US pushing Ukraine to sign peace deal by Thanksgiving or lose support

KYIV — The White House is pressuring Ukraine to sign on to its new peace proposal by Thanksgiving or lose U.S. support in its war with Russia, according to five people familiar with the talks.

U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll presented Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday with a version of the 28-point plan President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff recently drafted with Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev.

That plan, leaked to the news media and confirmed by several officials, includes several red lines for Ukraine, including a significant reduction of its army size and ceding territory to Russia that Moscow has not conquered militarily.

Zelenskyy addressed Ukrainians on Friday and told them the nation is facing “one of the most difficult moments in our history” as the United States, which has been the country’s biggest ally, seeks to force it into a deal that would cement Russia’s gains.

“Ukraine may face a very tough choice — either the loss of dignity or the risk of losing a key partner,” Zelenskyy said.

Although Trump has lessened direct aid to Ukraine, the U.S. has brokered deals for Ukraine to receive U.S. weapons through European partners and continues to share intelligence that is crucial to Ukraine’s survival on the battlefield.

The U.S. is now sending “signals” that everything could be off the table if Kyiv does not quickly sign the proposal, two officials said, even as Driscoll took a lighter tone in Thursday’s meeting. The two officials, like others quoted in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive diplomatic discussions.

Trump told Fox News Radio on Friday that next Thursday would be “appropriate” to reach agreement on the proposed deal.

“I’ve had a lot of deadlines, but if things are working well, you tend to extend the deadlines. But Thursday is what we think is an appropriate time,” he said, adding that Ukraine was losing land and “will lose in a short period of time.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin told a meeting of his security council on Friday that the new peace plan could serve “as the basis for a final peace settlement,” though he claimed that the U.S. had not yet discussed the proposal in detail with Russia. “Russia is ready for peace talks and peaceful resolution of problems. But this requires, of course, a substantive discussion of all the details of the proposed plan,” Putin said.

The plan is “pure Russian,” a senior European diplomat said, confirming the Thanksgiving deadline and threat to cut support. European leaders plan to meet Saturday on the sidelines of a Group of 20 meeting in Johannesburg to put together a counterproposal that they believe will be more favorable to Ukraine.

Another diplomat involved in the discussions said Ukraine is under “extraordinary pressure” to agree to a deal. A separate person said that while Washington’s vow to withdraw support from Kyiv is real, it probably would not be implemented for another two weeks at the earliest.

A U.S. official declined to comment on the deal, saying only: “Trump is working with both sides to end the war as quickly as possible.”

The leaders of France, Britain and Germany held a joint phone call with Zelenskyy on Friday and appeared to push back on several of the plan’s key points. German government spokesman Stefan Kornelius said the leaders had agreed that “vital European and Ukrainian interests” must be safeguarded.

Breaking with the major European powers was Hungary, Russia’s closest partner in the European Union, which Trump has said could host a peace summit to end the war. “We are very supportive of this proposal, which we believe is the only credible alternative on the table,” Hungary’s minister for European Union affairs, János Bóka, told The Washington Post in an interview.

Bóka said he had just completed meetings with Trump’s top aides for Europe, including the National Security Council’s Charles McLaughlin and the State Department’s Brendan Hanrahan, who have continued to encourage Hungary’s role in the peace process.

Zelenskyy said in his address Friday that it was his duty to uphold his pledge to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence and that he would offer alternatives to the U.S. plan. The Ukrainian leader, one official said, had requested changes Thursday and Driscoll’s team agreed some could be made.

The U.S. appears to have divided its teams between Witkoff and Driscoll to “play good cop and bad cop — one presses, the other tries to say, ‘Let’s work together to change [the plan],’” one official said.

Following the Thursday meeting in Kyiv, Julie Davis, the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, said the timeline for signing is “aggressive.”

The plan contains elements long pushed for by Moscow, including a full withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the heavily fortified Donetsk region in the east of Ukraine, granting Russia full control of territory it has not been able to conquer in nearly four years of war. Russia would receive “de facto recognition” of its control of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk, as well as of the areas of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia it seized illegally, with the conflict in these regions frozen on the current front line.

