Under the plan, which has not yet been made public, Kyiv would cede significant areas of the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine that it still controls, cut the size of its army, and pledge not to join NATO - proposals it had previously ruled out.
The White House has pushed back on claims that Ukraine was not involved in the drafting of the plan, which emerged following meetings between US special envoy Steve Witkoff and and Russian counterpart Kirill Dmitriev.
Zelenskyy said he was set to speak to Trump in the coming days about the proposals, which also include plans for Ukraine to forgo many of its weapons.
It is to be hoped that Volodymyr Zelenskyy won’t fall for this plan put forward by the US. This would be tantamount to rewarding the aggressor! One should not forget that it was Russia which invaded Ukraine, not the other way around. So the acceptance of this plan would set a precedent for other aggressor countries: The takeaway being… invade another country and you will not be punished for the invasion; rather, you will be rewarded for it!
As for having NATO-like guarantees, Zelenskyy would be wise to ignore such claptrap. Ukraine has been here before. On December 5, 1994, the Budapest Memorandum was signed in exchange for security guarantees. In that Memorandum, the Ukraine relinquished its nuclear arsenal that it had inherited from the Soviet Union in return for guaranteed assurances from the US and the UK, and even from Russia itself. Those assurances proved to be worthless.
Relinquishing its nuclear arsenal weakened Ukraine unnecessarily. One can but wonder whether Russia would have invaded Ukraine in February 2022 had Ukraine refused to relinquish its nuclear arsenal. I would wager that it probably wouldn’t have.
Therefore, keeping that hard lesson in mind, it is to be hoped that Zelenskyy will be very reluctant to hand over its territory to Putin’s Russia. It would appear to the outside observer that Putin is on an empire-building mission. If that is truly the case, and it probably is, he will not be satisfied to get the Donbass from Ukraine; rather, he will use that annexation as a stepping stone for the rest of the country, and then, the next country! As Thatcher was once famous for saying in Parliament: No! No! No! — © Mark Alexander
