On November 21, Ukrainians found themselves staring at a peace proposal that demanded near-immediate acceptance. The leaked twenty-eight-point peace plan, drafted by Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian official Kirill Dmitriev, reads like a real estate transaction. Russia gets the land, the United States takes its cut, Europe foots the bill, and Ukraine can choose between surrendering now or surrendering later. Under pressure, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, addressed the nation bluntly: “Loss of dignity or of a key partner. Twenty-eight difficult points or an extraordinarily difficult winter.”

Stunned European leaders — taken aback by the initiative’s provisions — scrambled to improvise counterproposals. Amid outrage in the White House over the leak, emergency talks in Geneva produced a revised nineteen-point framework, deferring the hardest questions to future high-level dialogue. Trump declared ”tremendous progress” and announced Witkoff’s sixth visit to Moscow this year. The Kremlin, meanwhile, dismissed European revisions and signaled that only the initial twenty-eight points matched the “spirit of Anchorage” — that is, Trump’s overtures to Vladimir Putin at their summit in Alaska this summer. Russia has made it clear that it remains ready to achieve its overall aims through military means — a position that leaves little room for compromise.

Thanksgiving passed, and Ukraine’s position weakened further. On November 28, just before his departure to Miami for another round of consultations, Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff and lead peace negotiator, resigned after anti-corruption investigators raided his home as part of a $100 million energy sector kickback probe. That same day, reports emerged that Washington was prepared to unilaterally recognize Russian control over Crimea and other occupied territories. The next day, Ukraine’s former commander in chief Valeriy Zaluzhny lamented the absence of clear political goals, noting that even a temporary peace could offer a window to recover and prepare for what comes next.