U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, cancelled a planned trip to Ankara on Wednesday where he had been scheduled to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss a reported 28-point peace plan that the Trump administration is now aggressively pushing in an effort to end the war in Ukraine.
According to Axios, citing White House officials, Witkoff abruptly called off the meeting after learning that Zelensky was unwilling to compromise and had arrived in Ankara with his own alternative proposal. Witkoff reportedly believed Zelensky’s plan would be categorically unacceptable to Moscow, undermining the purpose of the talks before they began.
Over the past several days, the White House has launched an intensified effort to craft a settlement and, for the first time, appears willing to consider Russia’s core demands. According to multiple media outlets, the plan, developed jointly by Witkoff and Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, would require Ukraine to withdraw from the remaining territories it controls in the Donbas, dramatically reduce the size of its military, limit the range of its missiles, adopt Russian as an official state language, and restore the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Reports indicate Zelensky rejected all of these points.
Despite the extensive attention the plan received in American media, Russian officials have been unusually quiet. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated that Moscow has not been officially informed of any such proposal, raising questions about whether the U.S. has formally communicated the plan or is attempting to pressure Kyiv before engaging Russia.
On Wednesday, it was also reported that senior American military officials traveled to Kiev to persuade Ukraine’s military leadership to support Trump’s plan. The same delegation was expected to travel to Moscow on Thursday, signaling a level of direct military-to-military involvement not previously seen in the conflict.
This sudden surge of diplomatic and political pressure comes as Zelensky faces a confluence of crises: mounting battlefield setbacks, deepening economic distress, and a widening political scandal that has forced two ministers to flee the country and implicated several figures close to the president. The turmoil has led many observers to argue that Washington is seizing on Zelensky’s moment of vulnerability to force concessions that he would have been unwilling—or politically unable—to consider earlier in the war.