The Washington Post - January 01, 2026
Europe
In plan for Ukraine, Trump faces fundamental differences with Russia
Russia invaded Ukraine to restore it to Moscow’s orbit, but President Donald Trump’s peace plan would increase Kyiv’s security, economic and other ties with the West.
Several provisions in the ceasefire plan being pushed by President Donald Trump would increase the involvement of the United States and European nations in Ukraine, including a proposal to give Kyiv “NATO-like” security guarantees; a plan for a demilitarized “free economic zone” along the current combat line, potentially patrolled by Western forces; and a U.S. role in operating Ukraine’s nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, which Russia seized in 2022. All of these cut against Russia’s war aims and are almost certain to be rejected by Putin, who insists he is open to a deal.
Despite hints of optimism following Trump’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday, Ukraine and Russia are starting 2026 with Russia trying once again to influence Trump’s opinion of the war, and buying time for continued military gains as the next steps in the peace process are kicked further into January.
This time, the Kremlin seems to have overreached. While Trump initially expressed outrage over Putin’s claim that Ukrainian drones targeted one his residences, on Wednesday Trump posted a link on social media to a New York Post editorial saying the attack never happened and was likely “an invented or embellished narrative” to disrupt Trump’s peace initiative and justify new strikes on Ukraine.
“Putin’s entire war is a lie,” the editorial proclaimed, adding: “Just as he did in Alaska, Putin was offered peace and instead spat in America’s eye.”
Russia had sought to get ahead of the talks with Zelensky, with Putin speaking to Trump on the phone before the meeting Sunday. On Monday, after Trump cited progress in the talks, the Kremlin alleged the attempted attack on Putin’s residence, for which it has provided scant evidence — and no claim of damage or casualties. Top Ukrainian officials and many foreign diplomats and analysts said the allegations, which Kyiv vehemently denied, were really an effort by Moscow to derail Trump’s plan.
Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, posting on X, called the allegations “a forceful ‘pound on the table’ to make the West finally hear that the current peace negotiations are heading in a completely unacceptable direction for Moscow and to derail the emerging US-Ukrainian framework.”
Russia’s success in stirring global outrage over the alleged attack astonished Ukrainians, who are surviving with almost no electricity because of ceaseless Russian missile strikes and bombing that also regularly kills civilians.
Since mid-November, Ukraine has frantically engaged in talks to rewrite a 28-point peace proposal that made major concessions to Russia and that the White House insisted Kyiv sign by Thanksgiving or risk losing all U.S. support.
The ensuing diplomatic blitz relieved some U.S. pressure on Kyiv and resulted in an abridged, 20-point plan that, while far from ideal for Kyiv, no longer calls for Ukraine simply to surrender territory that Russia has failed to capture. Zelensky and European leaders have sounded increasingly optimistic. Those voices include Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who said this week that he believed Trump was potentially willing to deploy U.S. troops as part of the security guarantees.
But for all the talk of progress, what has gone unspoken is that the more acceptable the deal became to Ukraine, the more objectionable it became to Russia, which has never said it is willing to end its war for anything less than total surrender to Putin’s demands.
Instead, after leveling the drone allegations this week, Russian officials said Putin had ordered his troops to capture more territory in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv and Sumy regions.
Moscow’s ultimate goal, however, remains severing Ukraine’s ties to the West and keeping Kyiv from pursuing its plans to join the European Union and NATO — a goal that was central to Putin’s invasion and illegal annexation of Crimea and initial military intervention in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
This goal, however, often seems to go unrecognized by Trump and his negotiators, who have tried to cast the U.S. as a neutral mediator in the war despite Putin and other Russian officials routinely insisting that Washington and its NATO allies are not only involved in the war but started it. Trump has been motivated by his effort to portray himself as a peacemaker and perhaps win a Nobel Prize. Putin has been accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
While Ukraine and Russia could each make some compromises, major obstacles are likely to remain insurmountable, signaling just how far they are from an agreement.
Even Trump, who once claimed he could end the conflict within 24 hours, said after meeting Zelensky on Sunday: “This is not a one-day-process deal. This is very complicated stuff.”
One of Zelensky’s main goals has been to demonstrate to Trump, who has often been swayed by Putin, that Ukraine is not the obstacle to peace. Even just by securing the coveted meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Zelensky appeared to succeed. In that meeting, Zelensky asked Trump to consider extending proposed security guarantees for Ukraine to 50 years, up from 15 — which he later announced that Trump said he would consider.
Those gains clearly irritated Moscow.
The Kremlin was in overdrive even before Sunday’s meeting, with Putin’s top foreign policy adviser asserting that it was Trump and Putin who shared a similar view and insisting that a ceasefire agreement, such as the 60-day truce Ukraine was suggesting, would only prolong the war.
But despite those claims and Putin’s call to the U.S. president, Trump struck a cautiously optimistic tone after the Zelensky meeting, bolstered by his longtime belief that he alone can end the war. Russia’s influence, however, was evident when he told journalists and Zelensky — who restrained himself by responding with raised eyebrows — that Russia “wants to see Ukraine succeed.”
