From: Transform Ukraine By Douglas Landro / December 25, 2025
As diplomats unveiled a revised peace framework, Russian drones darkened Ukrainian cities and Kremlin insiders exposed how Moscow was demanding territory its army never controlled.
The Day’s Reckoning
The drones came first, before dawn, their engines buzzing low over darkened cities as Ukrainians slept through Christmas Eve. By morning, President Volodymyr Zelensky was standing in Kyiv, outlining a revised U.S.–Ukrainian–European peace plan meant to chart a path out of the war. By nightfall, 131 Russian drones had crossed Ukrainian airspace, power grids lay damaged, and tens of thousands of people sat in the cold and dark.
It was a day built on collision.
In Miami conference rooms, diplomats debated language about demilitarized zones, nuclear plant management, and future economic arrangements. They spoke in paragraphs and clauses, searching for wording that might unlock compromise. At the same time, Russian forces sent wave after wave of drones into Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, striking nineteen locations in Chernihiv Oblast alone. Negotiation unfolded under fluorescent lights; war unfolded under missile alerts.
Elsewhere, another truth surfaced. Russian military bloggers—usually reliable amplifiers of Kremlin narratives—began dismantling their own army’s claims. They admitted that commanders had been “blatantly lying” upward about battlefield successes near Kupyansk, reporting victories that never existed and territory that had already been retaken by Ukrainian counterattacks. The fiction had collapsed in public.
The contrast was absolute. American officials described the twenty-point framework as progress. The Kremlin dismissed it while demanding Ukrainian withdrawal from territory Russian troops had failed to seize. Russian forces pressed attacks along multiple fronts even as Moscow’s diplomats rejected compromise outright.
This was diplomacy in parallel with destruction. Peace plans moved forward on paper while cities burned, power failed, and soldiers fought for meters of ground. December 24 revealed a war being discussed in one reality and lived in another—and the distance between those realities had never felt wider.
The Twenty Points of Compromise (That Russia Rejected Anyway)
President Zelensky unveiled details of the revised US-Ukrainian-European peace plan that had been released the previous day. The twenty-point proposal summarized months of trilateral negotiations, though Zelensky noted that two critical provisions—concerning the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and mechanisms for creating economic zones in Donetsk Oblast—remained unresolved.
The document marked significant evolution from the twenty-eight-point plan floated in November. Gone were demands for Ukraine to withdraw from unoccupied Donbas, for caps limiting Ukraine’s peacetime military to 600,000 personnel, and for explicit abandonment of NATO membership aspirations. The new plan proposed freezing the war along current frontlines in Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts—wherever troops stood when signatures were applied—and allowed Ukraine a peacetime force of 800,000.
“The ball is currently in their court,” US Ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker stated on Fox News, referring to Russia’s need to respond to the four documents emerging from recent talks. Whitaker noted that high casualties Russia was taking for “very small” gains hadn’t pushed the Kremlin toward ending the fighting.
They wouldn’t. Russian Presidential Aide Yuriy Ushakov had already signaled Moscow’s position even before the twenty-point plan’s publication, stating he was “certain” that Ukrainian and European proposals would be “rather unconstructive” and wouldn’t “improve” any settlement agreement. Translation: Russia wasn’t interested in compromise.
Putin’s demands remained unchanged from his June 2024 speech to the Foreign Ministry—the same maximalist position he’d maintained since February 2022. Ukraine’s complete withdrawal from all of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts. Ukraine’s NATO membership aspirations abandoned and neutrality guaranteed. Ukraine’s demilitarization to the point it couldn’t defend itself. Ukraine’s “denazification”—Kremlin code for regime change and installation of a puppet government. International recognition of Russia’s illegal annexations. Lifting of all Western sanctions.
These demands were incompatible not just with the twenty-point plan but with the November twenty-eight-point plan that had already made significant concessions. The Kremlin’s negotiating position assumed Ukrainian surrender, Russian territorial conquest, and Western capitulation. Nothing in the latest proposal approached these expectations.
Voice of Ukraine 