Trump's Ukraine plan – Who's against it?

European leaders are desperately trying to buy Ukraine more time to work out a new ceasefire framework with Russia after the Trump administration imposed a Thanksgiving deadline, with top US officials hammering the point that this is turning into an ultimatum, Bloomberg reports. Europe scrambles for time after US sets Ukraine an ultimatum. Then EU 'offers' changes to Trump’s plan – no division of Ukraine; no limiting military.

Zelenskiy and leaders in France, Germany and across Europe are rushing to respond to US demands that Ukraine agree to the 28-point plan circulated by next Thursday. Their approach, according to people familiar, is careful: how to essentially re-write much of the document but present it as constructive updates.

In a sign of the panic setting in, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz rushed to pick up the phone to President Donald Trump to agree to more discussions in coming days at the level of national security advisers.

Driscoll briefed European ambassadors earlier that a deal had to be done sooner rather than later, said the people who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. He told the envoys that Ukraine was in a bad position and now was the time for peace, the people said. He added that President Trump wanted a peace deal now.

The US president seemed to take a tough line when asked late Friday about the issue. If Ukraine doesn’t agree, he appeared ready to wash his hands of the conflict. As an enforcer of that message, Driscoll bluntly told them he was not there to negotiate on the details.

“He’ll have to like it — and if he doesn’t like it, then, you know, they should just keep fighting I guess,” Trump said, adding of Zelenskiy that “at some point he’s going to have to accept something.”

“Europe has been trying really hard to come up with this solid and unified stance on this. And I think what this plan potentially does is throw all that effort to the wind and create a scenario where Europeans really have to go back to the drawing board,” said Rachel Rizzo, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center.

The plan floated by US and Russian envoys would force Kyiv to cede large chunks of territory taken by Russia, cap the size of its military and see sanctions on Moscow lifted over time.

Under the plan, a copy of which was seen by Bloomberg News, the Ukrainian regions of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk would be “recognized as de facto Russian, including by the United States,” Ukraine would also be required to hold elections in 100 days, give up any hope of NATO membership and slash the size of its armed forces.

The US has threatened to cut all military and intelligence support to Ukraine if it doesn’t agree to a deal by next Thursday, the people said.

But as the initial shock of the plan faded, some officials argued it was a repeat of the past when Trump put forward a demand, Zelenskiy and Europe resisted, and the US president backed off.

Others are more pessimisitc and believe the very foundations of the transtatlantic alliance and security order are at stake.

“I find it very hard to believe that a proposal this far-reaching could be hammered out in a way that would be agreeable, not just to the Russians and Ukrainians but the Europeans in some fashion,” Meghan O’Sullivan, director of the Belfer Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, told Bloomberg Television. “I am a big believer in putting hard-core ideas on the table as a starting point, but expecting it could be resolved and these issues could be negotiated by Thursday seems inconceivable to me.”

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