Ukraine under pressure amid reports Russia and US have devised a secret peace plan

Ukraine could face some tough choices amid reports that the US and Russia have secretly formulated a peace plan to end the war, potentially including significant concessions to Moscow.

Senior US military officials are in Ukraine on Thursday “on a fact finding mission to meet with Ukrainian officials and discuss efforts to end the war” with Russia, a US army spokesman said.

The visit comes a day after media reports suggested Washington and Moscow had held secret talks and devised a new 28-point peace plan for Ukraine, without Kyiv’s involvement.

The 28-point plan — first reported by Axios but followed by other media, including the Financial Times and Reuters, citing unnamed sources — allegedly contains proposals for Ukraine to concede territory in its eastern Donbas region to Russia, abandon certain categories of weaponry and reduce the size of its armed forces by 50%, among other conditions.

One report in The Telegraph newspaper suggested that Russia could take control of the Donbas region despite Ukraine maintaining legal ownership, with Moscow essentially paying rent for the land.

CNBC was unable to confirm the information contained within the media reports.

A senior Ukrainian official told Reuters that Kyiv had received “signals” about a set of US proposals to end the war, but that Kyiv had had no role in preparing the proposals, the unnamed source said.

The Kremlin on Wednesday denied that there had been any “innovations on possible peace proposals” since Russian President Vladimir Putin had met US President Donald Trump in August.

When asked specifically about the Axios report, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there was nothing he could share publicly.

Meanwhile, the White House has not explicitly confirmed the existence of the 28-point peace plan, reportedly modelled on the Gaza peace agreement, but US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that new proposals were in the works.

“Ending a complex and deadly war such as the one in Ukraine requires an extensive exchange of serious and realistic ideas,” Mr Rubio posted on X overnight Wednesday.

“Achieving a durable peace will require both sides to agree to difficult but necessary concessions. That is why we are and will continue to develop a list of potential ideas for ending this war based on input from both sides of this conflict,” he said.

Ukraine in a corner?

Ukraine leadership has not publicly commented on the 28-point plan, but peace proposals are expected to form part of Thursday’s talks between President Volodymyr Zelensky and the US delegation of military officials.

On Wednesday, Mr Zelensky commented that “only President Trump and the United States have sufficient power to make this war come to an end.”

He said Kyiv had “supported every decisive step and the leadership of (President Trump), every strong and fair proposal aimed at ending this war,” and added that Ukraine was “ready to work in any other meaningful formats that could yield results.”

Ukraine’s First Deputy Foreign Minister Serhii Kyslytsia addressed reports of the peace plan head-on, however, suggesting in a post on X that Moscow was behind a push to hype up “a factory of unrealistic plans.”

Whether Ukraine would accept such concessions to end the war is highly uncertain, with pushback likely.

However, Kyiv finds itself in a vulnerable position given its reliance on the US for military aid, and although it still has staunch support from its European allies, military and financial aid are slower to materialise now than in the early days of the war.

Still, European diplomats appear unhappy at the reports of a peace plan lacking Ukrainian or regional involvement, with the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas commenting Thursday that “for any plan to work, it needs to have Ukrainians and Europeans on board.”

“In this war, there is one aggressor and one victim. So far, we haven’t heard of any concessions from Russia’s side,” she told reporters.

Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War said that if the reports are true, the 28-peace plan would amount to “Ukraine’s full capitulation and would set conditions for renewed Russian aggression against Ukraine.”

“The reported proposed peace plan would deprive Ukraine of critical defensive positions and capabilities necessary to defend against future Russian aggression, apparently in exchange for nothing,” the ISW analysts said Wednesday.

They noted it would “give this significant land to Russia — apparently for no specified compromise — sparing Russia the time, effort, and manpower that it could use elsewhere in Ukraine during renewed aggression.”

The ISW concluded that the plan, if verified, showed Russia’s maximalist territorial demands on Ukraine had essentially not changed since the initial invasion in 2022.

“This reported peace plan is fundamentally the same as Russia’s 2022 Istanbul demands, which Russia presented to Ukraine when the circumstances on the battlefield appeared to favor Russia more heavily.”