Steve Rosenberg: Kremlin is silent on leaked plan, but advises kyiv to accept it

It was quite a contrast.

On Thursday, a delegation from the US Pentagon was in Kyiv. They were talking to President Zelensky about a draft plan to end the war in Ukraine.

On the same day, on Russian state television, President Putin was wearing a military uniform. He was talking to his army leaders about the possibility of continuing to fight.

“We have our tasks, our objectives,” declared the Kremlin leader. “The main one is the unconditional achievement of the objectives of the special military operation.”

The Izvestia newspaper called President Putin’s visit to a command post “a signal to the United States that it is willing to negotiate over Ukraine, on Russia’s terms.”

Which brings us back to the peace plan.

On Friday night, President Putin said he had seen the US solution plan for Ukraine.

At a meeting of the Russian Security Council in Moscow, he described the US proposals as a “modernized” version of the plan discussed with Trump at the leaders’ summit in Alaska in August.

President Putin said he thought the plans could form the basis of a final peace deal.

The 28-point proposal, which has been widely leaked and publicized, emerged after a visit to the United States by President Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev. He participated in three days of talks in Miami with President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff.

According to drafts of the peace proposal, Ukraine would cede to Russia parts of the Donbass that are still under kyiv’s control; the Ukrainian armed forces would be reduced in size and Ukraine would promise not to join NATO.

“The effective work of the Russian military should convince Zelensky and his regime that it is better to reach an agreement and do it now,” President Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov previously told reporters in a conference call in the Kremlin.

A peace proposal does not automatically mean peace.

What happens if there is no agreement?

Pro-Kremlin commentators insist that, with or without a deal, Russia will prevail.

“Everyone thought that the idea of ​​a peace agreement had sunk into a quagmire,” wrote the Russian media outlet Moskovsky Komsomolets. “But suddenly, out of this swamp a rocket shot out with a new, or rather an ‘old new’ peace plan, with something from the Alaska summit. It shot out like a spring.

“How long and how far will this missile fly? Will it crash, sabotaged by Europe and kyiv? Even if the launch is a false start, it is unlikely to change the general trend. The balance of power is tilting in favor of Russia.”

But after almost four years of war, Russia is also under pressure. Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military has not only suffered huge losses on the battlefield, but the economy at home is faltering. Russia’s budget deficit is growing and oil and gas revenues are falling.

“Russian industry is between stagnation and decline,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper declared this week.

However, it is unclear whether economic pressures will change President Putin’s calculations and convince him that now is the time to end his so-called special operation: even on terms that many believe benefit Moscow.

Many. But not all.

Some elements of the peace plan have not been well received in Russia. Some reports suggest that Ukraine could be offered security guarantees based on NATO Article 5. That could commit Western allies to treating any future Russian attack on Ukraine as an attack on the transatlantic community as a whole and trigger a combined military response.

“This is, in fact, Ukraine in NATO,” wrote Moskovsky Komsomolets, “only without the deployment of bases and weapons on its territory.”

Full details of the peace plan have yet to be confirmed. We may be entering another period of intense diplomacy.

For now, however, Russia’s war against Ukraine continues.