US military Officials in Ukraine Amid Reports of Draft Russia Peace Plan

Senior Pentagon officials have arrived in Ukraine to “discuss efforts to end the war” with Russia, the US military has said.
The team, led by US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, is expected to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv yesterday.
Reports began surfacing on Wednesday that the US and Russia had prepared a new framework peace plan, requiring significant concessions from Ukraine including giving up territory it still controls and dramatically cutting the size of its military.
Neither Washington nor Moscow has officially confirmed the plan, drafted by President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev.
However, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on X that achieving a “durable peace will require both sides to agree to difficult but necessary concessions. That is why we are and will continue to develop a list of potential ideas for ending this war based on input from both sides of this conflict”.
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas warned on Thursday that for any plan to work, it would need to have Ukrainians and Europeans on board, and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said “the Ukrainians do not want any form of capitulation”.
Reports of a US-Russia peace plan emerged on the day at least 26 people were killed in a Russian missile and drone attack on blocks of flats in Ukraine’s western city of Ternopil. Another 22 people were missing at the site, Zelensky said yesterday.
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Zelensky was in Turkey at the time of the Ternopil attack, and unconfirmed Ukrainian reports suggested that talks had been planned with Trump’s envoy in Ankara, but were called off.
There was no mention of the framework plan when the US army secretary arrived in Kyiv late on Wednesday. Army spokesman Col David Butler said only that Driscoll and his team had were there “on behalf of the [Trump] administration on a fact-finding mission to meet Ukrainian officials and discuss efforts to end the war”.
Driscoll’s team in Kyiv is the most senior military group to travel to Kyiv since Trump took office in January. He is joined by Army chief of staff Gen Randy George, top US army commander in Europe Gen Chris Donahue, and Srg Maj of the Army Michael Weimer.
A Ukrainian official told CBS, the BBC’s US media partner, that talks on the trip would focus on the military situation on the ground – as well as plans for a possible ceasefire.
The unnamed official said: “Presidents Zelensky and Trump have already agreed to stop the conflict along the existing lines of engagement, and there are agreements on granting security guarantees”.