Trump administration pushes new plan for ending Ukraine war

The administration is attempting the same approach it used to achieve a U. S.-brokered cease-fire in Gaza last month—draft a multi-point outline and then push the warring parties to accept it, officials said.

But the blueprint, which was worked out by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner in consultation with Kremlin confidant Kirill Dmitriev, is likely to run into strong opposition in Kyiv and from European governments, according to a European official.

President Trump supports the new plan, which materialized after he told aides to craft new proposals that include incentives for the two sides to reach a deal, officials said. The U.S. is counting on Russia’s desire for revived economic relations with the West and Ukraine’s need for reconstruction funds to catalyze an agreement.

Trump’s yearlong effort to broker a peace deal hasn’t yielded results so far. He held a summit with Russian Vladimir Putin in Alaska and multiple meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky has expressed willingness to pause the war to start negotiations, while Putin has issued maximalist demands that have frustrated Trump and his aides.

On Wednesday, Trump again lamented that his relationship with Putin hadn’t led to a swiftly brokered peace deal. Trump had promised during the 2024 presidential campaign to negotiate such a deal within 24 hours of his return to the White House. “I’m a little disappointed in President Putin right now, he knows that," Trump said.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump “has grown frustrated with both sides for their refusal to commit to a peace agreement." But, she continued, “the president and his team never gives up, and the United States has been working on a detailed and acceptable plan for both sides to stop the killing and create a durable, lasting peace."

As the administration renews its push for a peace deal, Trump’s top envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, has told colleagues that he is planning to leave his position in January, an administration official said. Kellogg has been one of Kyiv’s most ardent supporters within the administration.

U.S. officials familiar with the proposal said it calls for Ukraine to hand over all of the eastern Donbas region to Russia, including land Kyiv now controls. Ukraine would have to agree at least for several years to abandon joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Kyiv wouldn’t be permitted to have an international peacekeeping force inside the country. Kyiv and European nations have seen such a force as vital to deter future Russian attacks after a peace settlement is agreed upon.

In return, Moscow would promise not to further attack Ukraine or other countries in Europe, according to the officials, and would codify that promise in legislation.

Elements of Trump’s new plan track closely to what Putin offered during August meetings with Witkoff and later during a summit with Trump in Alaska.

Trump doesn’t view it as his job to get Ukraine back its land that Russia has already taken, a senior administration official said. Instead, he is aiming for a deal that halts the fighting concentrated in eastern Ukraine, where Russian forces have made slow but steady territorial gains at great cost nearly four years after Moscow’s full-scale invasion.

However Ukraine and other European nations have long argued that yielding to Russia’s core demands would seriously undermine Kyiv’s sovereignty and security. The plan reverses a position Ukraine and U.S. allies have pressed Trump to adopt—that Kyiv should not be forced to hand over any territory unilaterally that its forces control.

Analysts say that forcing Ukraine to withdraw from the Donbas—where it has mounted its greatest resistance to Russian advances and still holds strategically important defensive positions—would make it easier for the Kremlin’s forces to push into other regions of the country.

The Trump administration hasn’t clarified what guarantees the U.S. and its allies would provide Kyiv. Trump officials indicated in August that the U.S. could provide air support and other indirect help for a European-led “reassurance force" that would be deployed in Ukraine after a peace settlement was reached to deter future Russian attacks.

Russia has strongly opposed such a peacekeeping force, which would be ruled out under the new plan, which was previously reported by Axios.

Proponents of the U.S. proposal say Russia’s steady but incremental gains on the battlefield and a corruption scandal involving associates of Zelensky will add pressure on Kyiv to make a deal. But that assumption was challenged by one Western official, who said that Zelensky has even less room to maneuver as a result of a corruption probe and that backing away from his country’s fundamental security positions would only further erode his standing at home.

European allies have been caught off guard by reports of the plan. Johann Wadephul, Germany’s foreign affairs minister, told reporters Wednesday that his country hadn’t been briefed on the specifics of the proposal. Various officials said the framework as they understood it featured many elements on the Kremlin’s wishlist long deemed to be unacceptable.

The new Trump plan marks a shift in the White House’s position in September when the president mused publicly about providing long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine and said that Kyiv was in a position to win back all of its lost territory because Russia was in economic trouble.

“I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form," Trump said in a social-media post then.

Last month Trump canceled a planned second summit with Putin and said it would be a “waste" because the Kremlin hadn’t signaled flexibility from its maximalist demands.

Earlier this week, as Russian attacks on Kyiv and other cities killed dozens of civilians, Ukraine announced that it used U.S.-provided Army Tactical Missile Systems missiles to strike inside Russia, the first time it has launched the weapon against targets on sovereign Russia territory since Trump returned to office. Previously, the Trump administration had restricted Kyiv’s cross-border employment of the missile.

The details about Trump’s new plan emerged as U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and two senior U.S. Army generals met in Kyiv with Ukraine’s defense minister and chief of defense to discuss battlefield plans and potential peace talks in meetings; it marked the highest-level visit by American officials since Trump returned to the White House.

Though Driscoll was briefed by Witkoff before heading to Ukraine, he didn’t plan to outline any of the ideas in the proposal, according to a U.S. defense official.

Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com, Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com, Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com