European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said she will speak directly with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the margins of the G20 summit in Johannesburg to discuss a United States-backed peace plan for Ukraine that has been negotiated with Russia without a formal role for the European Union.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, von der Leyen said that both EU leaders and G20 counterparts would examine the initiative during the summit and that she intended to contact Zelenskyy “to discuss the matter” in detail. She restated the line that has guided EU diplomacy since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022: “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”
The peace proposal, described as a 28-point roadmap, has been drawn up by Washington in direct talks with Moscow and is modelled in part on the Trump administration’s previous Gaza ceasefire framework. According to officials briefed on the text, the plan is structured around four pillars: ending active hostilities in Ukraine, security guarantees for Kyiv, broader security arrangements in Europe, and the future of US relations with both Russia and Ukraine.
Draft provisions seen by diplomats and media outlets set out conditions that would mark a significant change to Ukraine’s current war aims. Kyiv would be expected to relinquish the entire Donbas region, including territory its forces still control in Donetsk, and accept that Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk are de facto under Russian control. Ukraine would also be required to reduce the size of its armed forces to around 600,000 personnel, from an estimated one million in uniform today, in exchange for yet-to-be-defined “robust security guarantees” from Western partners.
These reported terms have caused unease among European governments that have supplied Ukraine with large volumes of military, financial and humanitarian assistance over the past three years. European officials and analysts have long argued that territorial concessions and enforced demilitarisation would risk rewarding aggression and could create long-term security vulnerabilities on the EU’s eastern flank. Media analyses have noted that the emerging text appears to favour Russian interests on key territorial questions, while also demanding compromises from Moscow that the Kremlin has so far rejected.
Kyiv has responded cautiously in public. After meeting a senior US Army official on Thursday, Zelenskyy said he was ready for “constructive, honest and prompt work” with Washington on ways to end the war, while reiterating that any settlement must respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and the safety of its population. Rustem Umerov, Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council, said technical teams from Ukraine and the United States were already studying the proposals and that Kyiv’s “core principles” – territorial integrity, justice for victims, and sustainable security – remained unchanged.
In Moscow, officials have also avoided a definitive public position while signalling their own conditions. The Kremlin said this week that any peace plan would have to address what it calls the “root causes” of the conflict and confirmed that, although there were contacts with Washington, there were no formal negotiations on the US roadmap at this stage. Russian forces have continued offensive operations in eastern Ukraine, and Russian officials have repeatedly linked any ceasefire to recognition of what they describe as “new territorial realities”.
Von der Leyen’s decision to engage Zelenskyy during the G20 reflects EU frustration at being left outside the core channel between Washington and Moscow. Brussels has been a central financial backer of Ukraine and has adopted successive packages of sanctions against Russia, but it has not been invited into the US-Russian drafting process. EU officials have stressed in recent days that the Union will maintain support for Ukraine regardless of the fate of the American plan, and that any final agreement must be acceptable to Kyiv.
