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Zelensky’s Peace Plan for Russia Wasn’t Worth the Ink to the New York Times or Washington Post
Al Jazeera’s got it covered. Maybe we’re not ready.
4 min readDec 30, 2022
So good to see that Zelensky has published a peace plan. At least he has been talking about a peace plan in public. Russia immediately rejected it, but Ukraine has a peace plan on offer. Al-Jazeera posted a story on December 28th with some of the details of Zelensky’s 10-point peace plan:
- Radiation and nuclear safety, focusing on restoring security around Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine, which is now Russian-occupied.
- Food security, including protecting and ensuring Ukraine’s grain exports to the world’s poorest nations.
- Energy security, with a focus on price restrictions on Russian energy resources, as well as aiding Ukraine with restoring its power infrastructure, half of which has been damaged by Russian attacks.
- Release of all prisoners and deportees, including war prisoners and children deported to Russia.
- Restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity and Russia reaffirming it according to the UN Charter, which Zelenskyy said is “not up to negotiations”.
- Withdrawal of Russian troops and the cessation of hostilities, the restoration of Ukraine’s state borders with Russia.
- Justice, including the establishment of a special tribunal to prosecute Russian war crimes.
- The prevention of ecocide, and the protection of the environment, with a focus on demining and restoring water treatment facilities.
- Prevention of an escalation of conflict and building security architecture in the Euro-Atlantic space, including guarantees for Ukraine.
- Confirmation of the war’s end, including a document signed by the involved parties.
It turns out I was wrong about there not being much “shuttle diplomacy”. I really wanted to be wrong about that. For weeks, Zelensky has been sharing this plan with world leaders for feedback and to demonstrate a willingness to talk about peace. I want to be wrong that Zelensky is more interested in defeating Russia than securing peace by agreement with Russia for his…
