How the War on Russia Became a Settlement on Moscow’s Terms

It was not supposed to end like this.

For three years Western leaders sold their publics a simple story. Ukraine would win. Russia would be weakened. NATO would emerge stronger than ever. The bill in money, matériel and men could be pushed into the future.

Now Russian troops are pushing again around Pokrovsk and Kupiansk, and Donald Trump is waving a twenty eight point peace plan that forces Kyiv to surrender land and abandon NATO for good. The story has flipped. What sits on the table is not a declaration of victory. It reads like the legal paperwork of a retreat.

The reality is blunt. This is a messy, contested codification of an emerging Russian success and a Western unwind. The arguments circulating in Moscow, in parts of Washington and in the small spaces of honest analysis all point in the same direction. The only real questions now are how the retreat is packaged, and who gets blamed.

From “as long as it takes” to “how do we get out”

The narrative arc is clearer when you strip away the slogans.

In twenty twenty two, NATO opened this war phase with maximalist ambitions. Publicly it was about defending Ukrainian sovereignty. Privately, senior Western officials and commentators talked in the language of regime change, a strategic defeat for Russia, a Kremlin chastened or even overturned, a wider deterrent message to China and the rest of the world.

The mechanisms were familiar. Sanctions promised to be from hell. Weapons would flow in volumes that Russia could not match. A state on the European periphery would be turned into a forward line for the alliance. Ukraine was the chosen front.

That project collided with three facts that were always visible to anyone looking at hard power instead of press releases:

• Russia had repeatedly signalled that turning Ukraine into a de facto NATO forward base was an existential red line.
• Russia had the industrial base, manpower pool and political cohesion for a long war.
• The West did not have either the stockpiles or the domestic consent for a multi year industrial proxy war with a nuclear state.

The Istanbul talks in spring twenty twenty two where Ukrainian neutrality was drafted on paper and texts were reportedly initialled were the last moment when a relatively limited settlement was still on the table. Those drafts were pushed aside by a coalition of Western hawks and Ukrainian maximalists who believed they could get more on the battlefield.

From that point onward the war had only two realistic endings, a negotiated Russian win, or a Ukrainian collapse that forces the same outcome on worse terms. Everything since has been a long walk toward that fork in the road.

Trump’s twenty eight point document is the first attempt to write that reality into a formal script.

The battlefield verdict

The reason this plan exists now, rather than a year ago, is written on the map.

Ukraine’s much touted twenty twenty three offensive ran into layered Russian defences that had been prepared for months. The result was predictable, heavy Ukrainian losses, marginal territorial gains and a Russian army that learned, adapted and dug in deeper.

By late twenty twenty four and into twenty twenty five the front began to move the other way. Russian forces pushed around Kupiansk, Seversk and then towards Pokrovsk, probing and then punching through parts of the defensive belt that Western engineers and trainers had spent a year building. Ukrainian units found themselves holding longer sectors with fewer men. Rotations slipped. Freshly mobilised troops were thrown into complex operations without the training their predecessors received.

Behind the lines another system was fraying. Medical reports and court filings described mounting rates of desertion, a growing number of men refusing call up, local authorities and military recruiters resorting to street dragnets to meet quotas. The romantic phase of volunteering to defend the home town was long past. This was the grind stage.

None of this meant that Russian columns were about to roll into Kyiv. It did mean that the war of attrition, the slow contest of shells, replacement rates and morale, was tilting decisively. Ukraine had burned through many of its best troops and much of its Western supplied equipment. Russia, despite its own casualties, still had the capacity and industrial momentum to push.

That is why Vladimir Putin can now sit before his Security Council, describe hopes of a strategic defeat for Russia as an illusion, and in the same breath say that Trump’s plan could serve as a basis for a final peace settlement. One side thinks in terms of narrative damage control. The other thinks in terms of how to bank what it has already won without inviting a larger war.

How a Russian term sheet became an American peace plan

Into this landscape walk two men who did not feature in any of the triumphant speeches of twenty twenty two, Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, and Steve Witkoff, a Trump aligned real estate developer.

In June this year, Moscow circulated a thirty one point proposal outlining its minimum conditions for ending the war, neutrality and NATO renunciation for Ukraine, recognition in practice of Russian control over Crimea and four regions in the east and south, demilitarised zones and limits on Ukrainian missile ranges and force structure, and a reworked European security framework that pushed NATO further from Russia’s borders.

