A peace deal in flux

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Tuesday, the 25th of November.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard

Up first, a peace plan.

Axios last week revealeda draft of the Trump team’s plan to end the war in Ukraine. It’s a 28- point proposal—one that guarantees security and reconstruction funding, but requires Ukraine to give up territory permanently to Russia.

EICHER: Many in Europe condemned the early outline, but this time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was not among them. Here he is on Friday ahead of talks in Geneva over the weekend.

ZELENSKYY: [Speaking Ukrainian]

Zelenskyy says it’s a choice between the dignity Ukraine loses in the plan or an extremely difficult winter ahead.

Ukrainians in the Western city of Uzhhorod told WORLD’s Caleb Welde the situation at this point is lose-lose.

CHRISTOFOROV: If we give this territory, it not stop the war.

REICHARD: Sasha Christoforov works for a humanitarian group there. He worries the plan rewards the wrong person.

CHRISTOFOROV: Putin is liar. Putin is killer and terrorist, and he wants all Ukraine.

EICHER: Evangelical pastor Vadim Khloba thinks that giving Russia what it failed to win on the battlefield will not produce lasting peace.

VADIM: When we stop this war and Russia will not be punished for what they doing, a couple years and they start again.

So: what’s actually in this plan?

What’s changing after Geneva?

And is anything realistic before Thanksgiving?

Joining us now is George Barros—Russia team lead at the Institute for the Study of War and a former adviser to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

REICHARD: George, good morning.

GEORGE BARROS: Good morning, thanks for having me.

REICHARD: George, what we know about the plan so far is based on reports of drafts, so nothing set in stone. But it sounds as though the White House is using the Gaza peace plan as a template for this one. What stands out to you from what we know so far about this 28-point plan for Ukraine?

BARROS: Yep, the key thing about the plan is that this is not going to be the plan that is going to be executed upon. Over the weekend, we had numerous American officials, including, you know, Steve Witkoff and Marco Rubio and General Keith Kellogg and a variety of other officials explicitly state that the plan is evolving. It's going to be changing. They were listening to the critiques that the Europeans had, that the Ukrainians had when they discussed this on Sunday in Geneva in Switzerland, and they are currently undertaking several revisions to that 28 point plan.

And we could talk about what the initial reported 28 point plan was, but suffice it to say, really, this wasn't a peace plan. It was a plan to give Russia a piece of Ukraine and not give Ukraine the sufficient guarantees that it needs to deter Russia from a future war. So they had several deficiencies. I think the administration is taking a very constructive approach to that, and we'll see what happens when the next iteration of the plan comes forward, but it will likely be a much stronger plan. That said, I strongly suspect the Russians are going to reject it anyway, and that can lead us to some interesting further developments.

REICHARD: Well, let's drill down into that some more. George, when we talked back in August before Trump's meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, you said land swaps would be a no go without robust guarantees of U.S. support for Ukraine. So what do you make of what's on the table this time?

BARROS: Right, the land swaps that's proposed in the current plan, which I suspect are not going to exist in the next plan, are an absolutely no go, even if there were robust guarantees. Because, look, the plan stipulates that Ukraine would lose all of Donetsk Oblast, and it would become a demilitarized zone, and it would be a de facto recognized as Russian terrain. This is a big problem for Ukraine, because Ukraine's best fortified and most defensible terrain right now is, in fact, in the continued part of Donetsk Oblast that Ukrainian forces still maintain. And that's why the Russians are so, you know, vested in having the Ukrainians diplomatically surrender terrain that the Russian military is very unlikely to seize in any sort of short timeline. And really it's very difficult for there to be a credible defense of Ukraine without that terrain, because it's a straight shot across the Steppes of Eastern Europe to go deep into the heart of Ukraine like just as the Russians tried to in 2022 without that lodgment. So that's a big deal there.

Now let's talk about the meat and bones of the security guarantees. The plan talks about how Ukraine should receive NATO-like, Article Five-like security guarantees. And I'm sorry to throw sort of a bit of a bucket of cold water on this, but we can do a better deal for Ukraine than NATO Article Five, because there are deficiencies with NATO, the Article Five. Many people don't know this, but if you actually read the NATO charter and read the language of Article Five, Article Five actually doesn't oblige a military response in reaction to an attack against one of the allies. It says that the member states should take steps as deemed necessary or as to respond to the situation, which can include military force, but it's not an obligation, and we already know that the Russians are engaging in acts of war against Europe, against NATO member states. We had sabotage in Poland. We've had assassinations in the U.K. We've had these unprecedented drone and even manned aircraft airspace incursions into European countries. And NATO has responded and decided actually not to treat these as attacks and to not respond in turn to these sorts of malign Russian acts.

