Ever-shifting stipulations: While Ukrainian and American delegations made headway in Geneva, Switzerland, hammering out a peace deal with Russia to end Vladimir Putin's bombardment of Ukraine by the Thanksgiving deadline set by President Donald Trump, Russia bombed the crap out of Kyiv.
The plan keeps shifting. What was once a 28-point peace plan has now been shrunken to just 20 points; the Thanksgiving deadline, which was always overly ambitious, has been scrapped. The most important things to hammer out—limits on how large the Ukrainian military may be in the future, a ban on NATO troops inside Ukraine, where new territorial boundaries might be drawn—haven't really been focused on at this stage. But it seems Trump's top guys—Secretary of State Marco Rubio, special envoy Steve Witkoff, and oddly gifted diplomat slash son-in-law Jared Kushner—"believed that the combination of Ukraine's unfolding corruption scandal and Russia's incremental battlefield gains put new pressure on [Ukraine] to cut a deal," per The New York Times. They ended up meeting, quite a few times, with Russian diplomats, and the deal that ultimately came together looked a lot more favorable to Russia than Ukraine.
