Lord Ashcroft: President Trump’s peace plan contains dangers for Ukraine and for America

Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC is an international businessman, philanthropist, author and pollster. For more information on his work, visit lordashcroft.com

When I visited Ukraine in September, senior officials told me candidly that Kyiv hoped to reach a peace deal by the end of this year – their estimates pointed to November. While Ukraine slipped from the top of international news agendas, diplomatic manoeuvring continued intensely behind the scenes.

That work culminated in the controversial 28-point peace plan presented by the United States-  a document that looked less like an American proposal and more like a list of Russian demands awkwardly translated into English.

Speculation swirled in Kyiv and European capitals on the limited diplomatic experience of President Trump’s envoy, Steven Witkoff, and was intensified by the resignation of the respected Ukraine Envoy, General Keith Kellogg, whom I interviewed in September. Perhaps this explains why President Trump dispatched his Secretary of State – a far more seasoned operator – to the emergency meeting convened by European leaders in Geneva on Sunday.

Marco Rubio emerged from that meeting with Ukrainian counterparts saying the negotiations were “further along than at any point in the last ten months.” He reiterated a point Europe has been stressing since Trump entered the Oval Office: “We all recognise that part of ending this war will require Ukraine to feel safe.”

That same day, European leaders unveiled their own peace plan – a 24-point document that still grants Moscow significant concessions. It proposes that Ukraine pledge not to retake occupied territories by force and caps its armed forces at 800,000 personnel – higher than the 600,000 suggested in the US plan. Ukraine would receive security guarantees mirroring NATO’s Article 5, and reconstruction would be financed using frozen Russian assets held in Europe. Crucially for European allies, Russia would have no say over NATO’s future enlargement.

Yet the plan still offers Moscow major gains: it would retain all currently occupied Ukrainian territories and be effectively welcomed back into the global economic system. Even readmitting Russia into the G8 – the club of leading economies from which it was expelled after invading Ukraine in 2014 – is once again under discussion.

Whether this European proposal gathers momentum or earns White House backing, will become clear in the coming days as two of Europe’s key “Trump whisperers” – Finland’s Alexander Stubb and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni – travel to Washington. Still the immediate success is evident: Europe has managed to delay the previously looming Thanksgiving deadline and to begin turning what looked like a capitulation document into the basis for a workable set of negotiations.

No one wants peace more than Ukraine.

Ukrainians are exhausted, their energy infrastructure is severely degraded, their troops are stretched to their limits. Yet exhaustion does not mean capitulation. Kyiv needs confidence that if it agrees to freeze the front line and accept a ceasefire, Russia will not simply regroup and strike again – at least not before a change of leadership in the Kremlin or the collapse of the Russian state, both of which, in today’s volatile world, are plausible scenarios.

A final point must be addressed. President Trump has accused Ukraine of being ungrateful for his efforts to end the war.

The facts tell a different story. Ukraine agreed to an unconditional ceasefire after its first meeting with him. It signed a critical minerals deal at his demand. Europe has taken on most of the burden for military, humanitarian and financial aid. Russia, meanwhile, has kept sending the Trump administration in circles.

Washington insists that this war is Europe’s responsibility – and in many respects, it is. The EU deserves criticism for turning a blind eye to the 2014 annexation of Crimea and continuing business as usual even as Russia advanced in Donbas in 2015. But this war is also partly the responsibility of the United States and the United Kingdom. It was Washington and London that guaranteed Ukraine’s security and sovereignty in 1994 in exchange for the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. Had Ukraine kept its nuclear weapons, its defence posture today would be entirely different – and, as President Trump often says, this war would likely never have happened.

Whether he likes it or not, this war is now his war.

He did not start it, but it is he who needs to end it. And it can only end if the peace that follows is durable. This is not just about fair terms for Ukraine, nor solely about the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who face being abandoned in occupied territories and exposed to systematic Russian war crimes. It is about America’s adversaries watching closely to see how much the United States is prepared to tolerate – and how much it is willing to concede to nuclear-armed dictators who gamble on Western hesitation.

President Trump warns that President Zelenskyy risks starting World War III. But as Sir Winston Churchill once said: “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.”