On Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine presented a 20-point peace plan formulated by Ukrainian and American officials that was a significant departure from a plan drawn up in October that would have essentially forced Ukraine to cede territory and rule out NATO membership, writes The New York Times.

“Mr. Zelensky presented the new proposal as a reasonable compromise to the plan drawn up by Kirill Dmitriev, the special envoy of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy, and unveiled in November. The new blueprint includes the security guarantees Kyiv wants to prevent future Russian aggression, as well as plans to rebuild the war-ravaged nation.

But a Kremlin emboldened by Moscow’s advances on the battlefield and restrained by the difficulty of selling the new plan to the Russian public as a victory is unlikely to accept it.

“This is an absolute mockery”, Aleksei Naumov, an analyst of international affairs based in Moscow, said of the new Ukrainian plan in a post on the Telegram messaging app. “The idea is clear: Pitch this to the Americans as a ‘compromise,’ and then blame Russia for its failure”.

What Are Russia’s Main Sticking Points?
Over the past two years, Mr. Putin has consistently insisted on two main points: Ukraine must withdraw its forces from the rest of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and NATO membership must be ruled out. Mr. Putin confirmed this position on Friday at his annual news conference. He said that Russia was willing to make some “accommodations” - widely believed to involve giving up some Russian-occupied land in Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia regions. But he stressed that Moscow remained willing to continue fighting to fully occupy the Donetsk region.

The Ukrainian peace plan stipulates that Russia must withdraw its forces from the Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, Sumy and Kharkiv regions. The proposal also states that Ukraine would pull its troops back from areas of the Donetsk region that would be turned into a demilitarized zone — but only if Russia withdrew its forces from an equivalent stretch of land.

“The plan offers no compromise regarding the territories or the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant,” Georgi Bovt, a Russian analyst, said of the plant that is currently occupied by Russian forces but that Ukraine would prefer to operate jointly with the United States. “Failing to resolve the territorial issue renders this a nonstarter”, - writes the author of the article.