AMATEUR HOURPeace Plan Presented by the U.S. to Ukraine Reflects Inexperienced, Unrealistic Handling of a Delicate Situation
“It’s amateur hour. We’ve seen this before. With this administration, it puts a lot of very amateurish people – Rubio’s not one of them – in place in important offices, like Steve Witkoff, the special envoy for Russia and Ukraine who is also the special envoy for the Middle East. And they’ve gotten rid of all the professionals. They either just fired some or ran some off,” says Donald Heflin.
As Russian bombs continued to pound Ukraine, a different conflict has blown up over plans to end that almost four-year-long war. The Trump administration on Nov. 20, 2025, formally presented Ukraine with a 28-point proposal to end the war, and President Donald Trump announced the country had until Thanksgiving to sign it. But Ukraine and its European and U.S. allies said the plan heavily favored Russia, requiring Ukraine to give up territory not even held by Russia, diminish the size of its military and, ultimately, place its long-term sovereignty at risk. The Trump administration was accused by policy experts and some lawmakers of fashioning a plan to serve Russia’s interests, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio got enmeshed in an argument with U.S. senators over whether the U.S. or Russia had authored the document. On Nov. 23, Ukrainian and U.S. officials held talks in Geneva, which Rubio declared were “productive and meaningful,” and those negotiations continue. The Conversation U.S. politics editor Naomi Schalit asked longtime diplomat Donald Heflin, now teaching at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, to help make sense of the chaotic events.
I have a whole list of questions to ask you, but my first question is what on earth is going on?
It’s hard to say. Ever since the Trump administration took power for the second time, it’s alternated between leaning towards Russia in this war or being more neutral, with occasional leaning towards Ukraine. They go back and forth.
This particular peace plan gives Russia a lot at once. It gets the size of the Ukrainian army cut down from 800,000-plus to 600,000, when the country is barely hanging on defending itself with 800,000 troops. Russia gets land, including land that it has conquered. A lot of people expected that might be one of the conditions of a Ukraine-Russia peace deal. But this also gives Russia land that it hasn’t taken yet and may never take.
It bars Ukraine from seeking NATO membership. That’s not a huge surprise. That was probably always going to be part of an eventual deal. Ukraine gets security guarantees from the West. Unfortunately, the U.S. gave ironclad security guarantees in 1994 when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons voluntarily. It’s been invaded by Russia twice since then, in 2014 and 2022. So our security guarantees really don’t mean a whole lot in that area of the world.
