Separate talks between the governments of the U.S. with Russia and Ukraine are taking place over alternative plans aimed at a potential end to Moscow’s war on Ukraine. The sole concern of President Donald Trump’s administration is to impose stability and set the stage to improve collaboration with Moscow, to advance the interests of the U.S. rulers, not Ukraine’s sovereignty, regardless of the resolve of working people there to defend it.
The talks were spurred when a leaked 28-point “peace” plan drawn up by negotiators from the White House and the Kremlin became public Nov. 19. And U.S. government sources reported Trump had given Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky until Thanksgiving to accept the package or all bets were off.
Trump wants to lift U.S.-led economic sanctions and facilitate the reintegration of Russia into the global capitalist economy. He wants to allow Moscow to rejoin the G8 grouping of imperialist governments. He hopes to pull Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime away from the embrace of Beijing, Washington’s primary global competitor, as the U.S. rulers try to shore up their declining world supremacy in the fight over profits, markets and resources.
Washington also looks to use a settlement to reassert its domination over “allied” imperialist governments in Europe.
The leaked proposal has now been dropped by Washington in favor of a revised 19-point plan issued Nov. 24 after talks between officials from the U.S. and Ukraine, joined later by representatives of capitalist powers in Europe.
The new plan postpones a decision on Putin’s demand that Ukraine cede territory that Moscow has failed to conquer. It eliminates the proposal, initially agreed to by negotiators for Moscow and Washington, that Ukraine cut the size of its armed forces by more than half. It leaves open the possibility Ukraine could join the imperialist-led NATO military alliance, a move that is fiercely opposed by Moscow.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Nov. 25 that Moscow will not agree to anything other than the plan it had cooked up exclusively with Washington.
One of Moscow’s main demands is Kyiv surrender its hold on about 25% of Donetsk province that Russian forces have never been able to take in 11 years of war. Moscow’s forces currently occupy 20% of Ukrainian territory, including all of the Crimean Peninsula, home to a largely pro-Ukraine Tatar people.
After years of grueling battles against the attempt to subjugate Ukraine, working people there remain determined to defend the country, having successfully repelled Moscow’s drive to seize Kyiv in 2022.
“Are we defending our borders here just to give them away? What’s the point of all this, of all these sacrifices?” Vitalii Traikalo, a Ukrainian soldier at a front-line artillery position near Pokrovsk told Reuters. Ukrainian forces had just cleared the center of that city of Russian troops.
Putin demands all of Donbas
Taking all of the rich industrial and mining regions of Donetsk and Luhansk has always been a key war goal for the Kremlin. Thousands of Ukrainians have given their lives defending this territory. And under the initial Washington-Moscow proposal, thousands more would have been displaced, forced to flee murderous repression under Moscow’s expanded occupation.
Ceding territory in the Donetsk cities of Slovyansk, Kramatorsk and Druzhkivka, where a quarter of a million people live, is unacceptable to most Ukrainians. In a year of trying to capture the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, Putin has sacrificed the lives of Russian workers in uniform in vast numbers in its “meat-grinder” offensive, with an average of over 1,000 casualties a day.
Nadiya, a resident of Slovyansk, witnessed the original seizure of the city in 2014 by Russian forces. She rejected Moscow’s claims that it was carried out by the local people and pointed to Ukrainian struggles to defend the city since.
“All these years, people died for what, so that we’d just hand it over?” she told Current Time news network correspondent Andriy Kuzakov. She said she believed the land would “remain Ukraine, I’m absolutely certain of it. If I hadn’t been certain, I would have left.”
The Ukrainian government has called for a meeting between President Volodymyr Zelensky and Trump by the end of November to thrash out questions left unresolved in the new 19-point plan. Zelensky predicted Moscow would try to “derail this opportunity for an agreement and to prolong the war.”
Zelensky warned that Ukraine “may now face a very difficult choice: either loss of dignity, or the risk of losing a key partner.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin will only agree to a deal that leaves Ukraine seriously weakened and keeps open possibilities for advancing his goal of conquering all the country. He says there is no basis for an independent Ukraine, whose existence he blames on V.I. Lenin and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which fought for the right of oppressed nations to self determination.
The scale of the death and destruction being orchestrated by Putin’s expansionist capitalist regime is described in a joint appeal for solidarity with Ukraine issued Nov. 16 by the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU) and the Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine (FPU).
Ukraine unions appeal for solidarity
Addressed to unions in countries in Europe, it notes how Moscow’s war has turned “into a prolonged terror against workers, trade unions and peaceful communities.” It notes that houses, hospitals, factories, and schools have been demolished. The jobs and entire communities of workers in front-line regions are being destroyed.
Ukraine’s energy and other critical infrastructure, “everything that sustains the lives of millions of people,” are being targeted. “In the first eight months of 2025 alone, 766 workers were injured and 154 were killed while doing their jobs,” the appeal said. Numerous trade union offices have been hit.
Putin has stepped up his deadly missile and drone assault. At least seven people were killed by Moscow’s aerial strikes on Kyiv Nov. 25. Six days earlier, 26 people were killed and 94 injured when a missile hit a residential building in Ternopil in western Ukraine. Five were killed in an attack in Zaporizhzhia the same night.