Ukraine would be forced to enshrine in its constitution that it will not seek to join NATO, while agreeing to significantly reduce the size of its armed forces from between 800,000 and 850,000 military personnel to 600,000.

In return for making such sweeping concessions to an armed invader, Ukraine is to receive “reliable security guarantees,” although the plan does not contain any wording on what that would mean.

Ukraine has long insisted that its best security guarantee is its own military, which should not be reduced to accommodate Russian demands.

In addition, the proposed settlement would bar the presence of any NATO troops on Ukrainian soil, effectively nixing European proposals to send troops to deter Russia from attacking again.

The document would be signed by Zelenskyy and Trump before being presented to the Russians.

Kyiv has long feared any arrangement that would force it to reduce its army and cede its most fortified territory in Donetsk, as that would give Moscow an upper hand territorially and militarily to eventually launch a new invasion.

One person familiar with the contents of the plan said that it would require months of painstaking negotiations to bring it to a format that could be acceptable to Ukraine. “Even if Zelenskyy wanted to sign it, he couldn’t because there is no political basis for it,” the person said. “There are many nonstarters there.”

“It is very similar to the minerals deal,” the person added, referring to the economic partnership agreement between Ukraine and the U.S. granting Washington preferential access to future Ukrainian minerals deals. “We modified it for three months” before it was signed. “But this deal is between the U.S., Ukraine, Russia and Europe, so I think it will be more like 12 months to negotiate. I think this is the beginning of the peace process, not the end.”

Putin on Friday sought to blame Ukraine and its allies in Europe for the lack of progress, accusing them of “living in illusions and dreaming of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia on the battlefield.” Further Russian military breakthroughs were “inevitable,” he said.

But analysts said aspects of the latest plan forwarded by the U.S. would also probably be unacceptable to Russia. “Although the concessions to Russia appear substantial, the plan would also require Moscow to abandon some of its earlier conditions — for example, the more radical reduction of Ukraine’s armed forces or parts of the political reform package,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “Having received, in outline, much of what it wanted, Moscow now has to treat seriously something it is likely to view as fundamentally unsubstantiated and unreliable.”

Russia has been making incremental advances on the battlefield, far outmanning and outgunning the Ukrainian side, and experts say any deal signed now would give Russia a huge advantage while it has the upper hand.

But analysts say Moscow does not have the military capacity to make major gains, and it could have to launch a politically difficult mobilization next year to continue the conflict, while sanctions are forcing the government to make painful tax hikes and spending cuts.

The proposal also calls for reintegrating Russia into the global economy as a result of the settlement of the conflict, with sanctions to be lifted “in stages and on a case-by-case basis.” If Russia were to attack Ukraine again, “in addition to a decisive coordinated military response, all global sanctions will be reinstated” and recognition of the seized territories would be revoked, the plan states.

Elements of the agreement appear to take inspiration from the White House’s recent efforts to strike a peace deal in Gaza, including the establishment of a council to monitor violations of the agreement that would be personally chaired by Trump.

Other ideas read like a wish list of long-standing Russian demands, including an end to further NATO expansion, which Washington and its allies have long said would impose unacceptable limits on the sovereign desires of European nations to join the alliance.

Russia would also win reintegration into the Group of Eight world powers from which it was expelled following its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.

And the U.S. would get a 50% cut of the profits of investments made in Ukraine with $100 billion in frozen Russian government assets, while the rest of the frozen assets would be handed back to Russia — forestalling an ongoing European effort to use those assets to pay for Ukraine’s defense and reconstruction.

Zelenskyy has been weakened in recent weeks by a major corruption scandal that has ensnared several of his close associates and which — coupled with the exhausting pace of Russian military strikes and slow advances on the ground — could leave the Ukrainian leader with diminishing options as U.S. officials exert greater pressure on him to accept a deal.

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• Belton reported from London; Birnbaum and Hudson reported from Washington. Kate Brady in Berlin and Ellen Francis in Brussels contributed.