Vladimir Putin Has “Amazing New Peace Plan” for Ukraine, Daily Mail reported, citing diplomatic sources from Moscow and Kiev.
The Russian president has sent his interior minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev to the US on a secret mission to present the peace plan in question to the Americans. Despite being sanctioned after the invasion, Kolokoltsev was allowed into the US ostensibly to attend a meeting of UN police chiefs.
But this was only a cover for the minister's true purpose – he arrived in Washington in a VIP plane from Putin's personal fleet to deliver the “peace plan” of the American authorities. Ukrainian intelligence sources also confirm that such a meeting took place.
Putin's plan, however, is unlikely to be acceptable to Ukraine, because it foresees the country giving up a huge part of its territory. Also, Ukraine will never be able to join NATO. The demands were for Ukraine to completely withdraw from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which are now partially annexed by Russia. But Russia will hand over the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and the nearby city of Enerhodar to Ukraine.
What is unique in Putin's new peace plan is the status of Crimea: the peninsula will become a “special demilitarized administrative territory with dual subordination to Ukraine and the Russian Federation”. Ukraine must undertake legally binding international guarantees not to block water supplies to Crimea. Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and promised it would be “Russian forever,” but now seems ready to give up on that dream. The Ukrainian peninsula, occupied by the Russian army, is constantly under attack by Ukrainian forces.
Ukraine's army will have a legal maximum size and the country will be barred from joining NATO. But Putin will not seek to block Ukraine's accession to the EU. The West will lift sanctions on Russian oil and gas, as well as the banking sector, the “peace plan” of Putin.
On this background, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán first went to Kiev and then to Moscow, trying to create conditions between the two countries for holding diplomatic talks. But Orbán doesn't seem to have really gotten that far. During a joint appearance with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, he had to admit that Moscow's and Kiev's ideas for resolving the conflict are far from each other. According to American experts, Putin shows no real will to negotiate even after his meeting with Orbán. According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in Washington, Putin instead called on Ukraine to surrender.