Last week, we asked whether Ukraine faced an impossible choice: accept Donald Trump’s 28-point peace plan or risk losing U.S. support. This week, that choice looks a little less impossible, and a lot more European.

By Carlos Taylhardat | 3 Narratives News | November 24, 2025

In “Ukraine’s Impossible Choice: Trump’s 28-Point Peace Plan and the Price of U.S. Support”, 3 Narratives News described Volodymyr Zelensky’s dilemma as a brutal fork in the road: preserve his country’s dignity by rejecting a lopsided peace deal, or preserve his country’s lifeline by accepting the wishes of its most important ally.

Seven days later, winter is pressing in on the trenches, but the political temperature has shifted. European leaders have moved from cautious spectators to full participants, backing Zelensky’s push to redraw the terms of peace, not to declare a neat end to the war. The new strategy isn’t about winners and losers, but about “stopping the killing” without legalizing conquest.

Behind closed doors in Geneva, U.S. and Ukrainian negotiators say they have agreed on a “refined peace framework,” paring back some of Moscow’s demands from the original 28-point document. European capitals, from Berlin to Helsinki, have given that modified text a guarded welcome. The Kremlin, by contrast, has just branded a European counter-proposal

“completely unconstructive”

and “unsuitable for us.”

As the snowline creeps toward the front, the question hanging over Kyiv, Moscow, Brussels and Washington is simple and brutal: can this evolving peace plan trade land, security guarantees and frozen assets for something more precious — a halt, however imperfect, to the dying?

What We Now Know About the 28-Point Plan

The original 28-point proposal, drafted in Washington and heavily influenced by Trump’s closest envoys, was pitched under his familiar promise to “stop the killing” on both sides. But leaks across U.S., European and Ukrainian media painted a text that looked far closer to a Russian wish list than a balanced ceasefire.

According to those leaks and later reporting, the core elements included:

• Territorial concessions. Ukraine would effectively recognise Russia’s control over Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, including parts of Donetsk still held by Kyiv. Front lines in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia would be frozen, with some areas rebranded as demilitarised buffer zones under de facto Russian control.
• Limits on Ukraine’s military. Kyiv would cap its armed forces at roughly 600,000 troops and accept restrictions on long-range weapons and foreign troop presence, leaving its future security heavily dependent on paper guarantees.
• NATO and neutrality. Ukraine’s NATO ambitions would be shelved or indefinitely frozen; the wider plan flirted with a broader non-expansion understanding around Russia’s borders, a key Kremlin priority.
• Sanctions relief and economic reintegration for Russia. Western sanctions would be phased out as Moscow implemented steps under the agreement, allowing Russia to rebuild its position in global energy and finance.
• Vague security guarantees for Ukraine. In exchange for land and limits, Ukraine would receive promises of Western reconstruction aid and yet-to-be-defined security assurances — strong on language, weaker on specifics.

When this text first landed in Kyiv, Zelensky publicly described his country as facing one of its “most difficult moments” since the full-scale invasion: accept a plan that legitimised territorial theft, or risk alienating a U.S. president who openly tied future support to Ukraine’s answer.

Then Europe stepped in, not with a rival plan to replace Washington’s, but with a red pen and its own definition of what “peace” must mean on a continent that has already seen too much history rewritten by force.

Narrative 1 — Europe Tries to Turn a Ceasefire into a Just Peace

(Told from the perspective of European leaders trying to shape the deal.)

From Brussels, Berlin and Helsinki, the initial leak of Trump’s 28 points landed like a bad déjà vu: a peace that looked suspiciously like the map Vladimir Putin has been trying to impose since 2014, dressed up as a diplomatic breakthrough. If Europe has learned anything from the last century, it is that borders changed by tanks rarely stay settled for long.

That’s why, in the days after the Geneva talks, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stepped in with a blunt message: Ukraine’s borders cannot be changed by force, and its army cannot be forcibly shrunk in ways that invite the next attack. A “just and lasting peace,” she said, must protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and its right to defend itself.

For many European leaders, the revised framework emerging from Geneva is not a betrayal of American leadership but its correction. The original 28-point document may have been drafted in Washington, but it will be implemented on Europe’s doorstep. If Ukraine is turned into an amputated buffer state, every NATO and EU capital from Tallinn to Berlin will live under the shadow of a precedent: that a nuclear power can invade a neighbour, hold what it grabs, and then be welcomed back into the global economy after a respectable cool-down period.

That is why European diplomats quietly pushed for a counter-proposal that stripped out or softened some of the plan’s most dangerous clauses. The emerging text, according to officials, does three things:

• It emphasises a ceasefire along current lines without prematurely recognising Russia’s claims on occupied territory as legal and permanent.
• It builds in the idea of serious security guarantees for Ukraine, steps that might not be called “NATO membership” but look more like a quasi-alliance than a promise on paper.
• It rejects demands that Ukraine be forced into long-term military weakness as the price of peace.

