Indeed, on November 24, Ukrainian officials announced that after meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other US officials in Geneva, they had developed their own nineteen-point plan. The new project, according to Zelensky, “takes into account many correct elements.”
The next day, Trump announced that Witkoff would travel to Moscow and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll would fly to Kyiv. “Only a few points of disagreement remain,” Trump said. But heading into Thanksgiving, there are essentially two proposals now: Vitkov's plan and Rubio's plan. One suits Russia, the other suits Ukraine. The basic logic of the war has reappeared: Moscow will not accept what Kyiv can stomach.
Throughout Trump's second term, officials in Kyiv have been more willing to make concessions than many observers realize. The country's position on the battlefield, although not catastrophic, is unfavorable. Ukraine lacks sufficient combat-ready infantry, and its drones are unable to fully defend against a Russian onslaught. Russia, although its achievements have come at great cost to its armed forces, has achieved an operational momentum that Ukraine has struggled to stop. The situation on the Southern Front, in the Zaporozhye region, became as alarming as in the East, where the battle for the city of Pokrovsk attracted the most attention. The Ukrainian military is questioning the competence of the top command and the ability of its troops to hold the line. According to Balazs Jarabik, a former European diplomat with extensive connections in Kyiv, security officials told him that “Armageddon is coming.”
Meanwhile, a corruption scandal erupted in Kyiv earlier this month in which several senior officials, including a longtime Zelensky confidant with interests in the energy and drone sectors, were implicated in a hundred million dollar kickback scheme. NABUThe independent anti-corruption watchdog that Zelensky tried but failed to bring under his control this summer has released a series of incriminating CCTV recordings. In the video, the suspect complains that his back hurts from the large number of bags of money; another says it's not worth spending money on protecting electrical substations from Russian attack – an infuriating statement in a winter of rolling blackouts. “The scandal shook the state to its core,” Jarabik said. “Everyone was wondering: who else is on these tapes?” Zelensky, even if he did not take a direct part in this, remained politically wounded.
The country's financial crisis has also become too acute to ignore. The European Commission estimates that over the next two years Ukraine will need more than one hundred and thirty billion euros to fill the holes in its budget. With Trump in the White House, this money is unlikely to come from the United States. In theory, the problem could be solved with an EU proposal that would reportedly provide Ukraine with one hundred and forty billion euros from an even larger amount of frozen Russian assets held in Europe. However, these efforts have stalled, and the amounts may never reach Ukraine; Belgium, home to Euroclear, one of the main securities depositories on the continent, is wary of taking sole legal responsibility for the maneuver.
The Kremlin is well aware of the pressure that Zelensky and the Ukrainian state are under. In any case, Putin constantly overestimates this factor. “He believes that in order to get what he wants, he just needs to put in a little more effort,” Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russian Eurasian Center, told me. “He will squeeze out every last drop. Trump will twist Ukraine's arm, otherwise the country will be weakened to such an extent that it will have no choice.”
This does not mean that Russia has absolutely no reason to consider a deal. Oil prices are falling. U.S. sanctions imposed in October on Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia's two biggest oil companies, have eaten into the Kremlin's most important revenue stream, with revenue from oil and gas sales down by about a quarter this month from a year earlier. Importers in India and China, two of the most important markets for Russian oil, have reduced or even canceled their purchases. Meanwhile, Ukraine has stepped up a campaign of drone strikes against oil refineries and refineries in Russia. In terms of the war effort, the number of conscripts fell to a two-year low this summer. Some Russian regions, faced with local budget shortfalls, have cut the large signing bonuses they handed out to recruits.
