Pillar Four: How the EU and NATO Nations Should Defang the Russian 28-Point “Peace” Plan
- john raymond
- 2 minutes ago
- 6 min read
The Trump–Putin 28-point “peace” proposal is not a diplomatic curiosity. It is a first-mover attempt by a Russian-aligned axis to fix the narrative and the end-state of this war in writing. The leaked European counter-proposal, built on the same skeletal structure, is not inherently better or worse; it simply sits inside the architecture the Kremlin and President Trump tried to define first.
Under the Raymond Method, this is exactly the kind of moment Pillar Four—Operationalization—exists for. The enemy has laid down a stage set. The task is not to improvise lines inside their play. The task is to bring down the curtain.
To see that clearly, we have to walk quickly through the first three pillars—and then show why Pillar Four, usually the least obvious, is obvious now.
Pillars One to Three: What the enemy is doing
Pillar One: Regime Security Is the Prime Directive.
Every serious autocratic actor in this war—Putin, the siloviki system behind him, and the Trump apparatus aligned with Kremlin interests—acts first and foremost to preserve personal and regime survival. “Peace” is not about justice, deterrence, or European security. It is about freezing Russian gains, restoring Russia’s economy, and giving Putin a survivable future.
The original 28-point text reflects exactly that logic: secure territorial theft in practice, cap Ukrainian force, re-open sanctions valves, and invite Russia back into polite economic society under an American-branded “deal.”
Pillar Two: Asymmetric Warfare and Weaponised Narrative.
In asymmetric conflict, the decisive moves are often informational and procedural. A “peace plan” that encodes defeat for Ukraine is a weapon, not a compromise. It is designed to:
invert moral categories (turning Ukraine into the “obstructionist” and Russia into the “pragmatic” actor),
fracture the alliance by making different capitals argue over the details of surrender,
and offer Western publics the narcotic story that “both sides” have valid security concerns and that insisting on Ukrainian victory is extremist.
The Trump–Putin plan is classic asymmetric warfare: it promises peace while structurally rewarding aggression.
Pillar Three: The Byzantine Traitor-General.
No modern great-power crisis is purely external. There are always internal actors—Byzantine Traitor-Generals—who, knowingly or not, advance the enemy’s architecture from within.
When a U.S. political faction and a Kremlin-linked channel co-draft a “settlement” that locks in Russian gains and constrains Ukraine, we are not watching neutral diplomacy. We are watching the enemy’s desired end-state laundered through captured and compromised elites.
Pillars One through Three tell us what this 28-point structure is: a regime-security blueprint, weaponised as “peace,” funneled into Western systems by internal collaborators.
Pillar Four: Operationalization—What the good side should do
Pillar Four answers a different question: given that we are democracies, with all the “messiness” that implies, how should we fight back?
In abstract form:
Pillar Four – Operationalization: When an autocratic axis seizes the diplomatic initiative with a rigged first-mover “peace” plan, democratic allies should deliberately wield time, internal division, and procedural slowness as weapons. They should drag out, deflate, and ultimately refuse the hostile architecture—using their own systems as armor rather than pretending they can behave like streamlined autocracies.
Most of the time, this is subtle. In this case, it is not. Here, the operational prescription collapses into three clear verbs:
Delay. Deflect. Defeat.
If the EU and NATO governments fail this moment, it will not be because there was no good play on the board. It will be because of stupidity and ignorance—because they refused to see the clarity of Pillar Four.
Delay: Stop producing “finished plans”; produce talking points
The first mistake would be to treat either the Russian/Trump 28-point draft or the European counter-draft as something that must be turned into a final package for Ukraine to accept or reject.
The correct move is the opposite:
No more finished “plans.” European and NATO governments should stop issuing complete draft treaties that sit inside the Kremlin’s stage set.
Only talking points, principles, and non-papers. They should release principles, red lines, and discussion documents, always framed as provisional and subject to Ukrainian consent.
Delay in this context is not cowardice; it is a weapon. Time erodes the first-mover advantage. Time exposes the Kremlin-aligned architecture to journalists, lawyers, and publics. Time allows the Ukrainian military to continue degrading Russian capabilities through another winter. Time denies Putin and President Trump the photo-op of a rapid, decisive “deal.”
