You can’t blame President Donald Trump for feeling frustrated with the minutiae involved in negotiating a settlement to the war in Ukraine. Nobody said such a feat was going to be easy, even if Trump at times genuinely seemed to drink his own Kool Aid about terminating the conflict in a day. His grand proclamations have run head-first into the realities of international peacemaking. 

If the battlefield has long since descended into a bloody slog where the frontlines are close to immovable, then Trump’s cadence toward the war is a mishmash of disjointed hot takes in which yesterday’s villain becomes tomorrow’s hero. On April 23, Trump lambasted Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky for undermining peace efforts and making statements that “will do nothing but prolong the killing field” in a war he constantly claims (without much evidence) wouldn’t have happened if he had been president at the time. Days later, after sitting somberly with Zelensky in the halls of the Vatican, he redirected his rhetorical spear at Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, openly questioning whether the dictator-president is really interested in a peace process to begin with. Although Trump is keeping the faith, it’s increasingly clear that he’s at the end of his rope. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has twice threatened to withdraw the United States from the entire process, and the war itself, if Ukraine and Russia don’t start giving the Americans a reason to continue their efforts. 

Those efforts include a draft peace plan, tabled by the Trump administration last week, that aims to square the circle between Russia’s maximalist ambitions and Ukraine’s desire to remain a strong, independent state. Unfortunately, the document presented didn’t do anything other than unleash a wave of objections from the combatants. Zelensky vocally denounced the Trump administration’s willingness to accept Crimea as Russian territory, stating that if Washington expected Kiev to follow suit, then it was deluding itself. The Russians, in typical fashion, offered a counter-proposal in the media that merely restated its standard argument: Ukraine must be demilitarized, denazified, and otherwise subjugated to Russia’s sphere of influence.  

The commentators, meanwhile, were aghast that America, the self-proclaimed defender of democracy and “shining city on a hill,” was offering a deal that was weighed heavily in Russia’s favor. Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian-turned-Ukraine-activist, blasted Trump’s peace plan as “strategic idiocy.” The Washington Post’s Max Boot was equally appalled, equating the draft to a “one-sided plan” that will embolden other authoritarians. Tom Nichols at the Atlantic was disgusted: "Trump is not a fair broker: He is acting as a de facto Russian ally and making demands as Moscow’s proxy.”  

Incessant hyperbole aside, the critics have a point. Some aspects of Trump’s peace offer are indeed to Ukraine’s disadvantage. The Russians, for example, would be able to keep Crimea in its column. The war would freeze at the current lines, which means the Russians would get to retain the roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory they have captured at such high cost to its army. The door to NATO membership for Ukraine would be locked, and U.S. and European sanctions that have hovered over the Russian economy would eventually be lifted. The Ukrainians obviously reject all of these conditions on moral and strategic grounds; no country, after all, would willingly accept a situation where one-fifth of its territory is handed over to an aggressor.

But the notion that Trump’s plan is a giveaway to Russia, propagated by so many pundits who are itching for any reason to continue the war, is woefully inaccurate. This isn’t a freebie to Moscow. The Ukrainians get some wins on the board as well, including the sovereign right to build, equip, and field a military without restrictions, an external security guarantee led by the Europeans, compensation for all the damage the Russians have caused over more than three years of war, and some small territorial swaps to ensure that Kiev has access to the Dnieper River, a critical waterway that leads to the Black Sea. None of these items are particularly great for Russia—in fact, Putin has been adamant that Ukraine’s military in any post-war settlement must be capped, both in terms of numbers as well as the weaponry Kiev’s troops can possess. Trump’s plan rejects that premise outright. Moscow’s demand that Ukraine be turned into a Russian vassal state whose foreign policy is dictated by the Kremlin is also shoved away and treated by the White House for what it is: abject surrender.

Although the foreign policy elite in Washington and in European capitals will twitch with trepidation at this observation, this deal, warts and all, is likely to be the best Ukraine is going to get under the circumstances. Yes, Trump’s plan has problems; to take the most obvious, you can make the argument that U.S. recognition of Crimea as Russian territory would in effect overturn the otherwise inviolable principle that state borders shouldn’t be changed by force. Even so, you can make an equally persuasive argument that Ukraine is highly unlikely to get Crimea back anyway, and recognition of this reality is a decent price to pay if it leads to the war winding down.

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As Joe Biden used to say, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” This test should be applied to Trump’s peace deal as well. Ukraine’s alternative to this deal is, quite simply, more war. Zelensky is free to reject the terms before him, but he will have to prepare for a scenario where the terms could get appreciably worse for him as the fighting goes on. The Russian army may be beat up, having suffered and continuing to suffer an absurd number of casualties as it tries to swallow up mid-sized Ukrainian cities like Pokrovsk and Chasiv Yar. But the Russians have a deeper bench—more mass, more tanks, more aircraft and munitions, not to mention a significant amount of manpower that Putin hasn’t tapped. The Ukrainians have reserves, too, yet Zelensky’s hesitancy to draft 18 year-olds into the ranks and dependence on the West for munitions and air defense is a bad omen for a smaller state fighting a war of attrition. The Russians can keep fighting for the immediate future, but how long can the Ukrainians? 

In the winter of 2023, Ukraine and its Western allies had a choice. It could have used the momentum from its successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv and Kherson to press for peace talks with Russia, which at that time was reeling from defeats. Or it could gamble on an even larger and more resource-intensive counteroffensive in the hope that more territorial gains would eventually force Moscow to end the war on Kiev’s maximalist terms. The latter was prioritized over the former, and the result was nothing more than mass casualties on all sides and next to no Ukrainian advances on the ground. 

Zelensky faces a similar choice today. The big difference between April 2025 and the winter of 2023 is that the stakes are higher today than they were back then. In 2023, Zelensky could count on Biden to for the most part support his position. Now, he’s dealing with an American president who doesn’t seem to have an issue with walking and letting the chips fall where they may.