It had emerged from a closed-door meeting in Miami, where Steve Witkoff — a Trump-aligned real estate developer — convened with Jared Kushner and Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin-linked head of a sanctioned Russian sovereign wealth fund.²
What they produced wasn’t a treaty. It was, as one European official later called it, “a transaction disguised as a ceasefire.”³
The plan proposed sweeping concessions from Ukraine: troop caps, constitutional neutrality, frozen front lines, and recognition of Russian control over Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk.⁴ In return, Russia faced no conditions for withdrawal, no penalties, and no admissions. It was a reset button — paid for with Ukrainian territory.
By the time senators confronted Marco Rubio about it in Halifax, he dismissed the document as “not the administration’s position” and “essentially a Russian wish list.”⁵ But within 24 hours, under visible pressure from Vice President J.D. Vance — who had vocally supported the proposal — Rubio reversed course on social media: “The peace proposal was authored by the U.S.… based on input from the Russian side.”⁶
The backpedal caught everyone off guard. A spokesperson for the State Department flatly contradicted Rubio’s earlier remarks, calling the senators’ account “blatantly false.”⁷
“It was damage control stacked on damage control,” said a senior Republican aide involved in national security discussions. “Rubio got boxed in. Vance went off-script. And the NSC? They weren’t even briefed.”
President Zelensky didn’t name names. He didn’t need to. “Ukraine wants peace,” he said. “But not the kind written by people who’ve never heard an air raid siren.”⁸
The language of the plan did little to reassure. Passive constructions like “It is expected that Russia will not invade its neighbors” and “Ukraine will receive reliable security guarantees” left obligations undefined. Zaporizhzhia’s nuclear plant, still under Russian occupation, was to be “launched” jointly — no mention of withdrawal.⁹
Point 14 stood out. It promised $100 billion in frozen Russian assets to rebuild Ukraine — with 50% of the profits going to U.S.-led firms.¹⁰
“It’s reverse reparations,” said the same EU official who reviewed the draft. “Russia razes a country, then recovers its cash — and America earns the fee.”
Back in Washington, the document had no clear owner. Trump endorsed it loosely. Rubio wobbled. The Bulwark reported that Vance had quietly helped orchestrate the Miami meeting — possibly without fully informing Rubio or Trump.¹¹
In Geneva, European officials moved quickly. France and Germany released a revised framework stripping out the territorial clauses and conditioning any talks on Russian withdrawal.¹² “This isn’t peacemaking,” a French diplomat told Le Monde. “It’s surrender laundering.”
Meanwhile, the war continued.
In a hospital outside Kharkiv, 22-year-old Maksym stared at a cracked television screen as the plan scrolled past in muted captions. He’d lost his leg to a drone strike the day before. “They’re drawing maps,” he said, “like we’re not still bleeding.”