Kyiv: “The problem with this round of negotiations is that they lack all credibility,” one senior European diplomat with knowledge of the peace process said this week. “It’s just stupid.”
The exasperation of the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss negotiations that are sensitive and ongoing, comes after weeks of what he described as an “endlessly frustrating” peace push — built around damage control, public pressure and shifting drafts — that has forced Ukraine and its European backers to “pretend to play along” even as demands circulated that are “impossible for Ukraine to accept.”
“There is no art to this deal-making,” he added.
It started with a leak. On November 20, just as President Donald Trump began floating a Thanksgiving countdown for a deal, a 28-point peace framework was made public by Axios. Within hours, the same set of points was being described in different rooms as an opening bid, a near-finished agreement or an instrument of pressure so one-sided that critics compared it to information warfare.
Kyiv’s posture through that early confusion was restrained. It stayed publicly disciplined, offered little detail and declined to engage the leak-driven blow-by-blow, while allies tried to work out what the process actually meant in real-time.
By December 4, the anxiety had broken the surface. Der Spiegel published a leaked transcript of a private European call that sounded less like allied coordination than emergency self-defence.
French President Emmanuel Macron warned the US might “betray Ukraine on the issue of territory,” a phrasing the Élysée later disputed. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Washington was “playing games — both with you and with us.”
Finnish President Alexander Stubb said it most strikingly, “We cannot leave Ukraine and Volodymyr [Zelenskyy] alone with these guys.”
Two days later, the timeline snapped into place. After several days of US-Ukraine talks in Miami, Washington formalised its new posture in the National Security Strategy — including language about “strategic stability with Russia” and “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”
Moscow welcomed the framing while rejecting key elements of the peace track.
For those in uniform, the unpredictability goes beyond politics: Russia followed the Miami talks with one of its largest combined attacks on Ukraine, sending 653 drones and 51 missiles aimed largely at Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, according to officials in Kyiv.
The so-called peace negotiations are driving real decisions about war posturing and capabilities as Russia’s full-scale invasion trudges into its fourth year.
By December 7, the messaging shifted decisively from pressure to strategic uncertainty. At the Doha Forum, Donald Trump Jr. was asked if his father might walk away.
“I think he may,” he said. “What’s good about my father, and what’s unique about my father, is you don’t know what he’s going to do. … The fact that he’s not predictable … forces everyone to actually deal in an intellectually honest capacity.”
As drafts leak and deadlines slide, the uncertainty is now showing up in major battlefield calculations.
The likely product, the official says, is a messy ceasefire that freezes lines, buys Russia time and forces Europe to plan for the war’s next phase — less peace through strength than war through instability — with US support treated as a variable, not a guarantee.
