When the first reports appeared of the new, 28-point peace plan for Ukraine earlier this week, the responsible thing was to withhold judgment. With anonymous sourcing, it was far from obvious where the genuine diplomatic back-and-forth ended and where the Russian spin started.

Unfortunately, the published documents, prepared by the president’s envoy Steven Witkoff and Kiril Dimitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, leave little room for doubt.

If implemented, the plan is tantamount to using US power to give Vladimir Putin what he has not been able to achieve through military means, thus effectively placing the United States on the same side of the conflict as China, which also has been helping Russia by non-military means.

For one, the plan counts on rewarding Russia for its aggression by lifting sanctions, allowing it to rejoin the G8 — as if Russia were the world’s eighth-largest economy and not number 11 — as well greenlighting a flurry of joint US-Russian projects in the Arctic, on AI, energy, and others. Russian war criminals will be protected from prosecution and Russia will regain much of its frozen assets, some of which will be invested in joint US-Russian ventures — presumably generating profit for the US and Russian treasuries.

More importantly, Witkoff and Dimitriev give Russia a veto over Ukraine’s geopolitical future — and also over NATO’s future.

Both Kyiv and the alliance are asked to ratify — in Ukraine’s case, in its constitution — that Ukraine will not be a member of NATO. While the prospect of Ukraine’s membership has always been a very distant one, it has always been a matter for the alliance’s members and Ukraine to decide — not Russia.

In what is perhaps the most damning part of the plan, Ukraine is asked to surrender significant portions of its territory — including the most heavily fortified portions of Donetsk, which have been impenetrable to a sustained Russian aggression since 2014.

In Munich in 1938, the UK and France likewise pressured Czechoslovakia into giving up the mountainous region of Sudetenland, together with its advanced system of fortifications, which had made a previous invasion by Nazi Germany impracticable. Less than seven months later, Czechoslovakia ceased to exist.

The deal would also halve Ukraine’s military to just 600,000 men, with no similar restrictions imposed on Russia.

The idea of a “NATO-style” security guarantee for Ukraine is laughable — especially in light of the stipulated absence of Western peacekeepers or other explicit tripwires. The alliance’s Article 5 considers an attack on one member — as on 9/11 — an attack on all. The plan’s version comes with heavy caveats — requiring a “significant, deliberate, and sustained armed attack” and thus ruling out the forms of warfare that Russia undertook against Ukraine in 2014 in Crimea (and unsuccessfully in cities such as Odesa or Kherson).

But even a restarted full-fledged invasion does not commit anyone to anything — beyond a huffing and puffing about a possible “threat to the peace and security of the trans-Atlantic community.”

There is plenty more in the agreement that gives Russia inroads to interfere with Ukrainian domestic politics, including in the space of media, education, and language rights — issues that the Kremlin has successfully weaponized against Ukraine.

When Witkoff embarked on his diplomatic effort in the spring of this year, one could perhaps blame the early setbacks on his and the administration’s naivete, especially about the Russians’ true intentions.

To see him now, on behalf of the president, simply recycle Russian demands into an official position of the US government amounts to something far more sinister than just an exercise in bumbling incompetence.

What reinforces that is the fact that the administration is trying to impose its will at a time of Kyiv’s weakness, as President Volodymyr Zelensky faces the fallout of a major corruption scandal in his administration and the country gears up for yet another cold, dark winter, driven by Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure.

There is still a good chance that the plan will fall apart — not least because Ukrainians are likely to persevere even with no US support. Alas, the bitterness of what many of them already see as betrayal will linger for decades.

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.