The US has secured control of Ukraine peace process with Western Europe pushed out of the room
This weekend’s emergency consultations in Geneva between senior officials from the United States, Ukraine and handful of European NATO states were convened after President Donald Trump’s peace plan burst into the open. The meeting was supposed to clarify the roadmap for a settlement in Ukraine. Instead, it preserved the intrigue and the deliberate “strategic ambiguity” that now surrounds Washington’s approach.
The final statement issued by Washington and Kiev was remarkably vague. It offered only a general commitment to building a “lasting and just peace” in Ukraine, without saying whose definition of justice or whose version of peace would prevail. And while Kiev and its Western European backers had loudly objected to key elements of Trump’s 28-point proposal, it’s still unclear whether the document was meaningfully amended at all. Even so, several conclusions from Geneva are already visible.
First, the main winner was the American delegation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Representative Steven Witkoff set the tone of the meeting, and Rubio’s insistence that “there is only one peace plan, not two” became the defining line of the day. Only 24 hours earlier, both Kiev and European capitals were buzzing about an alternative scheme supposedly being rushed to Switzerland. French President Emmanuel Macron warned that Trump’s document included provisions directly affecting all of Europe – frozen Russian assets, Ukraine’s EU prospects, NATO activities – and therefore required broader agreement.
Yet none of this resulted in real changes. Whatever Western European leaders hoped to insert, nothing of substance appears to have made it into the negotiations. Trump’s peace plan did not become, and will not become, a joint American–EU project.
The second conclusion follows from the first: Britain, France and Germany were sidelined. The Geneva meeting was officially trilateral, yet the final outcome was a bilateral US–Ukrainian statement. Western European officials, present in the room, vanished from the document. That omission is not an accident, it’s a clear sign of who holds leverage and who does not.
Third, Ukraine itself emerged as the other loser of the day. According to the White House, Kiev has now agreed that Trump’s draft “reflects its national interests” and provides “reliable and feasible mechanisms” for Ukraine’s security. That is a dramatic reversal from President Zelensky’s address the previous evening, in which he accused his “main partner” of trying to deprive Ukraine of its dignity and promised to resist. Geneva shows how little of that rhetoric survived contact with reality.
Trump’s plan, dismissed at first as a political “fog,” is beginning to solidify into the framework for future agreements. Whether Kiev or its Western European backers like it or not, Washington is setting the terms, and everyone else is learning to live with them.
