CRIB NOTES

Trump Admin Caught Passing Russia’s Homework Off as Its Own

The MAGA White House is scrambling to contain backlash to a plan critics say would amount to Ukraine’s surrender after nearly four years of brutal war.

Top lawmakers claim Secretary of State Marco Rubio told them the Donald Trump administration’s latest proposal for peace in Ukraine is in fact a “wish list” drawn up by the Kremlin.

The 28-point peace plan, widely leaked on Saturday, had already come under fire after it emerged the proposals had been pulled together by MAGA officials and their counterparts in Moscow without any input from Kyiv.

Now, Republican Senator Mike Rounds and independent Senator Angus King have told a panel at a security conference in Canada they’ve spoken with Rubio, who told them the plan was a Russian, rather than a U.S., document.

“The leaked 28-point plan, which according to [Rubio], is not of the administration’s position—it is essentially the wish list of the Russians,” King said Saturday. Rounds added “it looked more like it was written in Russian to begin with.”

U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, who is overseeing the negotiations, had earlier invited skepticism of the proposals after mistakenly tweeting a private message in response to an Axios report about the plan’s contents.

“He must have got this from K,” he wrote, in what several commentators took as a reference to Kirill Dmitriev, his Russian counterpart in the talks.

Rubio, for his part, has outright denied Rounds and Kings’ claims in public. “The peace proposal was authored by the U.S.,” he wrote in an X post Saturday. “It is offered as a strong framework for ongoing negotiations. It is based on input from the Russian side. But it is also based on previous and ongoing input from Ukraine.”

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State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott added of Rounds and Kings’ claims of what Rubio told them: “This is blatantly false.”

Critics have roundly and loudly decried the proposals as essentially a demand for surrender from Kyiv. The plan would require Ukraine to halve the size of its military, recognize occupied territories as under Russian control, and proscribe future NATO membership—all core Kremlin demands that have remained unchanged since the launch of Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February 2022.

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The Trump administration has routinely flip-flopped on U.S. commitments to Ukraine, at times exerting unprecedented pressure to capitulate to Moscow, while at others toying with sending weapons that would facilitate strikes deep into Russia and even predicting the embattled Eastern European country may be able to regain all territories currently held by Moscow.

The president has given Kyiv until Thursday to respond to the proposals, even as Trump sought Saturday to mitigate some of that pressure by suggesting there is still scope to make changes to the plan.

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“No, not my final,” he told reporters at the White House in response to questions about whether the terms are non-negotiable as they currently stand. “We’d like to get to peace. It should’ve happened a long time ago.”

The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.

A spokesperson for the State Department said: “As the Administration has consistently maintained, this plan was authored by the United States, with input from both the Russians and Ukrainians. This plan has always been a hopeful start to continued negotiations, and eventually the signing of a final peace agreement once and for all.”

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