Trump’s Ukraine peace plan draws pushback from Europe and Kyiv

European officials will now have to reprise a role they have played periodically since President Trump’s return to the White House in January: using connections in Washington to try to pull the administration back from a proposal they see as too favorable to Russia.

The Trump administration drafted a 28-point peace plan that calls for Ukraine to make major territorial concessions to Russia and drops demands for a peacekeeping force to deter future attacks by Moscow, U.S. officials said, resurrecting ideas that Kyiv has already rejected.

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

European officials said they hadn’t been involved in drafting the plan and hadn’t so far been briefed on the U.S. proposal. A senior European diplomat said it wasn’t clear whether Europeans will get more information from Washington soon. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment when asked about the peace plan Thursday.

U.S. officials said 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. It isn’t so far clear how receptive Washington is to redrafting the proposal to address Ukrainian or European ideas, or whether the administration would try to impose the plan on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Several senior European diplomats said they remained hopeful that they would be given the opportunity to share their concerns on any plans.

Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said that for any peace plan to work, it needs the support of Ukraine and the Europeans, who have also placed sweeping sanctions on Moscow.

“We have to understand that in this war, there is one aggressor and one victim, and we haven’t heard of any concessions on the Russian side," she told reporters on her way into a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels.

The plan includes several elements that Ukraine and its European allies have long opposed. It says that Ukraine would have to surrender some land in Ukraine’s east that Kyiv still holds. It would place a cap on the size of Ukraine’s military and reduce the type of long-range weapons Kyiv receives from allies, which European officials have warned could open the way for a future Russian attack on Ukraine and more loss of territory.

It would also block a so-called reassurance force that the Europeans have offered to send to Ukraine if there is a peace deal.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said that the Europeans and the Ukrainians want to see peace, but a fair solution is critical.

“We don’t want to see a Ukrainian capitulation, and one can well imagine that the Ukrainians, who have resisted in a heroic way against a brutal Russian invasion for more than three years now, will refuse, in any form, a capitulation," he told reporters.

Kyiv has long argued that any concessions would only encourage Russia to regroup its forces during any extended cease-fire to attack Ukraine again. Zelensky has insisted that any peace deal come with clear security guarantees for his country. He has emphatically rejected the notion of ceding territory in eastern Ukraine, a core demand for Moscow.

Ukraine has built a vast network of defenses across the eastern region known as the Donbas, where Moscow’s forces have been steadily grinding forward in recent months at a high price in human lives. Kyiv’s troops still hold many strategically significant positions in the region, and Ukrainian officials say relinquishing them would give Russia an opportunity to pursue further offensive operations from a position of greater strength.

European countries are now providing the bulk of the budget and military financing for Ukraine, and are currently working on a plan which would release up to $200 billion in immobilized Russian assets in Belgium as a loan for Ukraine. They have pledged to cover Ukraine’s finances for the next two years.

Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com and Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com