And I actually think that if we were to look at security guarantees and stronger treaty language that is actually likely to deter Russia from going in, we should look to more robust examples. For example, the treaty that the United States has with Japan that the U.S. Senate ratified is much stronger than the deal, than what we've given our NATO allies. The language there really is, if another state attacks Japan and they invoke the treaty, then the United States is obliged to help defend Japan, and that's a much stronger deterrent than Article Five-like language, because, unfortunately, the language is actually quite mushy. But these legal, these legal details matter.

REICHARD: I'm curious, what do you make of Zelensky's willingness to even consider the plan? I mean, in the past, he said giving Russia ill-gotten territory is just a non-starter, as we've mentioned, but now he is negotiating. So what pressures are at play here, you think?

BARROS: Well, the the big issue here is that, I think. Vice President JD Vance, threatened to cut off military aid and intelligence sharing with the Ukrainians if they don't accept this deal by Thanksgiving. That was the original reported deal. And the Ukrainians, of course, understand that their center of gravity for this war is the international coalition, of which the United States plays a big role. And so when you threaten to pull out the American support for Ukraine, that can tank your ability to continue waging a defensive war, and it's a massive issue. So that that is essentially an act of coercion to bring the, the Ukrainians into accepting massive concessions.

Now again, the good news here is it appears that the plan is not going to be executed quite that way. And candidly, I think we need to explore using coercion, not just against the Ukrainians to bring them to the table, but use coercion against the Russians to bring them to the table. Senator Lindsey Graham has a wonderful sanctions bill that can be used to try to bring the Russians to the table. And of course, the U.S. maintains options to destroy more of Russia's oil and gas refineries by giving long range weapons like tomahawks to Ukraine, which would certainly hurt Russia's economy. And perhaps use some sticks to bring them to the table as well. The sad critique that I have about this particular administration's approach to this negotiation seems to be we use more carrots with the Russians, who define us as an adversary, and we tend to use more sticks with the Ukrainians, who are our allies when I think maybe the approach should be inverted.

REICHARD: Right, let's talk about that some more. That early reported drafts do give Russia everything at once: permanent control of captured territory, a road to re-entering the international community. Anything Russia might have to give up in the final deal?

BARROS: There's a couple things that are some minor Russian concessions within the deal as originally reported. So for example, it does state that you would have a lockdown on the southern front line, and that Russia would would no longer have a claim to the other provinces of Kherson and Zaporizhia, which the Russians illegally declared as annexed terrain, even though they don't control it, all of it in 2022. And this deal would, in principle, force the Russians to relinquish their claims on that and for that reason, I think the Russians are very unlikely to do that. I think it's very difficult to compel Putin to try to amend his constitution, because it would be a massive embarrassment to him, but, but that would be a concession. Another concession would be amnesty for war crimes, that one of the points in the reported deal would be amnesty for both sides for war crimes. And essentially that would mean that we let the Russian, you know, war criminals and rapists and murderers who have committed a litany of war crimes that would all, in principle, be lifted.

REICHARD: So there's a lot still up in the air with all this, including buy-in from European allies. George, how likely do you think it is that the President gets Zelensky to sign a deal before Thanksgiving?

BARROS: This is not going to happen before Thanksgiving. I'm fairly confident of that. The recent commentary that we got from Secretary Rubio over Sunday indicated that this is still being workshopped. You know, they're talking, they're sitting, they're receiving feedback. There's counter proposals. I think it's going to take a little bit of time and thinking to develop this deal. And of course, as we head into the Thanksgiving holiday, which is imminently upon us, I think it's very unlikely that we're going to get there, because things move slowly in Washington this week.

REICHARD: George, is there any aspect of this story you think people should be paying more attention to or that is underreported?

BARROS: Couple of closing thoughts here. It seems that President Donald Trump is really trying to rush to a deal, and the timeline seems to be sort of a self imposed one. Whereas Moscow and Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin, they're in no particular rush to get to a deal particularly quickly. I mean, Putin is actually trying to, he's trying to do a variety of things, but he's trying to play a long game here and get to a deal that really benefits Russia.

And you know, one of the points in Donald Trump's book The Art of the Deal is when you're faced with with a bad deal, you walk away. And so I think it would be prudent for the President to heed his own advice and understand that actually there are tools in the American arsenal that we can employ to degrade Russia's negotiating position and get a deal that better puts the American interests first and not let the hasty deal be the enemy of the ideal deal. And really there's no reason for us to rush into it for any event. The frontline is not at a risk of a major collapse, and the longer this war protracts, the hairier and the less sustainable it becomes for Russia. Those are the key things that we should keep in mind.

REICHARD: George Barros is Russia team and Geospatial Intelligence Team Lead for the Institute for the Study of War. George, thanks so much for your time!

BARROS: Of course, thank you so much, Mary, and wish you a happy Thanksgiving.

REICHARD: Same to you.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.