Zelensky’s own rhetoric has started to converge with this European line. In a recent address to lawmakers in Sweden, now echoed in statements from Ukraine’s foreign ministry, he laid out three non-negotiables: borders cannot be changed by force, war criminals must not escape justice, and

“The aggressor must pay fully for the war he started, and this is why decisions on Russian assets are essential.”

For Europe, that sentence does double duty. It reassures Eastern member states that justice, not just stability, is on the table. And it gives legal and moral cover to ongoing efforts in Brussels, Ottawa and other capitals to turn frozen Russian state assets into a reconstruction fund for Ukraine. If the aggressor must pay, then leaving hundreds of billions in Russian reserves untouched in Western banks becomes harder to justify.

Not everyone in Europe is on the same page. Hungary has loudly urged unconditional acceptance of the original plan, calling it a major chance to end the war. But the centre of gravity in the EU, from Paris, Berlin and Rome to the Nordics, is closer to Zelensky: yes to a negotiated end to the killing, no to a settlement that bakes impunity and territorial revisionism into Europe’s future.

From this vantage point, Europe is not sabotaging Trump’s peace plan; it is trying to rescue it from its own worst instincts. A ceasefire that looks like surrender will not hold. A deal that Ukrainians see as “more dignified,” even if painful, stands a chance of surviving the winter after the war.

Narrative 2 — Moscow Says Europe Has Broken the Deal

(Told from the perspective of Russia’s leadership and its narrative about the talks.)

From the Kremlin’s perspective, the story of this peace plan is simple: for the first time since the invasion began, Washington drafted a document that Moscow could treat as a real starting point. Then Europe and Kyiv took that document and tried to turn it into something else.

Russian officials have been unusually warm about the original U.S. text. President Vladimir Putin has hinted that Trump’s plan could provide a “possible foundation” for ending the conflict on the condition that Ukraine accepts the new territorial reality and the West recognises Russia’s security concerns. If Kyiv refuses, he warns, Russia will continue advancing.

The logic in Moscow goes like this: Russia has fought for nearly four years, absorbed unprecedented sanctions and casualties, and redrawn the map by force. Any plan that does not recognise those gains is, from their standpoint, a non-starter. The original 28-point framework did exactly what the Kremlin has been demanding since 2022:

• It locked in Russia’s control over Crimea and much of Donbas.
• It created buffer zones in southern Ukraine that could be policed, if not formally annexed, by Russia.
• It put hard limits on Ukraine’s future army and kept NATO at arm’s length.
• It offered a road back to normal trade for Moscow once the ink was dry.

From that vantage point, the revisions emerging from Geneva look like a bait-and-switch. On November 24, Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov publicly dismissed a European counter-proposal as “completely unconstructive” and said it

“does not work for us”

even as he praised “many provisions” of the original U.S. draft.

Russian state media has framed Europe’s new firmness, especially von der Leyen’s insistence that Ukraine’s borders and army size are not up for negotiation, as proof that Brussels is “sabotaging” peace and clinging to a fantasy of Russian defeat. They point to Macron, Scholz and others talking about “just and lasting peace” and hear code for an outcome in which Moscow swallows the costs of war but gets little in return.

Inside Russia, the war economy has become both shield and trap. Military spending is projected at around 7% of GDP in 2025, with defence and security taking a third or more of the federal budget — levels not seen since the Cold War.

That spending has kept factories humming and headline GDP slightly above water, but growth is now slowing sharply. The IMF has cut its forecast for Russian growth in 2025 to just 0.6%, while domestic interest rates hover in the mid-teens and inflation eats into household incomes. Recent tax hikes, including a planned increase in value-added tax and new levies on small businesses and consumers, are a sign that the Kremlin is shifting more of the war’s cost onto ordinary Russians.

Against that backdrop, the original 28-point plan looks, from Moscow, like a chance to lock in military gains before the economic strain deepens. Every clause that Europe or Kyiv now attempts to soften — on borders, on sanctions relief, on Ukraine’s army — is seen not as negotiation, but as backtracking.

That is why, in this narrative, Trump’s promise to “stop the killing” is welcome, but only if it comes with recognition of new borders and an end to what the Kremlin calls “illegal” sanctions. Anything less, Russian officials say publicly, is no deal at all.

Winter, the Dead, and Economies Running on Empty

Step out of the negotiating rooms, and the numbers become harder to hold at arm’s length.

For Russia, independent estimates suggest between 790,000 and over 1 million military casualties — killed or wounded — since the full-scale invasion began, with around 200,000–250,000 soldiers killed. Ukraine’s own losses are lower but still devastating: President Zelensky has spoken of roughly 400,000 Ukrainian troops killed or injured and tens of thousands missing.

For civilians, UN-linked and research-group tallies count more than 40,000 civilian casualties from fighting and air strikes, with millions displaced: about 3.7 million Ukrainians internally displaced and nearly 7 million living abroad as refugees. The UN has confirmed at least 13,000 civilian deaths and many more injured, a number everyone involved quietly admits is an undercount.

