In the days of our sorrow when others, more powerful, have decided to beggar our ancient country… It is not we who should be ashamed.
— Josef Hora
When the 28-point Putin–Trump “peace plan” surfaced, most of the world reacted with disbelief. Ukraine was given six days to accept it — an ultimatum masquerading as diplomacy. As reporting accumulated, a clearer picture emerged: the document appears to have been drafted by Putin’s envoy, translated into English, and delivered to Trump’s negotiating team, which adopted and repackaged it as its own. From there, it was presented to President Zelensky as the official U.S. framework for ending the war.
If Michael D. Weiss’s account in his Bulwark interview proves accurate, the 28 points were hammered out by Kirill Alexandrovich Dmitriev — one of Putin’s close associates—together with two real-estate developers, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. The draft, written first in Russian and then translated, was passed back to the Kremlin and returned to Witkoff, who has reportedly been advising the Russians on how Putin should “handle” Trump, to be presented to the Ukrainians as a U.S. peace proposal.
As if this were not troubling enough, Vice President Vance then dispatched his close friend and faithful poodle, Secretary of the Army Daniel Patrick Driscoll — ostensibly in Ukraine to study its innovative drone tactics (where the U.S. lags badly behind) — to secure his standing in the negotiations (lest Rubio’s diplomacy succeed) and promote his isolationist goals, by intimidating and pressuring Kyiv into accepting the core terms of this de facto surrender within six days. Vance, a staunch isolationist, has openly expressed contempt for a strong Euro-Atlantic alliance, the stabilizing role of NATO, or the geopolitical importance of ensuring that Ukraine’s sovereignty is not extinguished by an aggressive neighbor that remains a U.S. adversary.
More revelations seem inevitable. What is already visible is a sordid sequence of parallel channels, Trump loyalists, and self-styled envoys working tirelessly to serve Trump’s interests by assisting Russia in securing dominance over Ukraine—whether as a pliant satellite or a fully subordinated state.
The internal confusion within the Trump administration was vaudevillian — a burlesque of errors, contradictions, and mixed messaging, prancing naked across the global stage. The world watched an uncoordinated U.S. apparatus shuffle toward capitulation, reducing America to a farcical metaphor: an unreliable ally and a transparently pro-Russian interlocutor eager to advance Putin’s designs for redrawing Europe’s security map.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially insisted the plan was merely Russia’s opening “wish list”. After Trump pushed for ownership, Rubio reversed himself. Later — following what he described as a “very productive” meeting with the Ukrainian delegation—he recast it as the official U.S. framework for peace.
Was Rubio misled by Trump’s self-styled envoys — Witkoff and Kushner—who crafted the plan in tandem with Dmitriev, their Russian counterpart? (Reports suggest both Rubio and Trump only learned of the “peace plan” when Dmitriev leaked it to the White House–friendly outlet Axios.) Or did Rubio mislead the public by first presenting it as a purely Russian proposal while knowing it to be a joint Russian–U.S. production? Rubio remains an internationalist, yes, but one whose fawning and ritual praise of dear leader Trump often overwhelm his better instincts.
Frankly, the answer hardly matters. What matters is the spectacle: how embarrassingly amateurish, confused, and transparently pro-Russian Trump’s negotiating team appears when set against the seasoned geopolitical operators in Putin’s orbit.
The asymmetry is not only military—it is epistemic. Russia’s negotiators knew exactly what they were doing. Trump’s team did not. Or perhaps they did, given that several (Witkoff, Kushner, Vance, Driscoll) seem to have had their foot—not merely their thumb—on the scales. More troubling still, the Trump administration has entrusted billionaire businessmen and television personalities with some of the most sensitive levers of government, including peace negotiations. Their ignorance of geopolitics, statecraft, diplomacy, and history is staggering. Their unfamiliarity with Eastern European history, the stakes of the conflict, the logic of coercive diplomacy, and the modern record of Russian hybrid operations is astonishing. Historical illiteracy is not a flaw around the margins; it shapes outcomes. Here it is the essence. Appeasement is not a metaphor—it is an analytic category grounded in long-observed patterns of misreading autocratic intent.
Trump’s own preferences compound the dysfunction. He has openly tilted toward Russia, expressed admiration for Putin, and repeatedly signaled his desire to reduce U.S. support for Ukraine. In that sense, the plan’s architecture is unsurprising. It reflects the worldview of someone who wants Russia to win, wants Ukraine to lose, and wants to present himself as the indispensable broker of the very terms he helped distort.
The resulting “peace” framework is pure appeasement. Rubio – seemingly grasping the moment to prove his international chops and avoid being branded as one of Trump’s pro-Russian agents in these negotiations is changing tack, delicately distancing himself from the lopsided, Kremlin-approved Dmitriev–Witkoff–Kushner draft—whose authors, incidentally, effectively admit its acceptance would legitimize Russia’s kidnapping of Ukrainian children (Point 24 b and c, combined with Point 25) the very crime for which the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for Putin. The rest of Trump’s circle seems either unaware of the reputational damage they are inflicting on the United States or MAGA-indifferent to it.
Put plainly, in presenting this ultimatum to Zelensky, Trump was doing Putin’s bidding. He was acting as his errand boy. As an American, I am ashamed. The plan is not merely appeasement or capitulation—it is co-option: the United States aligning itself with Russia to ensure Ukraine’s eventual demise as a sovereign state, along with its culture, language, and identity.