One senior diplomat who follows the negotiations said Trump’s treatment of Zelensky at Mar-a-Lago was “rude, hurtful and even cruel” and demonstrated “a level of complete and utter ignorance.”
“At this stage, after everything the Ukrainians bended over backward to give to Trump and deliver to Trump and how they do the dog and pony show, do whatever is asked of them — then to be told that Russia wants Ukraine to succeed? That probably hurt more than anything,” the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations.
Russia’s subsequent claim of an attack on Putin’s residence was “a classic psyop,” the diplomat added. “Just like every time he goes to meet with Zelensky, Putin finds a way to have a two-hour conversation with Trump just before, which poisons and twists and manipulates.”
By Monday, with Zelensky on his way back to Kyiv and plans in the works for follow-up meetings with national security advisers and more talks to coalesce support for an international troop presence in Ukraine after the war, Putin and Trump spoke again by phone.
It was on that call that Putin seemed to convince Trump that Ukraine, just after the Mar-a-Lago meeting ended, had launched a drone attack on him personally by targeting one of his vacation residences in northwest Russia. Moscow has still not said if Putin was at the residence at the time of the alleged attack.
But in a briefing just after the call, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, told journalists that Trump was “outraged” and had expressed relief to Putin that he had not provided Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles as Kyiv had requested earlier this year. Hours later, Trump repeated the Russian claim to journalists in the U.S., again without providing any evidence. In the same breath, he mentioned his refusal to grant Ukraine’s request for Tomahawks.
Ukraine, meanwhile, was insisting publicly and through diplomatic back channels to the U.S. delegation that no such attack had happened — urging the world not to take Putin at his word.
Russia’s own accounts of the alleged attack differed, many pointed out, with some officials claiming 91 drones had been downed near the residence and others reporting 41. It took two days for Russia to release a map it claimed showed the alleged drone trajectories and footage of some wreckage, as well as interviews with people it said were witnesses.
A response by Russian air defenses to such a large attack probably would have set off a flurry of photos and videos on social media by local witnesses, but no such posts appeared.
Zelensky and other top officials warned immediately that the Russian allegations were laying the groundwork for a massive Russian attack on Kyiv in the coming days.
But the rhetorical damage was done. By Tuesday, several countries, including India, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, publicly condemned Ukraine’s alleged attack, even as they failed to offer any evidence beyond Russia’s claims. The CIA declined to comment on whether it had any intelligence regarding the incident Russia reported.
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Moscow would retaliate and had already chosen its targets, stirring widespread warnings of a major upcoming attack on Kyiv.
“If they reject the U.S. leadership and U.S. peace efforts with Ukraine, then they need to tell this straight away and not invent fabricated, fake stories and then — working with other countries — try to convince them to react,” Heorhii Tykhyi, spokesman for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, told The Washington Post.
“It took them two days to basically produce those creepy photographs with some debris of some drones,” Tykhyi added. “They didn’t even bother to make it look plausible.”
Diplomats and officials involved in Ukraine’s negotiations were astounded not by Russia’s allegations, which several described as straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook, but by how quickly Russia’s narrative took hold.
“I knew that Putin would reject the peace plan, there was no doubt about that; the issue was only which pretext or excuse he would find,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, who chairs the foreign affairs committee in Ukraine’s parliament.
“Now is a very fragile moment for us because we are sort of diplomatically winning” by making concessions to the Americans in the peace process, Merezhko said. If Putin were to then reject the proposal, there remained a chance that Trump would understand the Russian leader had been “manipulating him all along and he will start to support Ukraine more, and that was our hope. And then Putin makes this move,” he said.
“It would be more professional when you’re president to ask first the CIA,” he added about Trump’s initial public condemnation of the alleged attack. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was briefed by the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, and told that a U.S. intelligence assessment found no attack against Putin had occurred.
Drone allegations aside, the long-standing, irreconcilable differences between Russia and Ukraine are the main hurdle to ending the war.
Russia will be reluctant to accept any of the compromises that Kyiv insists are essential to securing its future because so many involve strengthening Ukraine’s ties with Europe and the U.S. — the very outcome Russia invaded to avoid.
Suggestions that Ukraine and Russia could split electricity from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant — which Russia seized by force in 2022, risking nuclear catastrophe — would undermine Russia’s efforts to connect the plant to its own grid and deny Ukraine electricity it desperately needs, while probably requiring the presence of a foreign monitoring group.
The proposed free economic zone would dash Moscow’s dreams of full control over the Donbas region and would allow new Western investment in Ukrainian interests. A peacekeeping force staffed by troops from countries in a “coalition of the willing,” the group of about 30 countries that have offered Ukraine support, would contradict one of Putin’s core demands. Russia has already warned it would view any foreign troops in Ukraine as a target.
Alleging an attack on one of Putin’s residences was far easier than bridging any of these gaps — without the cost of Russia appearing to reject Trump’s peace initiative.
“Russia doesn’t want compromise but it needs to pretend interest to avoid irritating Trump,” said Volodymyr Ariev, a Ukrainian opposition lawmaker. “Putin is just playing with him. So, for Russia, it is easy as pie to figure out a reason to disrupt and put responsibility on Ukraine, as has happened before.”
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