WASHINGTON DC – US President Donald Trump on Friday delivered a blunt message to Kyiv.
President Volodymyr Zelensky, he said, “will have to come to terms” with a 28-point “peace” plan that critics across Washington and Kyiv say bears Moscow’s fingerprints.
Trump, speaking in the Oval Office with characteristic certainty, insisted that “we think we have a way of getting peace,” before adding the line that now hangs over Kyiv like a deadline stamped in red ink: “He’s going to have to approve it.”
And with that, he gave Ukraine a Thanksgiving ultimatum – agree by Thursday, or face consequences the administration has not yet spelled out but has repeatedly telegraphed.
Zelensky, who has been navigating an increasingly precarious relationship with Washington since the two leaders’ fractious Oval Office meeting in February, hinted Friday that Kyiv is approaching a breaking point in its dealings with the US.
Trump, asked about the Ukrainian president’s comments, pivoted back to that tense February exchange, recalling with a note of condescension: “I said you don’t have the cards.”
And with the same certainty, he emphasized again: “Thursday is it – we think an appropriate time.”
Peace, or partition
As the US administration tightens the screws, details of the plan have rippled through Congress and almost universally provoked outrage.
Lawmakers explicitly point to the fact the deal would require almost nothing from the Kremlin beyond a financial concession. Russia would regain full access to the global economy. Sanctions would evaporate. For many lawmakers, that alone made the plan untouchable.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) called it a capitulation disguised as diplomacy, warning that Ukraine “should not be forced to give up its lands to one of the world’s most flagrant war criminals in Vladimir Putin.”
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has long sparred with Trump over Ukraine, went further. “Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool,” he said.
If US officials are “more concerned with appeasing Putin than securing real peace, then the [US] President ought to find new advisors,” he added.
And Republican Congressman Don Bacon (R-NE) dismissed the plan as “just an ugly perspective,” predicting that “the vast majority of Americans will reject surrender to Putin.”
Plan critics say has ‘Russian DNA’
Even abroad, the pushback echoed with unusual sharpness. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, speaking from the Halifax International Security Forum, rejected the plan outright.
“That’s not a compromise,” she said. “That’s a plan Russia wrote to benefit Russia. What President Trump has failed to do is put pressure on Putin.”
Policy experts, long accustomed to parsing the internal contradictions of Trump-era foreign proposals, found this one especially alarming.
Daniel Fried, veteran US diplomat and former senior State Department official, labeled it “a hot mess” – at once sloppy, internally inconsistent, and a retreat from Trump’s earlier claim that peace should begin at the current front line.
Giving Russia all of the Donbas, Fried said, even areas it failed to conquer, would be an unprecedented reward for aggression.
John Herbst, former US ambassador to Ukraine, called the idea “fatuous,” but noted that the inclusion of a US security guarantee could be a small positive – provided Washington is actually prepared to enforce it.
“The Russians are afraid of our military,” he said, making any US guarantee meaningful, if real.
And yet Herbst warned that Trump’s mercurial instincts make the situation especially volatile. “There have obviously been times when that’s worked for him. I don’t think that works in the current war,” he said, noting that Putin’s aim “has not changed.”
Ukraine now faces what Fried described as “a tight place.” Rejecting the plan outright risks triggering “another Trump explosion” – and potentially a catastrophic withdrawal of US support. But agreeing to it would devastate Ukrainian sovereignty.
Fried’s advice to Zelensky was pragmatic: try to shape the text rather than reject it.
“It will not be pretty,” he warned, but Kyiv must at least ensure the plan is “not a disaster” and avoid blame for what may become an unworkable peace.
Ukrainian Americans see a trap
Ukrainian diaspora leaders were far less diplomatic. The American Coalition for Ukraine blasted the administration’s pressure campaign as coercive, accusing Trump of pushing a plan that “amounts to surrender and appeasement.”
The group warned that threatening to cut military aid if Kyiv refuses “undermines Ukraine’s sovereignty” and “endangers global security.”
Yuriy Boyechko, CEO of Hope for Ukraine, went even further, arguing the proposal is “fundamentally dead on arrival” – only because of its concessions but because its authors misread Ukraine’s national resolve.
“The outrageous nature of the 28 points,” he said, “carries the unmistakable stench of a Russian trap,” he told Kyiv Post.
Boyechko warned that any attempt to force Zelensky into signing away territory “bypasses the democratic will of the Ukrainian people” and would be met with “fierce resistance.”
The final decision, he insisted, “rests with the Ukrainian people, and their answer to this plan will be a resounding ‘No.’”
What comes next
The pressure campaign has united critics across the political spectrum, creating a rare moment of bipartisan alarm over the White House’s strategy to force an end to the war.
It is a rare moment when voices from Capitol Hill, foreign-policy veterans, European capitals, and Ukrainian civil society align so neatly – and when all of them, in some form, warn that Washington is careening toward a diplomatic dead end.
But with Thursday looming, Trump seems determined to push ahead, confident that pressure – and his own instincts – can deliver the elusive end to Europe’s bloodiest war in generations.
Whether Kyiv bows, bargains, or breaks remains the central question. Whether the US is prepared to live with the consequences is another question entirely – one Washington will soon have to answer, ready or not.