The latest proposal to end the war in Ukraine — Donald Trump’s much-touted 28-point “peace plan” — is being sold as pragmatic statesmanship, a hard-nosed reset after years of bloodshed. But strip away the varnish and what stands revealed is not a roadmap to peace, but a glossy reissue of the oldest foreign-policy illusion in the book: appeasement dressed up as realpolitik. The echoes of Neville Chamberlain stepping off a plane in 1938, waving his doomed “peace for our time” agreement with Adolf Hitler, are not subtle. They do not need to be. This plan practically shouts them.
Putin has already told us who he is. He has demonstrated it through the flattening of Mariupol, the deportation of Ukrainian children, the murder of civilians, the deliberate targeting of infrastructure. He has said, explicitly, that Ukraine is not a real country and has no right to exist independently of Russia. And yet here is a plan that would, point by point, reward the very behavior the world has spent nearly three years trying to stop. If implemented, it would allow Russia to keep the land it seized by force, dictate the political posture of a sovereign neighbor, and walk away not chastened, but vindicated.
What Chamberlain failed to understand — and what anyone now flirting with a quick fix for Ukraine must understand — is that autocrats do not stop when handed concessions. They bank them, and then they move to the next objective. Hitler took the Sudetenland as a warm-up. Putin took Crimea as a warm-up. He tested the world’s resolve in 2014 and found it wanting. That miscalculation, that willingness to look away, brought us to the war now grinding through its thousandth day.
Trump’s plan would repeat the mistake on a grander scale. By requiring Ukraine to relinquish territory before Russia withdraws, by limiting Ukraine’s military alliances, and by forcing Kyiv into negotiations while its cities remain under threat, the proposal asks Ukrainians to surrender the very independence they are fighting to protect. One can call that many things. Peace is not one of them.
Appeasement always comes wrapped in the language of responsibility, maturity, and restraint. Chamberlain believed he was preventing a wider war. Trump and his allies say they are ending one. But the logic is the same: give the aggressor what he wants, and maybe the aggressor will be satisfied. History tells us — bluntly, repeatedly — that this is fantasy. Putin has already hinted at grievances far beyond Ukraine’s borders. If the world signals that borders may be changed by force without consequence, then what becomes of Poland? Of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania? Of Moldova, already destabilized by Kremlin interference? Once an autocrat is handed his Christmas wish list, he does not retire to enjoy his gifts. He asks for more.
The moral cost is equally stark. Ukrainians have endured the unendurable because they believed, correctly, that freedom is worth defending. To pressure them into accepting permanent occupation is not just geopolitically reckless — it is a profound betrayal of a people who have staked their survival on democratic ideals. It tells every small nation on Earth that their sovereignty exists only until a larger neighbor decides otherwise.
There will be a peace in Ukraine one day. It will come when Russia stops trying to erase a nation of forty million people. It will come when Ukraine’s borders are secure, not redrawn to please Moscow. And it will come when the world stands firm in the lesson Chamberlain learned too late: appeasement is not a path to stability but an invitation to further aggression.
Trump’s plan does not end the war; it extends its consequences. Ukraine deserves a future, not a settlement negotiated at its expense. And the rest of Europe deserves the reassurance that we’ve finally learned from history — not the terror of watching it repeat itself.