The peace plan designed by the United States with Russia asks kyiv to limit its Army to a maximum of 600,000 men after the war, rules out the entry of and the invaded country to withdraw from the territory it still controls in its eastern region of the country, which would remain after the war as a demilitarized zone and would be recognized de facto internationally as Russian.
The other two regions in dispute, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, would remain under the control of each of the sides according to the partition that marks the front line at the time of the cessation of hostilities, according to the document, which has been published among others by and by Washington, a think tank specialized in conflicts and that has followed the development of this since its origins, becoming a world reference.
The Ukrainian Army currently has around 900,000 troops and kyiv has insisted that it needs to maintain an Armed Forces large enough and well-armed enough after the war to deter Russia from invading its territory again.
The Donbas region in eastern Ukraine comprises the two administrative units of Luhansk and Donetsk. Russia controls practically all of Lugansk and around 75% of Donetsk, where Kremlin forces have been slowly but steadily gaining ground for more than two years.
The occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe and under Russian control since the beginning of the invasion, would distribute electricity equally to the Ukrainian side and the Russian side.
If this peace plan ends up being signed, which was negotiated in secret and behind the backs of Ukraine and the EU in recent weeks by the White House and the Kremlin, President Volodymyr Zelensky will have to submit to elections within a period of one hundred days from the entry into force of the document.
but Ukrainian law prohibits voting while the country is at war and he remains in office indefinitely until elections can be held again.
The document – which kyiv said it is willing to negotiate after receiving it yesterday from Pentagon representatives – also provides that Ukraine must guarantee religious freedom and recognize the right to use Russian in the educational system and the media, something that is now de facto prohibited.
Another section of the plan contemplates the prohibition in Ukraine of “all Nazi ideology and activities.” The Kremlin has used as an argument for its invasion the alleged Nazi ideology that would have penetrated the Ukrainian Army and Government after the overthrow in 2014 in a wave of massive street protests of the last pro-Russian president of Ukraine.
In its current form, the plan also guarantees amnesty for all actors involved in the war, and plans to allocate part of Russia’s frozen assets in the West to a reconstruction process in Ukraine that the United States would lead.
Russia would be fully reintegrated into the international trading system and Ukraine would renounce the deployment of NATO troops on its territory, a measure that constitutes in kyiv’s eyes the only viable security alternative to its already almost ruled out entry into the Alliance.
What does kyiv say?
For now, President Zelensky affirms that he is willing to work “honestly” with the United States, after receiving the draft of the peace plan to end the war with Russia.
It was unclear to what extent Ukraine had been involved in crafting the plan, but White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the United States had been “equally involved with both sides.” In a separate statement, Zelensky’s office said Ukraine had “agreed to work on the provisions of the plan in a way that achieves a just end to the war.”
The president said he hoped to speak with the US president in the coming days about the proposals, but Leavitt rejected suggestions that the plan required significant concessions from Ukraine and said the US president “supports” it.
The U.S. special envoy and the U.S. secretary of state had been quietly working on a proposal for about a month and had reached out to both sides “to understand what these countries would commit to in order to achieve a lasting and resilient peace,” Leavitt said.
“It is a good plan for both Russia and Ukraine,” he added, without giving further details. «We believe it will be acceptable to both parties. And we are working hard to make it happen.”
A senior US official, who preferred to remain anonymous, stated that the plan “was drawn up immediately after discussions with one of the most senior members of President Zelensky’s government, Rustem Umerov, who accepted most of the plan, after making several modifications, and presented it to President Zelensky.”
