I am in utter disbelief at the 28-point American peace plan for Ukraine that has been circulating in the news media. Unless it turns out to be an elaborate hoax or a sinister Russian disinformation plot, it marks the lowest point yet in US diplomacy on Ukraine.
For starters, this is not really a peace plan at all, but articles of surrender, legitimising Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and the illegal annexation of its territory while brazenly dividing the spoils of war.
There is too much in this shameful document to discuss in detail here. The main takeaways are these:
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Time and again, it implies that Ukraine and Russia are equally culpable for a brutal war Putin started.
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It creates no mechanism for accountability and justice, even granting general amnesty for Russia’s countless and horrific war crimes.
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It forces Ukraine to relinquish control over vast swaths of its sovereign territory in exchange for vague (and potentially costly) security guarantees.
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It robs the Ukrainian people of the agency to freely choose alliances such as NATO or to determine the size of their armed forces.
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And it creates plenty of opportunities for the US to cash in on whatever reconstruction arrangements will be put in place.
It’s a deal, alright – a great deal for Russia. Putin’s negotiators must have walked away from those consultations with a sense of total victory: all their central demands were met, with complete impunity for the horrors they unleashed on the brave Ukrainian people.
President Zelensky and his European allies should reject this plan and develop a realistic, fair, and feasible proposal of their own, with conditions that are acceptable to Ukraine and respect international law. This is a bamboozle of epic proportions.
As if the terms of this plan weren’t already terrifying enough, the document also marks a remarkable retreat of US leadership, signalling to Putin’s Russia and other authoritarian regimes that violent aggression is perfectly acceptable and, I suspect, even respectable to the US government.
I never thought I’d live to see the US turn into a proponent of appeasement, riding roughshod over the concerns and interests of its closest allies, while trying to please a brutal dictator who appears to have been pulling the strings all along. In some ways, this feels worse than Neville Chamberlain’s failed efforts. At least his heart seemed in the right place…