With the unsurprising exception of Point 1—affirming Ukrainian sovereignty—the remaining 27 points are, in the words of Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Oleksandr Merezhko, “ludicrous,” deeply offensive, and strategically incoherent. Among the lowlights:
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- Ukraine must renounce NATO membership and cap its armed forces at 600,000.
- NATO may station no troops in Ukraine, while Russia is economically reintegrated.
- Putin’s territorial gains are formalized and frozen.
- A “Peace Council,” chaired by Donald Trump, would oversee implementation.
- A reconstruction fund would draw on frozen Russian assets, with the remainder used for U.S.–Russian business ventures.
- Elections in Ukraine must occur within 100 days.
- And, astonishingly, full amnesty for all perpetrators on both sides—including Russian officials implicated in war crimes.
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This is not compromise; it is capitulation. It accommodates Russian objectives while constraining Ukraine’s sovereignty, military capacity, and long-term security posture.
Many have invoked Munich. The analogy is often lazy, bordering on cliché, a reflexive reach for the nearest historical shorthand. Here, the comparison is tragically apt. In 1938, British Prime Minister Chamberlain and French Premier Daladier ceded the Sudetenland to Hitler without Czechoslovakia’s participation, cloaking coerced surrender in the language of diplomacy. As Telford Taylor observed in MUNICH: The Price of Peace (reviewed here), “Munich” has come to describe a yielding approach that avoids confrontation by granting the aggressor’s demands—appeasement in its purest form.
The lesson is not that Trump is Chamberlain or that Putin is Hitler. It is that the structure of the Putin–Trump plan replicates the core pathology of Munich: a small nation’s fate decided over its head; coercion laundered as diplomacy; and the aggressor rewarded under the guise of “peace.”
It is not only a poodle dynamic—Witkoff, Kushner, and Vance as Trump’s poodles, Trump as Putin’s.1 It is a complete failure to appreciate that Ukraine is a distinct nation with its own heritage, culture, and identity—precisely what Stalin sought to erase. Putin is on the same track. Stalin tried to starve Ukrainians into submission, as Anne Applebaum documents brilliantly in RED FAMINE – Stalin’s War on Ukraine (reviewed here) Putin bombs, kills, and kidnaps them into submission—with not merely approval but assistance from Trump.
The grotesqueness of the plan is obvious to anyone objective. Republican Congressman Don Bacon—a retired Air Force Brigadier General—called the U.S. proposal “embarrassing”, praising the evolving European counter-proposal as “ten times better.” Retired Lt. General Mark Hertling’s analysis on The Bulwark underscores just how strategically bankrupt the U.S. plan is.
The historical echoes of Munich lie not in personalities but in structure. Diplomacy is not abstract. Frameworks shape the battlefield, signal intentions to allies and adversaries, and define the boundaries of what is possible. The Putin–Trump plan’s structure is one of surrender disguised as statesmanship.
Let us therefore call it what it is: a geopolitical hallucination, a blueprint for Ukrainian submission drafted in Moscow, laundered through Trump’s team, and presented to Kyiv as if Washington possessed leverage rather than self-inflicted weakness. It is appeasement with modern branding—an assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty dressed up as peace.
Had Ukraine accepted it — as Trump demanded — the Putin–Trump plan would not have ended the war. It would have green-lit the next one.
NEXT
Prolegomenon to Part II: Point 25 and the Law of Amnesties
If the geopolitical architecture of the Putin–Trump plan is one of capitulation, its legal architecture is something even more alarming. Point 25 — the proposed blanket amnesty — is the plan’s most revealing and most dangerous feature. It is not merely morally offensive; it is legally explosive.
Part II will examine why.
Since 2016 when I last posted on amnesty, the legal landscape governing amnesties has shifted dramatically: the consolidation of jus cogens norms, the ICC’s expanding jurisprudence, the hardening duty to prosecute atrocity crimes, and the growing recognition that treaty provisions conflicting with peremptory norms are invalid ab initio. Against this backdrop, a universal, retroactive, and forward-looking amnesty for all political and military actors—including those implicated in war crimes, crimes against humanity, or even genocide—is not simply objectionable. It may well be void beyond the two states of this war.
The questions this raises are profound. Could such an amnesty survive scrutiny before the ICC, which already has active arrest warrants? What of the “boutique court” now being constructed to prosecute crimes arising from this war, including the still-untested but increasingly central crime of aggression—an offense that may well form the concrete foundation for future prosecutions at the ICC and beyond? How would domestic courts exercising universal jurisdiction treat an amnesty clause that purports to erase accountability for international crimes?
And more provocatively still: even if Ukraine and Russia agreed, could an amnesty of this scope be imposed on third states—neutralizing prosecutions outside the peace agreement entirely? The answer is almost certainly no, but the question exposes the fatal flaw in Point 25’s design.
These are not abstract legal puzzles. They cut to the heart of why the Putin–Trump plan is untenable—not only geopolitically, but juridically. If Point 25 is the keystone of the plan, then the entire structure rests on a legal impossibility.
Part II will pick up from here.
About Author
- I know I am overusing the term “poodle“. While it certainly captures the Putin-Trump relationship, perhaps “toady” is more accurate for the Trump worshipping enablers. But you get the point. [↩]
Succinctly written without using any of the scathing language so well deserved.