The instruction under Pillar Four is simple: refuse to convert text into treaty. Keep everything in the realm of talking points until the toxic skeleton of the 28-point structure has rotted away in public view.
Deflect: Undercut the process from the start
Second, democratic leaders must stop flattering these processes with false optimism. The Trump–Putin axis wants Western elites to treat this as a serious, promising “path to peace.” That is how the moral inversion works: once the process is taken seriously, Ukraine will be painted as the spoiler when it says no.
Pillar Four says: deflect that trap from the beginning.
Leak from day one that you expect the process to fail.
Tell your own press, on background, that any architecture not built with Ukraine as a co-author is unlikely to pass parliaments and publics.
Frame the exercise as an opportunity to “test Russian seriousness” rather than as a likely settlement.
By doing this, you hollow out the informational payload of the Russian plan. Instead of “this is a promising plan for peace,” the baseline expectation becomes “this is more theater, and we are going through the motions.”
Deflection here means: you aim the entire apparatus of expectation against the plan. You refuse to let it become the gravitational center of Western diplomacy. You say, in effect, “We will listen, we will talk, and we fully expect this to crash on the rocks of Ukrainian sovereignty and our own red lines.”
Defeat: Refuse to ratify either plan
Delay and deflection are not enough by themselves. Pillar Four’s third verb—Defeat—means there must be a clear end-state:
Ultimately, neither the Russian/Trump plan nor the derivative EU plan will be signed, endorsed, or underwritten by the EU or NATO, because neither respects Ukrainian statehood or treats Ukraine as a serious partner to peace.
That must be the destination.
Practically, this means:
No EU signature on any text that starts from the current line of contact and forbids Ukraine to liberate its own territory by force.
No NATO blessing for any settlement that encodes de facto recognition of annexations and caps Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.
No Western financing for a scheme that uses frozen Russian assets to reward the aggressor while forcing Ukraine to bless its own dismemberment.
The diplomatic language is easy to craft: “We cannot, as democracies, ratify a plan drafted without Ukraine that demands it trade away sovereign territory under duress. The fault lies not in Kyiv’s refusal to capitulate, but in the architecture of the proposals themselves.”
Defeat, in this sense, is the formal burial: both texts die not because of Ukrainian intransigence, but because they fail the minimum test of respect for Ukrainian statehood.
Using the pillars against Russia, while “doing what Trump wants”
When executed correctly, this strategy turns the entire Raymond Method back on the Russian-led axis.
Pillar One – Regime Security. The Trump–Putin plan is a regime-security instrument for Moscow. Delaying, deflecting, and defeating it prevents the enemy from locking in a survivable, legitimised end-state.
Pillar Two – Asymmetric Warfare. Russia weaponised narrative by branding a capitulation as “peace.” Democracies answer asymmetrically by weaponising their own procedures, media, and public skepticism to strip that narrative of power.
Pillar Three – Byzantine Traitor-General. The original plan relied on internal collaborators to carry the Kremlin’s architecture into Western policy. Under Pillar Four, EU and NATO leaders invert the logic: they pretend to sit in the Trump–Putin “peace camp” while, in truth, acting as traitor-generals to that camp—slow-walking, undermining, and finally killing the architecture from within.
This last point is crucial. Operationalization here does not look like open rebellion. It looks like choreographed discord:
Attending the meetings.
Nodding through the briefings.
Issuing cautious communiqués.
And then letting “inability to reach consensus,” “parliamentary concerns,” “constitutional questions,” and “Ukrainian objections” sink the process over time.
Outwardly, leaders appear to be “trying” to make the Trump–Putin peace architecture work. In substance, they are ensuring it never can.
The cost of failure
Because the prescription is so clear—Delay, Deflect, Defeat—failure here cannot be blamed on structural constraints or tragic necessity. If EU and NATO governments line up behind any dressed-up version of the 28-point script, it will not be because there was no alternative.
It will be because they refused to use the tools their own systems give them:
the ability to turn slowness into a weapon,
the ability to turn internal disagreement into a shield,
and the ability to turn democratic “sloppiness” into a veto on moral inversion.
Pillar Four, Operationalization, exists to prevent that failure. It says: when the enemy writes the script and calls it peace, your job is not to improvise better lines. Your job is to make sure the play never reaches opening night.