Behind every figure is a very local winter. Apartment blocks patched with plastic in Kharkiv and Odesa. Farm towns near Pokrovsk learning to live with a fourth New Year under artillery range. Russian families who never see their sons again except in the grainy photos of Telegram channels, or who learn that a body cannot be recovered from a field now bracketed by drones.

Economically, both countries are running hot just to stay upright. Ukraine’s economy, propped up by more than $400 billion in aid and loans since 2022, is forecast to grow about 2% in 2025, but with inflation still in double digits and a power grid that remains a target for missiles and drones.

Russia, after two years of war-fuelled expansion, is heading toward stagnation. War spending has crowded out social programmes; drone strikes on oil refineries have knocked out a large share of refining capacity, forcing fuel rationing in regions like Crimea and new imports from Belarus and Asia. Analysts increasingly describe the outlook as “managed stagnation” — a system that can fund the war, for now, but at the price of rising taxes, falling real incomes and a future mortgaged to the present.

Meanwhile, Europe itself is rearming at a pace not seen in decades, pushing defence budgets toward or beyond 2% of GDP as it confronts a Russia that now spends more on its military than all of Europe combined, at least in purchasing-power terms. The bill for this war is not just measured in Ukrainian and Russian lives, but in the way it is reshaping economies and political priorities from Warsaw to Washington.

That is the silent backdrop to the “refined framework” now moving between Kyiv, Washington and European capitals. For diplomats, the debate is about clauses: where the ceasefire line lies, how long sanctions stay, what kind of weapons Ukraine can keep. For the people who will spend this winter in trenches, basements and under strained electric grids, the debate is simpler: can any of these men in suits actually stop the killing?

Trump’s promise to end the war quickly, Europe’s insistence on a just peace, Zelensky’s demand that “the aggressor must pay fully for the war he started” — all of these are attempts to put moral shape on a conflict that has already consumed more lives than most leaders will ever admit. Whether the revised plan becomes a path out, or just another chapter in a grinding war of position, will be decided not only in Geneva and Moscow, but in how much more loss Ukrainians and Russians are willing — or forced — to absorb.

As winter settles in, the battlefield is quieter than it was in summer. But the decisions now being drafted in windowless rooms could decide how many winters like this are still to come.

Key Takeaways

• Trump’s original 28-point peace plan asked Ukraine to accept major territorial losses, cap its army and freeze NATO ambitions in exchange for vague security guarantees and phased sanctions relief for Russia.
• European leaders have moved from the sidelines into the centre of the process, backing Zelensky’s efforts to revise the plan so that any ceasefire does not legitimise borders changed by force or lock Ukraine into permanent military weakness.
• Moscow welcomes much of the original U.S. text but rejects European revisions as “completely unconstructive,” seeing efforts to soften clauses on borders, sanctions and Ukraine’s army as breaking an implied deal.
• Both Russia and Ukraine are paying a staggering human price — hundreds of thousands of military casualties and tens of thousands of civilian deaths, with millions displaced and entire regions facing a fourth winter at war.
• Behind the negotiations is a deeper question: can any revised framework stop the killing without rewarding aggression, at a time when both countries’ economies and Europe’s security architecture are being reshaped by the war?

Questions This Article Answers

1. What is Trump’s 28-point peace plan for the Russia–Ukraine war?

   It is a U.S.-drafted framework that originally asked Ukraine to recognise Russian control over Crimea and much of Donbas, freeze front lines in parts of the south, cap its army, and pause NATO ambitions in exchange for phased sanctions relief for Russia and broad, but vague, security guarantees for Ukraine.

2. How have European leaders responded to the 28-point plan?

   Most EU leaders see the plan as a starting point that needs heavy revision. They support Zelensky’s efforts to remove clauses that legitimise territorial conquest, insist that Ukraine’s borders cannot be changed by force, and push for stronger, NATO-like security guarantees instead of paper promises.

3. What is Russia’s position on the revised peace framework?

   The Kremlin has welcomed many elements of the original U.S. draft but rejected a European counter-proposal as “completely unconstructive” and “not working for us.” Russian officials frame attempts to soften clauses on borders, sanctions and Ukraine’s army as backtracking rather than legitimate negotiation.

4. Why is Zelensky insisting that “the aggressor must pay fully for the war he started”?

   Zelensky uses this phrase to argue that any peace must include accountability and compensation from Russia, including decisions on frozen Russian assets. For Ukraine and many European leaders, using those assets for reconstruction is part of making peace just, not merely convenient.

5. How is the war affecting civilians and the economies of Russia and Ukraine?

   Both countries have suffered massive military and civilian casualties, with millions of Ukrainians displaced and entire regions facing repeated attacks on housing and infrastructure. Ukraine’s economy survives on aid and loans amid high inflation, while Russia’s war-fuelled growth is fading into “managed stagnation,” with high military spending, rising taxes and pressure on household incomes.