a deal” and “should never have started it”; therefore, Ukraine bears at least partial responsibility for the current slaughter.
Zelensky is “prolonging the killing field” by refusing to give up land Russia claims; therefore, the obstacle to peace is Ukrainian insistence on sovereignty, not Russian insistence on conquest.
Layer on that the Alaska optics—Putin on U.S. soil, no Ukrainian seat at the table, no Russian concessions, talk of “understandings” and economic cooperation—and the stage was set for a final act in which any “peace” that preserves Ukrainian sovereignty is treated as unrealistic, while a Russian-dictated freeze is presented as common sense.
When the 28-point plan arrived, much of the heavy lifting was already been done. The text does not need to be convincing in a legal sense; it needs to be sufficient for people who have already internalized the inversion to say, “Well, at least someone is trying. If Ukraine refuses, maybe they don’t really want peace.”
Vocabulary as a weapon
Part of understanding this war is understanding how certain words have been repurposed.
“Peace” now often means: codified surrender dressed up as compromise.
“Deal” means: a settlement structured to secure Putin’s regime and Russia’s gains, with costs loaded onto Ukraine and future Europe.
“Land swap” is the euphemism for rewarding aggression: a one-way transfer of Ukrainian territory, described as mutual adjustment.
“Security guarantees” are invoked repeatedly, but without credible enforcement. They function as rhetorical anesthetic to make the underlying capitulation easier to swallow.
“Realism” is used by a certain class of commentator to mean acceptance of Russian conquest as unchangeable, not serious engagement with Russian weaknesses or Ukrainian agency.
“Fatigue” is invoked to suggest that Western publics are simply tired and that therefore Ukraine must yield. In practice, this is an argument that the victim’s rights should be contingent on the aggressor’s ability to outlast our attention span.
Each of these terms is part of the moral inversion toolkit. The Alaska summit and the current plan are where this vocabulary is operationalized into concrete demands.
The traitor-general lens
Once the traitor-general frame is applied, the logic is straightforward.
From Putin’s regime-security perspective, the ideal outcome is a Ukraine that is amputated, neutralized, economically dependent, and politically blamed if the war continues. From Trump’s perspective, his role is to deliver that outcome by:
Normalizing Russian demands in Western discourse (Alaska, land swaps, “both sides” rhetoric).
Isolating Ukraine from direct negotiations, then presenting Kyiv with finished texts.
Posing as the indispensable peacemaker so that any Ukrainian refusal can be spun as ingratitude and extremism.
Seen through that lens, the 28-point plan is not an aberration; it is the crystallization of a months-long strategy.
What serious observers must now do
The key step now is interpretive discipline.
First, moral inversion must be treated as a settled feature of the information environment, not as a hypothesis to be re-litigated each news cycle. Trump and Putin have provided abundant evidence in their own words and actions.
Second, any analysis of this or future “plans” must begin from content, not labeling. If the document requires Ukraine to surrender territory, cap its own defense, abandon alliances, amnesty its attackers, and rehabilitate Russia’s status, then it is a surrender bill.
Third, commentators who still insist on treating Trump as an erratic but sincere seeker of peace are part of the problem. They are the transmission belt by which moral inversion enters mainstream discourse. Even when they recognize that this specific plan is “unworkable,” if they refuse to see the pattern, they clear the path for the next iteration.
Finally, Ukraine and Europe must speak in their own operative vocabulary: one where peace is defined as the cessation of aggression and the restoration of sovereignty, not the victim’s submission to coercion.
The 28-point text is not the story. It is just the latest prop. The story is the attempt to recast a colonial war of annihilation as a negotiation in which the victim is at fault for refusing to sign its own defeat.
That is the moral inversion that has been under construction from the first “I could end it in 24 hours” to Alaska to this week’s ultimatum.
Calling it by its proper name is but the beginning of honest analysis.