Journalism of Courage
US President Donald Trump on Saturday issued a warning to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to agree to his 28-point peace plan by Thanksgiving to end the war in Ukraine which has been raging since close to four years, saying it is a “good” and “necessary” deal to end the conflict between Moscow and Kyiv, NBC News reported.
Speaking to reporters in front of the White House on Saturday morning, the US president said if Zelenskyy doesn’t agree to the 28-point peace deal, then he can “fight his little heart out.” However, when asked by a reporter if it was his “final offer”, Trump responded saying, “Not my final offer, one way or the other, we have to get it ended, we’d like to get to peace.”
The Republican president is pushing Zelenskyy-led Ukraine to accept the peace deal by Thursday. Trump reiterated his stance that if he were to be the president in early 2022, the war “never would have happened” to begin with.
Key points of the 28-point peace proposal sponsored by the Trump administration includes: the proposal directs Russia to keep more Ukrainian territory than it currently holds, Kyiv will have to limit the size of its army and agree to the fact that Ukraine would never join military alliance NATO.
But reports suggest that a security guarantee would be provided to Ukraine by the West as Axios earlier reported that Trump’s peace plan includes includes “a security guarantee modeled on NATO’s Article 5, which would commit the US and European allies to treat an attack on Ukraine as an attack on the entire ‘transatlantic community’.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday said that the 28-point peace plan has been authored by Washington with inputs from Russian counterparts. “It is based on input from the Russian side. But it is also based on previous and ongoing input from Ukraine,” Rubio said.
Zelenskyy, while addressing the peace plan in a video earlier had said, “Ukraine may now face a very difficult choice, either losing its dignity or the risk of losing a key partner, either the difficult 28 points, or a very difficult winter.”
(with inputs from Reuters)
