A US-led peace plan reflecting several key Russian demands has had repercussions across Europe, with leaders expressing concern that it could leave Ukraine vulnerable and calling for changes to the proposals.
European leaders and key allies met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in South Africa and said in a joint statement that the plan requires additional work, adding that they are “concerned about the proposed limitations on Ukraine’s armed forces, which would leave Ukraine vulnerable to future attacks.”
The declaration is signed by the leaders of Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain and Norway, as well as the EU Commission and Council. The leaders of Japan and Canada also signed the declaration, which warns that “borders should not be changed by force.”
President Donald Trump has set a Thanksgiving deadline for Ukraine to agree to the 28-point framework, suggesting Russia could be granted more territory than it has, impose limits on Ukraine’s military and prevent kyiv from joining NATO, demands long sought by Moscow.
The U.S. proposals include a security guarantee modeled on NATO’s Article 5, which would commit the United States and its European allies to treat a future attack on Ukraine as an attack on the entire transatlantic community, according to a U.S. official, although there are few details on what that would entail.
Senior Ukrainian and American officials will meet in Switzerland to discuss “possible parameters of a future peace,” Rustem Umerov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, wrote on Telegram on Saturday. Separately, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office said Saturday that the delegation has been confirmed for the talks, which “will take place in the coming days.”
The White House has described the plan as “a best-case scenario in which both sides gain more than they have to give,” saying the proposals were crafted with input from Russia and Ukraine.
However, analysts say the plan could amount to a dangerous capitulation for Ukraine, which had previously rejected plans that would require recognizing Russia’s illegal annexations of the entire eastern Donetsk region and Crimea.
“Even if parts of this plan were shoved down Ukraine’s throat, it would be the end of Ukraine as we know it. It’s a real capitulation,” Michael Bociurkiw, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, who was in Johannesburg, told NBC News by phone.
The United States was facilitating a “potentially disastrous surrender for Ukraine,” said Keir Giles, a consultant at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.
“And now we will see another panicked scramble by European leaders to avoid an outcome that would be disastrous for their own security,” he said, adding that the European response to “repeated disastrous peace plans has been one of words, not actions.”
“There should be nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” Ursula Von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said in a post on X on Friday, adding that European leaders will also meet in Angola next week.
Ukraine must have a “decisive voice in peace talks,” Polish President Karol Nawrocki said Friday night on X. “The price of peace cannot in any way be the achievement of strategic goals by the aggressor, and the aggressor was and remains the Russian Federation,” he added.
As European leaders mulled the plan on the sidelines of the G20 summit, notably absent was Trump, who boycotted the event over his baseless claims that the country’s white minority is subject to hate crimes and land grabs.
While Trump initially said Vice President JD Vance would attend, he later said no American delegation would participate. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, will also not attend.
To what extent Europe will actually be able to influence the plan without US involvement remains an open question, and has implications both for Ukraine’s borders and for peace across the continent.
“They can’t influence this,” Bociurkiw said. “It makes NATO and Europe look weak, and Putin will continue to cause more disruption,” he said.
“It’s like a high-speed train and you have Putin and Trump on it, and then you have Zelenskyy on the departure platform and Europe stuck at the check-in counter,” he added.
Giles said the military aspects of the peace plan leave Ukraine effectively defenseless against a future Russian attack.
“And given that Ukraine forms the first line of Europe’s defense, this is a potentially disastrous outcome for the continent as a whole,” Giles said.
Lawmakers in Ukraine are also not particularly happy with the plan, as Victoria Podgorna of Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy’s political party said it was giving Russia “amnesty for launching a brutal war.”
Zelenskyy said on Friday that he had spoken with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his counterparts in Germany and France, adding that he would also speak with Washington to ensure that kyiv’s “principled stances are taken into account.”
“Ukraine may now face a very difficult decision, whether to lose its dignity or risk losing a key partner, whether it is the difficult 28 points or a very difficult winter,” Zelenskyy said, warning his country of a “very difficult and eventful” week ahead.
His warning also came as Ukraine suffers battlefield setbacks and Zelenskyy tries to contain the fallout from a $100 million corruption scandal involving his top officials.
On Saturday, the Russian Defense Ministry said it had captured two more villages in eastern Ukraine, one in Donetsk and another in Zaporizhzhia.
Russia’s progress, both on the battlefield and in the proposed plan, has generated a positive response from the Kremlin, where Putin has said it could “form the basis of a final peace agreement,” although he added that it was not “substantially” discussed with Russia.
Meanwhile, two people were killed in the southern Russian city of Syzran in a Ukrainian attack on energy facilities, regional governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev said on the Russian state-backed Max messaging app on Saturday.