To Western minds steeped in their own talking points this looked like a fantasy ultimatum. To anyone tracking the military balance it looked like a first draft of the likely end state once the fighting stopped.

Trump’s twenty eight point draft, leaked to American and European outlets and now defended as a United States initiative, tracks that Russian term sheet closely. The language is different. The architecture is not.

• Ukraine is permanently barred from NATO and required to codify neutrality.
• Kyiv gives up more land in the east than Russia currently occupies so that the contact line looks tidy on a map.
• Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk are treated as Russian in everything except the most technical legal phrasing.
• Ukraine’s army is capped, long range weapons are restricted, and verification regimes are intrusive.
• Frozen Russian assets become bargaining chips for Ukrainian reconstruction and joint United States Russia business projects.

On paper there are concessions from Moscow, promises about non aggression, arms control talks, selective sanctions relief, and a notional path for Russia to re enter parts of the Western financial system.

In practice this is a package that concedes three things the West spent three years denying, Ukraine will not join NATO, it will not recover all of its territory, and Russia will sit at the table when Europe’s security order is rewritten.

The authorship politics are noisy. Washington insists the plan is an American design. Russian insiders brief that Dmitriev’s job was to align it with Moscow’s red lines. What matters more than the branding is what the text actually accepts. However it is spun, the document codifies a Russian strategic advantage that was achieved on the ground.

Zelensky’s impossible choice

For Volodymyr Zelensky the plan does not land in a vacuum. It lands on top of two crises he can no longer control.

On the front his army is stuck in a war of attrition it cannot win. At home he presides over a state in which war time corruption has begun to touch his own circle and mobilisation has become increasingly coercive.

Western funded anti corruption bodies have dug into defence contracts, energy deals and reconstruction money. Their files describe inflated procurements, shell companies and striking kickbacks. Senior officials close to power have been named. Some have fled. Others sit under investigation. It is hard to argue that everyone around the president is crooked while maintaining the fiction that the president himself knew nothing.

In that atmosphere the American document forces Zelensky to choose in public what he has managed to avoid choosing in private, accept a deal that amputates territory and abandons the NATO promise, or refuse and be blamed for prolonging a losing war.

He has already framed the dilemma in his own rhetoric, speaking about a choice between defending dignity and losing Ukraine’s main partner, or accepting a humiliating compromise. The ambiguity is deliberate. It is also running out of space.

The corruption wave is not just a moral reckoning. It is also leverage. The same institutions that were funded to clean up Ukraine can be used to unseat or discipline a leader who refuses to sign.

Say no to the plan and the leaks intensify. Say yes and Zelensky may survive as a diminished figurehead in a neutralised state, or be eased aside once a signature is on the page. Either way, the picture is the same, a president whose options were progressively narrowed by choices made in Kyiv and Western capitals in twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, when less brutal off ramps were on offer and ignored.

Europe discovers it is collateral

If Zelensky must choose between humiliation and marginalisation, Europe must finally confront the bill for its own illusions.

European leaders backed maximalist goals with limited means. They sanctioned themselves off Russian pipeline gas without a coherent replacement plan. They cheered a proxy war that hollowed out their own stockpiles. They described tens of billions in assistance to Kyiv as an insurance premium on a safer continent.

Now they face a United States Russia draft that redistributes territory in Europe’s neighbourhood without any European signature on the initial deal, forces them to fund the reconstruction of a smaller, permanently neutral Ukraine that can no longer serve as a forward operating base against Russia, and exposes the core project of European Union enlargement and NATO expansion eastwards as a gamble that has not delivered what was promised.

The first response has been outrage. European leaders have labelled the plan unacceptable and rushed out their own counter proposals, editing or striking clauses that most obviously favour Moscow. The usual language about nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine has been wheeled out.

Beneath that surface a more uncomfortable realisation is taking root. When Washington decides that its interests require a separate deal with Moscow, it will pursue one. The unity of the West was always contingent on American calculations. That contingency is no longer theoretical. It sits in the form of twenty eight numbered paragraphs.

For Europe the nightmare is not Russian tanks on the Rhine. It is a settlement in which Russia is contained and recognised, the United States shifts its focus to Asia and the Gulf, and Europe is left holding an energy poor, militarised frontier facing a neighbour it has spent a decade demonising.

