GENEVA — The Trump administration’s peace plan for Ukraine encountered yeoman resistance from European leaders and lawmakers in the United States on Sunday as officials of the United States, Ukraine, and key European Union states opened talks here even as new Russian strikes hit Nikopol and fighting erupted in Pokrovsk. The broad 28-point blueprint would lock in Russian territorial gains and limit Ukraine’s future security, Nov. 23, 2025.
U.S., Ukrainian, and European envoys convened formal talks in the afternoon at Geneva’s InterContinental hotel, pitching changes ahead of President Donald Trump’s Nov. 27 deadline for Kyiv to take or leave the final outlines of the plan. A recent Reuters report from Geneva states that European leaders regard the Trump peace plan merely as a basis for negotiations, not a take-it-or-leave-it offer.
As detailed by the Associated Press, the Trump peace plan would include Washington acknowledging Russia’s sway over Crimea and parts of Luhansk and Donetsk; freezing front lines in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia; banning Ukraine from NATO in perpetuity, capping its army at 600,000 soldiers, and dropping some legal claims against Moscow.
While Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has said his country is open to the U.S. draft as a starting point for negotiations on peace — but also warned that if Kyiv rejects these terms, his forces would continue to advance — Ukraine’s leaders argue that such terms would guarantee an occupation or even reward aggression rather than deter it.
Meanwhile, at this weekend’s Group of 20 summit in South Africa, European leaders said the plan requires “further work” to safeguard Ukrainian interests, even as they aim to avoid a public clash with Trump. They told Reuters they had also directed security advisers from France, Britain, and Germany to work closely with Kyiv in the run-up to the Geneva meeting.
In Washington, the bipartisan Congressional Ukraine Caucus denounced the Trump plan for peace as “unacceptable,” arguing that it prejudices “the interests of the aggressor,” Vladimir Putin, coerces Ukraine into dropping its Nato aspirations, and makes Europe more susceptible to future Russian depredation. In a sharp statement on Friday, the caucus called on U.S. and European negotiators to reject any framework that would compel Kyiv to cede additional territory or water down sanctions.
The plan is also coming under intense scrutiny in the Senate. A few senators on the call, according to an account of the conversation published by The Associated Press and other outlets, described their private discussions with foreign officials as tantamount to Trump’s insistence that Ukraine adopt a push from Russia. “We’re not playing today,” Senator Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said he had told a Ukrainian politician who came visiting. “They were joking with us,” he added, cracking wise about people in Brussels at NATO headquarters who sing his adoration.
Trump and his aides argue that the Trump peace plan is just a starting point. The president has said it is not his “final offer,” and urged that a tough compromise is necessary to stop the bloodshed, while negotiators huddled in Geneva can revise language that Ukraine and its allies find most objectionable.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has cautioned that his country may be forced to choose between its sovereignty and continued U.S. support if it accepts such a deal now. According to Reuters, Kyiv is working with European partners on counterproposals even as Trump ties progress in negotiations to the fate of U.S. intelligence and weapons aid.
Some of the most salient features of Trump’s current peace plan have come from previous trial balloons floated by his advisers. A Reuters analysis in December 2024 outlined proposals that would freeze the frontline, remove NATO membership from the table, and put pressure on Kyiv to make major territorial concessions, raising early alarm among European officials.
Even before his return to office, Trump had repeatedly said that, as president, he could end the war in “24 hours.” An Associated Press report from July 2024 added that Russia’s United Nations ambassador publicly dismissed the promise as infeasible, underscoring how few details Trump provided about what a settlement would look like.
Later that year, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty report on proposals from the adviser, Keith Kellogg, outlined suggestions to freeze the front lines and compel Kyiv and Moscow to enter direct talks — ideas that are present, in a harsher form, in Mr. Trump’s plan for peace today.
Diplomats trade formulas in Switzerland while Russian forces pound Ukrainian towns. In the region of Dnipropetrovsk, drones and artillery targeted the Nikopol area and Pokrovsk nearby, killing two men and wounding five people, regional officials cited by the country’s national news agency Ukrinform reported.
On Saturday, Ukrainian officials reported that the Nikopol district had been struck more than 60 times in individual attacks, killing at least one woman and injuring several residents and single-handedly destroying homes, farms, and power lines — all of it just part of Russia’s habit of escalating terror whenever negotiations are near, a navy spokesman said.
Further to the east, there is still heavy fighting for Pokrovsk, a strategic hub. Russian and Ukrainian troops have fought for weeks alongside shattered apartment blocks while Kyiv rushes special forces and extra artillery to the front in Pokrovsk, a recent Reuters report on the fighting there and briefings by the Ukrainian armed forces show.
Analysts warn that if Pokrovsk falls, Moscow may get a springboard for strikes on more significant Ukrainian-held cities, like Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, even though Ukraine says its defenses are stabilizing and denies that its troops there have been encircled.
And as the Trump peace plan moves from a leaked draft to formal negotiations in Geneva, European governments and many in Congress are seeking to strike a balance between wanting a cease-fire and fearing it could reward aggression. For civilians under fire in Nikopol and the defenders dug in around Pokrovsk, the question is whether any deal will provide a measure of protection or merely ratify the violence they are already suffering.
