Trump's ultimatum and the limits of US leverage over Ukraine

In this video, I discuss the American peace plan and ultimatum to Ukraine. Watch the video here or read the transcript below.

Best,
Anders

Transcript:

Donald Trump has issued a strong ultimatum to Ukraine, which must agree to a framework for a peace deal before Thanksgiving, which is on Thursday. This is dramatic, so let's talk about it.

The Trump administration, together with the Russians, has developed a 28-point peace plan, which they have presented to Ukraine. They have stated that Ukraine must agree to this before Thursday, or there will be severe consequences. So this is a strong ultimatum.

I think this is perhaps a good place to start by discussing the leverage that the United States actually has to force Ukraine into signing this agreement. There are two things that are typically mentioned. One is intelligence sharing and the other is weapons deliveries.

The intelligence sharing means that the United States has information from various sources, most importantly spy satellites, but also other means such as spy planes and other methods that provide intelligence which Ukraine benefits from. However, I think the significance of this intelligence sharing is often overrated. The reason for this is that the Ukrainians have, in the last six months, been eager to emphasize the importance of the intelligence sharing that is happening because they want to present the United States as a stronger partner than it really is for political reasons. So they have exaggerated the significance of this.

What the Ukrainians actually get from the intelligence sharing includes things like early warnings about Russian air raids. They receive a heads up when Russian long-range bombers take off from airfields inside of Russia. This way, Ukraine can prepare for a large airstrike that will be happening in a few hours. And this allows them to have the air defenses ready and to issue air raid warnings to the population.

Another benefit is that they will receive more precise information about the location of Russian air defense units. This allows Ukraine to plan offensive airstrikes more effectively. Most importantly, this is significant when they aim to take out the air defense battery itself. It might be, I think, less significant for the long range strikes that Ukraine is conducting on oil refineries and other things deep inside of Russia. But it's crucial when they want to target a specific Russian air defense system. Having updated information on the location and condition of that system is very important.

So those are significant benefits that Ukraine gets from this intelligence sharing. However, it's not crucial to the extent that it would jeopardize Ukraine's war efforts if they don't receive the support. Ukraine can continue fighting without U.S. intelligence sharing.

The weapons deliveries are a bigger problem. I'm always careful not to refer to the United States as a supporter of Ukraine because since Trump came to office, the United States is no longer donating weapons or cash to Ukraine's war effort. They're selling weapons at a profit. And I think it's misleading to talk about supporters as someone who sells things at a profit.

But leaving that terminology aside, the United States is still an important partner for Ukraine in the sense that it's an arms dealer that provides assets that Ukraine needs. And the way this works today is through what's called the PURL initiative, which stands for Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List. This is essentially a wish list of weapons produced in the United States that Ukraine can prioritize and request. And then European countries can contribute by donating those weapons in which Ukraine has expressed interest.

This mechanism was created back in the summer. And from a European perspective, it's been seen as a win-win-win arrangement. Ukraine still has access to American weapons. The United States will receive a substantial sum of money, and the European NATO countries believed that this was a way to keep the transatlantic alliance together because it creates incentives for the Americans to stay engaged in European security.

So when there is talk about stopping weapons deliveries to Ukraine, what we're really talking about is the United States withdrawing from the PURL Initiative. And this is something that Donald Trump could obviously do. But I think it's important to be aware that there are also significant downsides for the United States in doing so. It essentially means leaving money on the table in order to help Russia win the war and undermine NATO coherence. And this is something that Donald Trump might be willing to do. But I think it's also fair to assume that it's probably not a priority that most Americans would share. So, it might create some domestic political backlash in the United States.

And importantly, today, Ukraine is also producing most of the weapons themselves in their own domestic defense industry. So, we are at a level now where American weapons are still significant, but they are a smaller part of the overall arsenal that Ukraine has. This obviously also means that you don't have as much leverage as you would have if you delivered most of the weapons that Ukraine was using.

So overall, the leverage that the United States has in Ukraine is smaller than many people think. The intelligence sharing is not as important as it is sometimes made out to be. And the question of weapons deliveries is going to be domestically difficult for Donald Trump. It's just going to be hard to explain to the American people why it's necessary to leave money on the table to help Putin win the war.

And in either case, losing American support might have consequences for Ukraine's ability to fight the war in the long term, but it's not going to lead to a short-term collapse.

I want to turn to the question of how Russia would view this 28-point plan. Many people have pointed out that this plan is not actually that great for Russia either. If you look into it, even though overall the plan requires significantly more concessions from Ukraine than from Russia, there are still some aspects that are quite unfavorable for Russia too.

In reality, this plan would mean that Putin would not achieve all the goals he has set out for what he calls the special military operation. For example, Putin has justified the war with a need to demilitarize Ukraine. Now, according to this plan, Ukraine's military will be capped at a size that is two and a half times bigger than before the demilitarization began. So it's not much demilitarization going on there.

Ukraine will also receive something that, at least on paper, sounds like Article 5 level security guarantees from the United States. And Russia will not actually gain control of all the regions that they have annexed because there are some areas of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia that Russia will not be getting.

