For a Weakened Zelensky, Yielding to Trump Is Riskier Than Defiance
Buffeted by a corruption scandal that has sparked fury across Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky is in political trouble at home, weaker than at any point since the full-scale Russian invasion of his country began nearly four years ago.
Yet, this very vulnerability makes him even less likely to yield to the Trump administration, which is pushing a 28-point plan that was secretly drafted by White House special envoy Steve Witkoff and Kremlin adviser Kirill Dmitriev. Zelensky has described the current text, released by Washington shortly after the corruption affair in Kyiv erupted, as forcing Ukraine to give up its dignity and freedom.
“Trump seems to repeat the mistakes that Putin already made several times, underestimating the strength of Ukrainian society and not understanding what Ukraine really is,” said Nico Lange, a former senior German defense official who is involved in European efforts to help Ukraine. “No Ukrainian president—and especially not a weakened Zelensky—has a mandate to agree to anything like this. If he does, he would not be president anymore when he comes home.”
U.S. officials led by Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio; a Ukrainian team led by Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak, who has been facing calls to resign by Ukrainian lawmakers; and national-security advisers from European nations came to Geneva on Sunday to discuss the plan, which President Trump has said he wants signed by Thanksgiving.
Despite widespread wariness of war and desire for peace, Ukrainians overwhelmingly view this latest U.S.-Russian proposal as a veiled capitulation—one that isn’t justified by the situation on the battlefield, where Russia has made slow advances at a tremendous cost. While Ukrainian politicians generally support the idea of talks, none have endorsed the plan’s key demand to give up cities that Russia doesn’t control.
“Our society is not ready to surrender. It wasn’t ready to surrender at the start of the full-scale war, when Zelensky’s popularity was nearly 99%, and it’s not ready to surrender now, when his popularity has declined,” said Yaroslav Zheleznyak, an opposition lawmaker and one of the most vocal critics of corruption within the Zelensky administration. “His problems don’t impact our ability to conduct the talks, even if the American side may mistakenly think so.”
Ukraine’s situation on the battlefield is likely to grow even worse next year—and Russian demands may become even harsher, said Dmytro Kuleba, who served until last year as foreign minister. Yet, he added, the current government believes that the consequences of acquiescing to Trump’s demands would be worse than rejecting them.
“Agreeing to an unacceptable, extremely painful, package, just to halt the war—no politician will approve such a decision if he feels that the society is not ready to accept it. Accepting an agreement that will be rejected by the society would mean political, and unfortunately in our reality also physical, suicide for such a leader,” Kuleba said.
Zelensky had to fire his ministers of justice and energy after the independent anticorruption agency this month released tapes implicating them in a $100 million corruption network allegedly led by Ukrainian-Israeli entrepreneur Timur Mindich, an investor in the media company that Zelensky founded before he became president. Mindich has since fled Ukraine, and Kyiv has issued an arrest warrant for him.
Back in July, before the scandal broke out, Zelensky pushed through parliament legislation that stripped the independence of the country’s anticorruption agency. Large-scale street protests broke out immediately, forcing him to quickly reverse course. That chain of events led to the latest disclosures. No evidence has been released that implicates Zelensky personally in graft or any other criminal activity.
“This scandal has given Russia cards to wage propaganda warfare against us, weakening Ukraine,” said Oleksiy Honcharenko, another prominent opposition lawmaker who has been campaigning against Zelensky’s entourage. “But what’s positive here is that we have also proven that we have truly independent anticorruption authorities that can question the president’s closest circle, and maybe in the future him personally too, and there is nothing that he can do about it. This makes us a civilized country, a country whose society rejects corruption.”
No politician of import in Ukraine has urged Zelensky to step down, or to hold elections, before the war ends. Zelensky, in a dramatic address recorded after receiving the 28-point plan, urged Ukrainians to “stop squabbling” so as not to let the country’s enemies divide it. While saying he would engage in diplomacy to seek a just peace, he also added that “we will do everything so that the result will be an end to the war, not an end to Ukraine.”
As currently drafted, the plan calls for Ukraine to hand over to Russia parts of the Donbas region that Moscow hasn’t been able to occupy since 2022, recognize the loss of vast areas that are already occupied, agree to caps on armed forces, and renounce the aspiration for NATO membership. The deal would require Ukrainian constitutional changes and a supermajority in parliament to gain validity. In its current form, this is unlikely to happen even if Zelensky were to agree to these provisions.
Ukraine, with the support of all the major European nations, Canada and Japan, has pushed back hard against these demands. Rubio described the draft in a statement Sunday as a “solid framework for ongoing negotiations,” and Trump has said the text is open to changes. The Kremlin hasn’t formally endorsed the plan either, suggesting that President Vladimir Putin sees it as a pre-emptive concession and would seek even harsher terms.
The agreement as currently drafted would simply make the next round of war even more devastating, as it frees Russia from sanctions while imposing major curbs on Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, said Andriy Zagorodnyuk, chairman of the Center for Defence Strategies think tank in Kyiv, who served as minister of defense in the first year of Zelensky’s administration.
“It’s not a choice between a bad peace or a bad war. There is no peace on the table,” he said. “The Ukrainian people realize this intuitively. They see this proposal not as an alternative to war, but just a step to strengthen the enemy, a pause to rearm Russia.”
This attitude is certainly widespread among Ukrainian troops. Already in 2019, Zelensky had—on camera—a heated exchange with front-line soldiers who objected to his order to pull back from a village in the Donbas, part of an attempted de-escalation with Russia. There is wide discontent in the ranks with the current commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy, who was appointed by Zelensky in 2024 to replace Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, who was seen as a potential political rival and has since been sent as ambassador to London.
Any order by Zelensky to surrender the heavily fortified cities of northern Donbas, as required by the plan, could precipitate a crisis in civil-military relations, warned Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst who frequently visits the front line to assess Ukrainian combat ability.
“While the overall trajectory remains negative for Ukraine, this is not a military that is on the verge of being defeated, or facing a loss of cohesion. They are fatigued, they are exhausted, but they are still determined to fight on,” he said.
The Trump administration, which already briefly suspended intelligence sharing earlier this year, still holds significant leverage if it wants to pressure Ukraine to accept the deal. While the U.S. no longer spends money on Ukraine, it is selling it vital weapons through a joint mechanism with European allies.
Still, this leverage is limited in a war that many Ukrainians view as existential.
“You can deny intelligence, you can deny support, but it won’t matter in the short run because the Ukrainian military will still keep up the fight. They are not in a mood to surrender,” said Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics who served as minister of economy before the war. “The key problem here is that people understand that, if we surrender to Russia in a meaningful way, more and not fewer people will die. For any deal to go through, someone has to convince the civilians and military in Ukraine that their lives will be protected and that war won’t resume.”
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