Trump administration rushes to emulate Gaza plan in new push for Ukraine Deal

By Kylie Atwood, Zachary Cohen, Jennifer Hansler, CNN

(CNN) — Believing they have a new window of opportunity to restart peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, Trump administration officials are rushing ahead with a new framework to end the Ukraine war modeled after the Gaza deal President Donald Trump pushed, despite little initial input from Ukrainian or European allies, according to sources.

The push to restart talks reemerged as a top priority for the president in recent weeks — shortly after the US helped broker a ceasefire in Gaza, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Trump has indicated he wants to expedite the timeline for ending the war in Ukraine, hoping to conclude a conflict he once said publicly would be the easily resolved, the sources added. Some US officials have said that the administration wants Russia and Ukraine to agree to a deal by the end of the year, according to two sources.

Like the proposal the Trump administration crafted which led to the ceasefire in Gaza, the Ukraine plan reads as a listicle of bullet points, laying out commitments each side would make in order to drive a lasting end to the conflict. Both proposals call for the halt to fighting, global funding for reconstruction and a board overseeing the commitments led by Trump.

The ongoing war, now approaching its fourth year, has fueled the frustrations of a US president who regularly touts his dealmaking ability and believes he has not received enough credit for overseeing other recent diplomatic successes, the sources said.

As a result, several top Trump administration officials have turned their focus back to the war in Ukraine and the US has considered enlisting some of the same foreign intermediaries who helped facilitate negotiations related to Gaza – including Qatar and Turkey – to play a more prominent, but still behind the scenes, diplomatic role, the sources said.

Some of the similarities to the Gaza ceasefire deal that appeared in the Ukraine framework for peace that emerged on Thursday, which US officials cautioned was not a final proposal, were very stark. Similar to the ceasefire in Gaza, which is being overseen by a Trump-led “Board of Peace,” the draft proposal describes the Ukraine peace implementation as being “monitored and guaranteed by the Peace Council, headed by President Donald J. Trump,” according to a draft seen by CNN. The draft’s veracity was confirmed by a US official.

The draft also included components that Russian diplomats have pushed and Ukrainian officials have previously rejected.

For example, the 28-point plan includes elements such as territorial concessions in areas not currently held by Russia, a limit on the size of Ukraine’s armed forces and a Ukrainian commitment in its constitution that it will not join NATO, the draft said. Reports emerged earlier this week that President Trump’s top envoy Steve Witkoff was working with Russia on the framework, which includes the Russian maximalist demands.

Witkoff has been working with Russian Special Envoy and the head of the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund Kirill Dmitriev directly for many months and the two have remained engaged in crafting this new draft proposal, sources said.

As Europeans monitored reports that emerged on Tuesday that Witkoff had worked exclusively with Russian officials to develop the plan, some were on edge, according to six sources familiar with the matter.

Europeans who said they had not been briefed on the details grew concerned about what the effort could mean for Ukraine – given their longstanding position that Ukraine must be involved in any discussions about a peace deal.

Then on Wednesday night, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted that ending the war would require “an extensive exchange of serious and realistic ideas.” Rubio added that the Trump administration would continue “to develop a list of potential ideas” to end the Ukraine war, without saying any final proposal was being floated.

Some Europeans let out a collective sigh of relief.

“Yesterday nerves were up, today nerves are down,” said a diplomat based in Brussels on Thursday, explaining that Rubio’s tweet had appeared to chill the idea that a firm new deal was on the table that the US would be urging Ukraine to accept.

“The president lets hundreds of flowers bloom,” the diplomat added, pointing to the possibility that the efforts could have been driven by Witkoff freelancing, but also noting that he is one of few people who has the official green-light do that from the president.

A senior State Department official said that Rubio “was reiterating a point he has made for months – a diplomatic end to the war requires both sides to make concessions, and that cannot happen without ongoing dialogue.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that both Witkoff and Rubio “have been working on a plan quietly for about the last month.” She would not go into details of the plan, saying that it’s “ongoing” and “in flux.”

Leavitt acknowledged that the administration was taking cues from its playbook on the Gaza ceasefire.

Witkoff and Rubio, she said, have “been engaging with both sides, Russia and Ukraine equally, to understand what these countries would commit to in order to see a lasting and durable peace.”

“That’s how you get to a peace negotiation, right? That’s how it worked with Israel, with respect to Israel and Gaza and all of the Arab countries in the Middle East,” she said at a press briefing.

The new push comes just after recent reports of corruption inside Ukraine, which some administration officials believe leaves the Ukrainian government in a weakened state, and some Europeans are concerned about the US seeking to leverage that weakness.

Still, other Europeans diplomats believe that a continued push towards a peace agreement is useful. One European diplomat explained that they viewed Witkoff’s current efforts as a natural evolution of continued US strategy to drive a peace deal.

“You have to look at it as an evolution of a negotiation. You take out points, dial up points… the two sides won’t get an agreement overnight,” the European said.

Russia has not publicly endorsed the ongoing efforts. The Kremlin denied it is working with the US on a peace proposal for Ukraine this week, saying Thursday there were “no new developments” following a Trump-Putin summit in Alaska in August.

Asked if Russia and the US are currently working towards an end to the war in Ukraine, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that “there are no consultations as such currently underway. There are certainly contacts. But there is no process that could be called consultations. It is not ongoing.”

As of last week, Rubio still publicly said his assessment was Russia did not want peace.

“They’ve stated clearly what they want is they want the rest of Donetsk, and obviously the Ukrainians aren’t going to agree to that,” he told reporters after a meeting of the G7 foreign ministers.

“That’s the assessment we have to make,” he said. “They’ve made a demand that Ukraine can’t agree to, and so that’s sort of where we are at this point.”

When the top US diplomat spoke with his Russian counterpart by phone last month, officials felt that the Russian position had not evolved enough beyond its maximalist stance, a source familiar with the matter said at the time. Potential meetings between Rubio and Lavrov and Trump and Putin did not move forward, despite Trump saying just a week prior that he planned to meet the Russian president.

Administration officials said that the reported plan is not the final product, and the fact that it has a number of items that had been pushed by Russia and previously rejected by Ukraine does not mean that is the expectation for an agreement at the end of the ongoing talks – including talks with Ukrainians.

The plan was presented on Thursday to the Ukrainians by the Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, two sources said. While his trip to Ukraine was previously scheduled, it was an opportunity to share the current thinking on the revived push to end the war, the sources explained.

The Ukrainian presidential office did not outright reject the current US efforts, saying Thursday on X that “the President of Ukraine has officially received from the American side a draft plan which, in the American side’s assessment, could help reinvigorate diplomacy.”

Still, who becomes the primary Trump administration point person for the Ukrainians as the administration pushes – again – for a peace deal remains unclear. Throughout the last year, Keith Kellogg, the US special envoy for Russia and Ukraine, has served as the chief Trump administration official communicating with the Ukrainians. But in recent months he has privately told people that he plans to depart early next year, which could leave a significant void until that role is filled.

CNN’s Natasha Bertrand and Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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