So, some people will say that because of these things, it's quite possible that for Putin to actually agree to this plan, it's not only going to be Ukraine that will be demanding changes. But I think he looks at it differently. I don't think he expects this plan to realistically materialize, but he assumes that it will be more damaging for Ukraine to agree to this text than for him, and therefore, relatively speaking, it will benefit him.

Because sure, inside of Russia, there would be dissatisfaction if this is actually the outcome they get after four years of war, but it's nothing compared to the resistance that Zelensky would face. And this means that for Putin, it's actually a win-win situation. Either Zelensky goes along with this, and that will throw Ukraine into a deep domestic political crisis. Or Zelensky does not agree to this, and that can fracture the relationship between Ukraine and the United States, and Ukraine can lose its most important external source of weapons.

So even though there are some things in this 28-point plan that are pretty bad for Russia, I actually think Putin is okay with it. And that is also supported by the fact that many people have pointed out how the text in these 28 points in many instances sound like a translation from an original Russian text into English because it sounds quirky in English, but it's much more natural in Russian. And as someone who speaks Russian, I can confirm that that is indeed the case.

I will not go through all the 28 points in this video and explain exactly why this is bad for Ukraine. Lawrence Friedman has made a really nice annotated version of the plan on Substack, and I will leave a link to it in the video description if you want to read it. But what I want to say is that it's really bad. It will mean that Ukraine loses a lot of territory, it loses sovereignty, it loses security. It also throws Ukraine into a deep political crisis because it demands concessions that a majority of Ukrainians don't support, and it requires Ukraine to give up any ideas of things like justice for war crimes, for example.

And most importantly, it does not provide Ukraine with any sense of security from future Russian attacks. So, frankly, in Ukraine, this plan will be interpreted as Russia just getting a break for a year or two, and then they can rearm and restart the war. Everything that Russia would essentially have to do is to stage some kind of false flag attack on themselves and then claim that Ukraine did it. And this action would effectively nullify any security guarantees that Ukraine might receive from this 28-point plan, at least if Donald Trump agrees to this interpretation of this false flag attack.

So, it's a really bad plan for Ukraine. There isn't public support for these things in Ukraine. And it's also beyond Zelensky's powers to make decisions of this caliber on his own.

I also think it's really important to remember that militarily, there is no justification for demanding such sweeping concessions from Ukraine compared to Russia. Russia is not currently winning the war. Ukraine is not exactly winning either. But when you have a situation where militarily it's very equal, then it does not make sense to demand so many more concessions from one side than the other.

Zelensky made a powerful speech in which he said that Ukraine faces difficult choices and might have to choose between losing their dignity or losing a valuable partner. I think it's important to understand that this doesn't actually imply that Zelensky is saying that there is an actual choice, because there isn't. It's not really an option for him to go along with Trump's plan and save the relationship with the United States at the expense of dignity.

So, what this powerful statement was about is mobilizing public support, both domestically in Ukraine and abroad, especially in Europe and the United States. He's laying the groundwork to explain why he's going to reject this plan, even if it means Ukraine will suffer more and there will be higher casualties in the months to come. Because Ukraine will be even shorter on things like air defense systems, for example, if they don't get American weapons. It might also be necessary to make other difficult choices, such as increasing mobilization in Ukraine.

But this 28-point plan is essentially a demand for Ukraine's capitulation. And they're not going to do that because, as I explained before, the United States does not actually have the leverage to make them do so. And in reality, Zelensky's only option is to try to soften the blow and persuade the Americans to change their mind. It's not an option for him to go along with the plan as it stands now.

The last thing I want to say is that I think this whole situation shows that the European strategy for working with Donald Trump has failed. Essentially, the game that's been going on since Trump came into office has been that both the Ukrainian and European side and the Russian side have tried to convince him that the obstacle to peace is the other side. And therefore, the solution would be to put pressure on the others.

This has been happening in many iterations, but all the while, there's been this assumption in Europe that it would be possible to convince Donald Trump in the end that the way forward is to put pressure on Russia. And so, there was this feeling in Europe that with the PURL Initiative and the latest American sanctions on Russia that they kind of made it.

That all seems lost now. Just last week, I made a Q&A video where I mentioned that Ukraine's biggest achievement in 2025 perhaps might have been how they managed on the political stage to establish some new ground rules for working with the Americans. This allowed them to once again rely on weapons deliveries thanks to the PURL Initiative, which provides some certainty about future deliveries, some predictability. And then perhaps in 2026, they could focus more on how to handle the enemy instead of how to deal with Donald Trump.

But now it looks like we might be back to step zero. And it turns out that once again, Donald Trump does not understand it. That you can't make a deal with Donald Trump because he's just going to change his mind the next day.

So I think overall, this strategy of always pretending to be very willing to negotiate when really you don't think that negotiations are possible, but you just want the other side to appear as the obstacles to negotiations, I think this strategy has failed. And they, meaning Ukraine and the Europeans, will need to take a different approach and adopt a more assertive posture if they want to be taken seriously. Because right now, Europe and Ukraine are losing the diplomatic game.

Okay, I will end it here. If you found the video helpful or informative, then please give it a like. Also remember to subscribe to the channel and click the bell icon to get notifications when I upload new videos. And if you want more videos and you want to support the channel, you can subscribe to my website at www.logicofwar.com. Thank you very much for watching and I will see you again next time.