Friday, November 21, 2025

John Cookson, AC Intel Anchor

Tomorrow is Holodomor Remembrance Day, commemorating the 1932-1933 Soviet-instigated famine in Ukraine. One needn’t be Ukrainian or in Ukraine to mark the occasion and consider the history. Here in Washington, DC, for instance, there is a Holodomor Memorial, a thirty-foot wedge of bronze just north of the Capitol that depicts a field of Ukrainian wheat disappearing into nothingness.

This bas-relief of disappearing Ukrainian land feels eerily timely, with news today that the United States is pressuring Ukraine to accept a plan that would see it cede territory (among other concessions) to Russia, potentially in exchange for peace. But is peace really on the table?

With so many questions, we turned to former US Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst for answers. Looking at the twenty-eight-point draft plan, Herbst sees some promise, but he also notes that it appears to give Russia territory it has so far been unable to conquer. “This would seem to be a fatuous idea, rewarding the aggressor,” he tells us. The former US ambassador continues:

“There’s clearly a play led by [Russian envoy Kirill] Dmitriev, because of his special relationship with [US envoy Steve] Witkoff, to get a deal that hands over to Russia hard-to-conquer territory in western Donbas, and improves relations between Trump and Putin. From Dmitriev’s perspective, the goal is to create conditions that allow Putin to gobble up more of Ukraine—eighteen months, twenty-four months down the road, or maybe right after Trump leaves office. That’s the game.”

Though Trump said today that Ukraine has until Thanksgiving to take the deal, Herbst does not think that’s a hard deadline:

“It is also true that despite the Kremlin’s rejection of Trump’s cease-fire proposal in August, Trump ignored his own deadline for Russian compliance. There is no reason to assume that the president would severely sanction Ukraine for not quickly accepting a document that appears to have many Kremlin-friendly points.”

So, what advice would Herbst give the US president at this moment?

“You have to choose what’s more important: a friendly relationship with an aggressor—whose policies are, in fact, adversarial to the United States—or a durable peace. The only way you get [a durable peace] is to make it unpleasant for Putin to continue his war of aggression.”

Your AC Intel starts there—with more of our late-breaking conversation with Herbst.  

“We’re really, really, really far from any true endgame negotiation.”

If this reported deal were to go into effect, John Herbst says, “Putin may lie low for six months, twelve months, twenty-four months before he makes his next move to take additional Ukrainian territory.” But that simply doesn’t work with the kind of peace Trump wants, so Herbst argues we should think of this plan as “just one more turn of the wheel, and we’re going to have a lot more turns in the future.” 

The US plan does move the ball forward on security guarantees

There is much to critique in the US deal now before Ukraine. But as former US Ambassador to Poland Daniel Fried explains, there are also “workable elements,” particularly around security guarantees. And “we saw earlier this year how a bad initial US proposal—the ‘minerals deal’—could be transformed into a reasonable deal for development and a plus for US-Ukraine relations.” 

Meanwhile in Ukraine, a massive political scandal is bad news for Zelenskyy

US pressure on Kyiv to agree to the deal comes amid a massive corruption scandal in Ukraine. Adrian Karatnycky, former president and executive director of Freedom House and a fellow with our Eurasia Center, writes that “while there’s no evidence of personal corruption by the president, his style of rule and reliance on governing with the help of a group of pals and cronies has worn thin.” 

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