Peace plan should not be imposed on Ukraine from the outside, US’s Sullivan says

KYIV — The Ukrainian government has to lead the way regarding how the war in Ukraine will end, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told a conference in the country’s capital on Saturday.

“I think any peace plan that attends to essentially impose peace on the people of Ukraine that runs across fundamental principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, democracy and freedom is not just or sustainable,” Sullivan said via video link during the annual Yalta European Strategy (YES) conference in Kyiv.

Various initiatives have been put forward to end the Ukraine conflict since Russian President Vladmir Putin launched his all-out invasion in 2022, including self-declared “peace missions” by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. But only the peace formula proposed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy includes the return of all Ukrainian territories seized by Russia.

China and Brazil proposed a cease-fire and freezing of the frontline, but they did not even ask Kyiv for its opinion before pushing the proposal around the world; though they consulted the Kremlin. Putin wants Kyiv to give Moscow four Ukrainian regions it does not even fully control and to demilitarize its army while giving no guarantees that aggression will not happen again in the future.

Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance last week talked about how the ultimate peace deal might look like for Trump’s administration, in a proposal that mirrors Putin’s propositions, including Ukraine not joining NATO or the EU.

“What it probably looks like is something like the current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine becomes like a demilitarized zone, heavily fortified for the Russians don’t invade again,” Vance said in an interview on the Shaun Ryan Show on Thursday.

“Ukraine remains an independent sovereignty. Russia gets the guarantee of neutrality from Ukraine. It does not join NATO and some other allied institutions. Germans and other nations have to fund Ukraine’s reconstruction,” Vance added.

His plan includes no costs to Russia to compensate for its aggression and devastation of Ukraine, while he repeated the Kremlin’s claim that Europe, not Russia, will have to pay for Ukraine’s rebuilding.

Trump, in a video address to the Kyiv conference on Friday, reiterated his belief that the Russian invasion would never have happened if he had been U.S. president at the time, blaming the current “weak American administration.”

Putin’s aggression against Ukraine started in 2014, with Russia illegally annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and fuelling uprisings in the Donbas region of Ukraine. The Russian hostility led to a stalemate and positional conflict that continued throughout Trump’s presidential term.

During the U.S. presidential debate last week, Trump twice dodged the question of whether he wants Ukraine to win the war against Russia. Instead, he said the war must end. In his video on Friday, which was not distributed beyond the Kyiv conference, Trump repeated that if he wins in November, he would end the Ukraine-Russia conflict quickly.

Trump recorded the video address for the YES conference at the request of former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who attended the gathering. Johnson told the attendees that he was asked to bring Trump to Kyiv for the conference, but “completely failed to do so” and then offered the video instead.

Sullivan, in his remarks to the Kyiv conference on Saturday, said that suggestions that the Ukraine war can be solved “in one day from the outside” are off the mark.

“Anyone, who steps forward and says they could solve the Ukraine war in one day from the outside, you really have to ask whose side are they going to be solving it on,” Sullivan said. “And that I think is something that should be a source of real concern,” he added, saying he was not referring specifically to Trump’s claims.