Speaker of Ukraine’s Parliament stresses Kyiv’s ‘red lines’ as revised peace plan is drafted

The Speaker of Ukraine’s Parliament Ruslan Stefanchuk reiterated Kyiv’s “red lines” on Monday, following a weekend of fraught diplomacy in Europe as Ukraine and its allies pushed back against a peace plan put forward by the Trump administration that was widely seen as little more than a list of Russian demands. 

In Stockholm to address the Crimea Platform, a forum created in 2021 to raise international awareness of Russia’s illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, Stefanchuk stressed that any peace plan acceptable to Kyiv would have to be constitutional, and neither undermine the interests of the Ukrainian People, nor legitimise the Russian occupation of its territory. 

“A just peace is one protected from renewed aggression, secured with reliable guarantees, and grounded in full respect for international law,” Stefanchuk wrote on X later on Monday. 

Stefanchuk’s reaction came as an “updated and refined” peace plan was announced by Kyiv and Washington after talks in Geneva on Sunday. The initial plan faced significant backlash from NATO member states and some US senators, with questions being raised about its authorship, and European partners suggesting refinements were needed for the plan to work for Ukraine. 

Rustem Umerov, Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine and a member of the Ukrainian delegation at the Geneva talks, was optimistic about the updated draft of the peace plan on Sunday, writing on X that while Ukraine’s proposals were not “finalised”, they included “many Ukrainian priorities”. 

The peace plan was met with scepticism by most Ukrainian politicians, with Inna Sovsun, a lawmaker from pro-European Ukrainian liberal party Holos, telling The Kyiv Independent on Friday that the price of maintaining its dialogue with the US could not be “the sovereignty of Ukraine, which this plan undermines altogether”.

Sovsun’s stance echoes the sentiments voiced by frontline soldiers in interviews conducted by the BBC on Monday, with one medic calling the US proposals “unworthy of our attention”.