Trump's plan for Ukraine won't bring peace

It kicks the can down the road with "freezes" and probably concedes too much for an opening bid.

Trump has come up with a peace plan for Ukraine, according to Axios. The headline-grabber has been his proposal to grant Russia the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine, which has provoked understandable but unrealistic grumbling from pundits like Dan Nexon. Understandable because this would indeed violate rules of territorial integrity that, as Nexon puts it, “is one of its foundational principles” of the current international order. Unrealistic because absent some massive and ill-advised intervention by the United States and other international actors, Russia has de facto annexed these lands already and has no reason to give them up. Anyone who doubts this just needs to look at how the battle lines have changed since the war began. Since late 2022 it has generally just been a war of inches, and one where Ukraine is slowly but surely losing ground.