Indeed, on November 24th, Ukrainian officials announced that, after meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other U.S. officials, in Geneva, they had come up with their own, nineteen-point plan. In the new draft, Zelensky said, “many of the right elements have been taken into account.”
The next day, Trump announced that Witkoff would travel to Moscow, and Dan Driscoll, the Secretary of the Army, would fly to Kyiv. “There are only a few remaining points of disagreement,” Trump said. But, heading into the Thanksgiving holiday, there are now essentially two proposals: a Witkoff plan and a Rubio plan. One suits Russia, the other Ukraine. The war’s essential logic has again revealed itself: Moscow won’t accept what Kyiv can stomach.
Throughout Trump’s second term, officials in Kyiv have appeared more willing to make concessions than many observers realize. The country’s situation on the battlefield, while not catastrophic, is unfavorable. Ukraine lacks sufficient numbers of combat-ready infantry, and its drones are not able to fully defend against the Russian onslaught. Russia, though its advances have come at enormous cost to its forces, has achieved an operational momentum that Ukraine has struggled to halt. The situation in the southern front, around Zaporizhzhia, has become as worrying as that in the east, where the battle for the city of Pokrovsk has attracted the most attention. Members of the Ukrainian military are questioning the competency of the top command and the ability of their forces to hold the line. According to Balazs Jarabik, a former European diplomat with extensive connections in Kyiv, security officials have told him that “Armageddon is coming.”
Meanwhile, a corruption scandal unfolded in Kyiv earlier this month in which several top officials, including a longtime Zelensky confidant with interests in the energy and drone sectors, were implicated in a hundred-million-dollar kickback scheme. NABU, an independent anticorruption body that Zelensky had tried but failed to bring under his authority this summer, released a series of incriminating surveillance tapes. In the videos, a suspect complains that his back hurts from carrying so many bags of cash; another says it’s not worth spending the money to protect electrical substations from Russian attack—an infuriating statement in a winter of rolling blackouts. “The scandal shook the state to the core,” Jarabik said. “Everyone was wondering, Who else is on these tapes?” Zelensky, even if not directly involved, was left politically wounded.
The country’s fiscal crisis has also become too acute to ignore. According to estimates by the European Commission, over the next two years Ukraine will need more than a hundred and thirty billion euros to fill holes in its budget. With Trump in the White House, that money is not likely coming from the U.S. In theory, the problem could be solved by an E.U. proposal, which would reportedly provide Ukraine with a hundred and forty billion euros from an even larger sum of frozen Russian assets that are being held in Europe. However, that effort has stalled, and the sums may never reach Ukraine; Belgium, the home of Euroclear, one of the continent’s chief securities depositories, is wary of taking on the sole legal responsibility for the maneuver.
The Kremlin is keenly aware of the pressures that Zelensky and the Ukrainian state are under. If anything, Putin has consistently overestimated this factor. “He thinks for him to get what he wants he just needs to push a bit more,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, told me. “He will squeeze every last drop. Trump will twist Ukraine’s arm or the country will be weakened to the point that it has no choice.”
That’s not to say that Russia is entirely without its own reasons to consider a deal. Oil prices are down. U.S. sanctions imposed in October on Rosneft and Lukoil, two of Russia’s largest oil companies, have eaten into the Kremlin’s most important revenue stream—this month, income from oil-and-gas sales was down about a quarter from a year ago. Importers in India and China, the two most important markets for Russian oil, have scaled down or even cancelled their purchases. Meanwhile, Ukraine has stepped up its campaign of drone strikes on refining and processing facilities inside Russia. As for the military effort, enlistment numbers fell to a two-year low this summer. Some Russian regions, facing local budget crunches, have cut the large signing bonuses they were handing out to new recruits.
