Trump’s Ukraine ‘Peace’ Plan Proves He’s Working for Russian Interests
- john raymond
- 2 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Trump and Rubio are still trying to sell a “peace plan” that everyone can see is a Russian wish list. That persistence is the evidence. An honest broker would have walked away the moment the plan’s contents and reactions were clear. They didn’t.
That tells you where their loyalties lie—and it isn’t with Ukraine, NATO, or the EU.
I. What the plan actually is
Once we strip away the spin, the 28-point plan is straightforward:
Ukraine gives up more territory in the east and south, including areas it still controls.
Ukraine caps the size of its military and renounces NATO membership permanently.
Russia keeps its gains and is welcomed back into economic and political normality.
Axios and Sky, both working from authenticated drafts, describe a document that forces Kyiv to hand “swathes of land to Russia” and accept hard limits on its armed forces and NATO trajectory.
Al Jazeera’s summary is blunt: the U.S.-brokered proposal “requires Kyiv to make territorial concessions to Russia and to stay out of NATO.”
In other words, it is not a compromise between Russian aims and Ukrainian survival. It is codified defeat for Ukraine dressed up as “peace.”
II. The moment of clarity
By now, everyone important has said out loud what this document is.
Putin welcomed it. The Kremlin’s reaction could not be clearer: Putin has publicly said Trump’s plan “could serve as a basis” for peace, because it tracks Russia’s long-stated demands—keep the land it claims, block Ukraine from NATO, and start rolling back sanctions.
European leaders called it a Russian playbook. European defense ministers and senior officials, meeting at Halifax and in EU formats, are describing the 28-point text as “straight out of the Russian playbook” and “entirely one-sided in favor of Russia,” warning that it would hamstring NATO and reward aggression.
Ukraine called it a choice between dignity and blackmail. Zelensky has been explicit: the plan confronts Ukraine with “one of the most difficult moments”—choose between national dignity and the risk of losing U.S. support. He is not confused about what is being asked; he is being told to trade territory, sovereignty, and justice for continued help.
Rubio himself called it a Russian “wish list.” At Halifax, multiple U.S. senators report that Marco Rubio told them on a call that the document “was not the administration’s plan” but a “wish list of the Russians” that “looked more like it was written in Russian to begin with.” He later tried to walk that back in public—claiming on social media that the proposal was authored by the U.S.—but you can’t unring that bell.
At that point, the fog is gone. The content matches Russian demands. The aggressor praises it. Allies and Ukraine reject it. Trump’s own secretary of state privately labels it a Russian wish list.
That is the moment where any genuinely neutral mediator would say: this is dead. We mis-judged. We have to start again.
III. What Trump and Rubio did instead
They did the opposite. They doubled down.
Trump’s move was the Thanksgiving ultimatum. He publicly gave Zelensky a deadline—Thanksgiving Day—to accept the plan or face unspecified consequences.
In a Fox radio interview, he said Zelensky “will have to like” the proposal and will “have to approve it,” and warned that Ukraine would “lose in a short period of time” if it refused.
That is not the language of an honest broker checking whether a draft still makes sense. That is a threat: sign this Russian-coded text, on my timetable, or I start pulling the plug.
Rubio’s move was Byzantine, but the direction of travel is the same. After calling the document a Russian wish list to senators in private, he then:
Flew to Geneva to negotiate “based on” this very text.
Issued statements insisting that, whatever he had said before, “the peace proposal was authored by the U.S.” and is a “strong framework for ongoing negotiations,” merely incorporating Russian input.
If Rubio truly believed the plan was illegitimate—a Russian document the U.S. had merely received—his next move was obvious: declare it dead and make clear the United States would not impose Moscow’s demands on Kyiv.
Instead, he is now defending it as a U.S. product and using it as the starting point in Geneva.
So Trump is still pushing it with a deadline. Rubio is still legitimizing it as a framework. They are not walking away.
IV. What that tells you about loyalties
Strip the story down to first principles.
Your ally, under invasion, tells you a document will cost them their dignity and their territorial integrity.
Your alliance partners say it is “straight out of the Russian playbook.”
Your own senators report that your secretary of state privately calls it a Russian wish list.
The aggressor welcomes it as a useful basis because it locks in his war aims.
At that fork, you have two options:
Kill it, admit error, and go back to the drawing board with Ukraine and Europe at the table.
Or keep trying to make it “a thing,” lean on the victim to sign, and pretend this is what peace looks like.
Trump and Rubio chose option two. That is the entire case in one line.
Once the plan was exposed as structurally Russian, “we didn’t realize” stops being a defense. You don’t get to hide behind confusion after the mask has been torn off. Persisting anyway is the substantive act. It is the signal of alignment.
If your supposed peace plan looks like it was written in Moscow; if your allies and your own legislature recoil; if the only people still pushing it are the U.S. president and his inner circle—that is not diplomacy gone wrong. That is policy serving Russian interests.
V. Don’t let them complicate what is simple
You will now hear all the usual fog:
It’s “just a starting point.”
Every serious negotiation includes painful concessions.
The timeline can always be “flexible.”
Criticism is “hysterical” or “war-mongering.”
Ignore it. The basic test is very simple:
Does this plan defend Ukraine’s sovereignty, or institutionalize its defeat?
Does it strengthen NATO and the EU, or fracture them?
Are Trump and Rubio acting like representatives of a pro-Ukraine alliance, or like salesmen for a Russian-coded document?
Once the contents, the reactions, and their own behavior are on the table, there is no ambiguity left. Trump’s Thanksgiving ultimatum and Rubio’s continued negotiation off a Russian wish list are not the actions of honest brokers. They are the actions of officials who have chosen to prioritize Russian interests over those of Ukraine, NATO, and the EU.
You don’t need to overthink it. They have showed you who they are by refusing to walk away.