Moscow’s argument with itself

In Moscow the twenty eight points have not been greeted with a single voice.

On one side stand officials and commentators who see the plan as proof that the basic aims of the campaign have been met. It formalises Ukrainian neutrality, secures control over Crimea and the Donbas, opens a path, however narrow, to sanctions relief and legitimises Russia’s role in any future European security architecture. Putin’s own description of the document as a possible foundation for peace reflects this camp.

On the other side are nationalists and hard liners who see danger rather than victory. To them, any deal that leaves a functioning Ukrainian state aligned with the West is a potential third Minsk, a pause in which the West will rearm, retrain and return. They point to the record, arms control treaties abandoned, promises on NATO expansion broken, earlier agreements treated as expendable.

This split is not cosmetic. It reflects a genuine strategic choice. Bank the gains now, accept imperfect guarantees and a hostile West, and move on to the longer contest with the United States and China. Or reject any deal short of the dismantling of Ukrainian statehood and brace for a longer, riskier confrontation.

What unites both sides is insistence that any agreement must be enforceable, not simply a piece of paper that lives at the mercy of the next election in Washington or Berlin.

Where this ends, and why it is a Western disaster

Even if this specific twenty eight point draft is amended, renamed or quietly shelved, the underlying direction is now hard to reverse.

The military trajectory favours Russia. Western publics are tired. European treasuries are pulled between domestic crises and foreign commitments. Washington is managing crises from Gaza to the Red Sea to the Pacific. The notion that it can indefinitely bankroll a full spectrum proxy war against Russia has collided with budget lines and ammunition stocks.

That is why a deal that would have been unthinkable in twenty twenty two is being floated in twenty twenty five.

For the West it is already a disaster in three dimensions.

Strategic credibility. A policy sold as a way to weaken Russia and deter China has instead produced a hardened Russian army, a damaged but functioning Russian economy, and a Global South that watched sanctions fail and drew its own conclusions.

European security. The future security order will include Russia as a necessary partner, not a permanent pariah. Europe will live with the knowledge that its energy and industrial policies were set on an assumption Russian isolation that did not survive contact with reality.

Internal politics. The politicians who promised victory must now explain maps that show lost territory and legal texts that freeze Ukraine out of NATO. The backlash will come from multiple directions, from those who wanted to fight to the end and from those who will ask why diplomacy was blocked when the price could have been lower.

For Russia this is not a smiling victory parade. The human and economic costs are severe. The neighbour it wins is broken, not friendly. The wider relationship with the West will remain cold for a generation. But in cold strategic terms Moscow is closer to its red lines being recognised than at any point since the end of the Soviet Union.

And this is only the first chapter. If an over ambitious project in Ukraine ends with this kind of settlement, the next question is where Western elites try to recoup their losses, in the Taiwan Strait, in the Gulf, along Arctic sea lanes, in the scramble for African resources.

The twenty eight point plan is not just an endgame document for one war. It is a mirror held up to three decades of Western policy. It shows what happens when you confuse talking points with artillery, press releases with power and wishful maps with reality on the ground.

The Russian victory on the Dnieper is not the end of the story. It is the opening scene of a wider reckoning.

References

Source	Relevance
Reuters – Draft of United States backed twenty eight point peace proposal for Ukraine	Summarises key features of the plan, including territorial concessions, NATO exclusion and use of frozen Russian assets.
Sky News / Associated Press – Trump’s twenty eight point Ukraine plan in full	Details how the proposal mirrors long standing Russian demands and limits Kyiv’s military and alliance options.
Financial Times – Annotated text of Trump’s twenty eight point peace plan	Provides structured breakdown of the plan’s clauses and their implications for sovereignty, security and sanctions.
Kremlin Security Council transcript (November twenty twenty five)	Records Putin’s public assessment that the plan can serve as a foundation for settlement and his comments on Western illusions of strategic defeat for Russia.
Reports on Russian thirty one point memorandum from Istanbul talks in twenty twenty two	Show continuity between early Russian ceasefire ultimatums and the current architecture of the proposed settlement.
Telegraph Online Ukraine long reads and war reports	Previous analysis on attrition, desertion, European de industrialisation and the collapse of the Western narrative that underpins this assessment.