The US and Russia have prepared a new 28 point peace plan to end the war caused by Russia’s illegal 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine will have to give up areas of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine that it still controls, to cut significantly the size of its armed forces and to forego many of its weapons.

In the BBC Today Programme on 21 November, International Editor Jeremy Bowen said the plan reads as if it has been dictated by the Kremlin. “Clause 1 says Ukraine’s sovereignty will be confirmed and the other 27 clauses describe all the ways in which Ukraine will lose its sovereignty. There is vague talk of reliable security guarantees and a lot more detail about how the US is going to profit from it.”

And this is despite the fact that, according to an unnamed Ukrainian official talking to CBS, “Presidents Zelensky and Trump have already agreed to stop the conflict along the existing lines of engagement, and there are agreements on granting security guarantees.”

According to the BBC news website, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has recently said that Moscow’s pre-conditions for a peace deal – including ceding territory, tough curbs on the size of Ukraine’s military and the country’s neutrality – had not changed since President Vladimir Putin laid them out in 2024.

On November 21, 2025 Carl Bildt, the former prime minister of Sweden, wrote in a post on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that the 24 points presented by the White House to Ukraine for agreement with Russia is “a collection of the shameful, the naive and the absurd”.

On 22 November, Trump announced that Ukraine had one-week to accept this peace plan.

And Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that the plan can form the basis of final peace settlement. Hardly surprising since the plan includes everything he wants and nothing that Ukraine wants.

Meanwhile Ukrainian President Zelenskiy is working with European states to develop a counter-proposal.

One wonders how much intelligence Trump is applying to this problem. If he gives an illegal invasion his full support then it will only encourage the dictator Putin to invade more countries.

So what is Trump’s motivation? Is he totally stupid? Well not quite.

He wants, perhaps more even than making more money for himself, to win some sort of peace prize. He failed to win the Nobel Prize in 2025 but the world football’s governing body, Fifa, will be awarding a new annual peace prize, with the first award to take place in Washington in December. And there have been heavy hints that he stands a good chance to win it. Bringing peace to Ukraine would no doubt ensure his success.