European officials pushed back against a U.S. proposal for ending the Ukraine war, saying that Kyiv must approve any plan and that the conflict must not end with a Ukrainian capitulation.
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.
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 White House 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.
The plan being circulated includes several elements that Ukraine and its European allies have long opposed, including the surrender of some land in Ukraine’s east that Kyiv still holds. It would cap the size of Ukraine’s military and reduce the type of long-range weapons Kyiv receives from allies, moves which European officials have warned could open the way for a future Russian attack on Ukraine.
The plan also blocks a so-called reassurance force that the Europeans have offered to send to Ukraine if there is a peace deal.
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.
Pushback from Europe is significant because the continent is now by far Ukraine’s leading supporter in monetary and military terms, and it has offered to help play a major role in guaranteeing the peace in Ukraine if the war ends.
Europe has imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia that would need to be addressed as part of any peace deal. The bloc also has a plan to use immobilized Russian central bank assets in Belgium to fund Ukraine, another issue that is likely to arise in any peace negotiations.
European officials said they hadn’t been involved in drafting the plan and hadn’t so far been briefed on the U.S. proposal. The U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will talk with senior European national security officials on Friday, according to several European and U.S. officials. Several senior European diplomats said they remained hopeful that they would be given the opportunity to share their concerns on any plans.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Thursday declined to comment on a new peace plan and said the Russian and U.S. sides were not actively engaged in discussing a cease-fire. He said any deal needs to address the root causes of the war.
U.S. officials said Trump supports the proposal, which materialized after he told aides to craft new plans 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 .
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 have pledged to cover Ukraine’s finances for the next two years. Germany has taken a leading role. It plans to give Kyiv around 12 billion euros, equivalent to almost $14 billion, from next year’s budget.
“We welcome any initiative taken to enter into a negotiation phase, but the first prerequisite is that [Russian President] Vladimir Putin ends his aggressive war against Ukraine, that a cease-fire is agreed upon without preconditions and that fair negotiations can then take place,” said German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul .
Europe has been repeatedly cut out of direct Russia-U.S. discussions on how to end the war, although the White House has generally briefed European leaders on talks.
In August, after Trump appeared to veer toward a demand that Ukraine hand over the rest of Donbas to end the war following his meeting with Putin in Alaska , European leaders accompanied Zelensky on a trip to Washington to prod the president to back a cease-fire on the current front line.
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said Thursday that issues such as land swaps or the surrender of territory should be part of peace negotiations with the Ukrainians at the table.
“We still echo Trump’s position in all this, which is an immediate unconditional cease-fire,” he told reporters. “And the American president has called for that. So the only problem is still Putin.”
Trump dispatched a high-level Pentagon delegation to Kyiv this week for talks about reviving peace negotiations. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, along with two four-star Army generals, held discussions with Ukraine’s defense ministry on Wednesday, and was scheduled to meet with Zelensky on Thursday.
Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com and Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com
