Secretary of State Marco Rubio said a “tremendous amount of progress” was made toward finalising a US-proposed peace plan to end the Russia-Ukraine war, but added “there’s still some work to be done” after meeting Ukrainian and European negotiators in Geneva.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said there were “signals that President [Donald] Trump’s team is hearing us”. Kyiv and its European allies had raised concerns after a leaked draft seen as favouring Russia was welcomed by Vladimir Putin as “the basis” for settlement. Zelensky warned Ukraine faced a “very difficult choice: either losing dignity, or risk losing a key partner”.
Rubio told reporters the Geneva teams had a “very good day”, focusing on narrowing “open items” from the 28-point US plan and achieving substantial progress. He said any final package must be approved by the Ukrainian and US presidents before it is sent to Russia and that a few issues still require work.
A joint US-Ukraine statement said an “updated and refined peace framework” had been agreed and that both countries would do “intensive work on joint proposals in the coming days”. Several outlets reported seeing an alternative plan from Kyiv’s European allies led by the UK, France and Germany; the BBC has not seen it and Rubio denied knowing of such a document.
Earlier, President Trump accused Ukraine’s leaders of showing “zero gratitude” for US efforts and noted Europe was continuing to buy Russian oil, a key revenue source Moscow uses to fund the war.
The Geneva talks centre on the US draft, the leaked version of which proposes a Ukrainian withdrawal from territory in eastern Donetsk that Kyiv currently controls, and de facto Russian control of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, plus the Crimea peninsula annexed in 2014. The plan also envisages freezing the borders of southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia along current front lines; both regions are partially occupied by Russia.
The draft would limit Ukraine’s military to 600,000 personnel, down from about 880,000 now, and include a pledge that Ukraine will not seek NATO membership, offering instead unspecified “reliable security guarantees”. It says it is expected Russia will not invade neighbours and that NATO will not expand further. The document also suggests reintegrating Russia into the global economy by lifting sanctions and inviting it back into the G7, effectively restoring a G8.
Russia currently controls about 20% of Ukrainian territory and its forces have made slow advances along the front despite reported heavy losses. Trump gave Ukraine until the coming Thursday to accept the proposals but later said this was not his “final offer” after concerns from European, Canadian and Japanese allies. Rubio expressed optimism the parties would reach agreement “in a very reasonable period of time very soon”, whether by Thursday or shortly thereafter.
Before Geneva, Rubio and the State Department had to insist the widely leaked plan was authored by the US, after a bipartisan group of US senators said Rubio had told them the draft was a Russian proposal and did not reflect the Trump administration’s position. Rubio rebutted that the draft was authored by the US with “input” from Moscow and Kyiv, and a State Department spokesperson called the senators’ account “blatantly false”.
