Trump’s Ukraine Peace Plan Should Prompt Congress ‘To Hold The Horses’

Steve Witkoff, US President Donald Trump’s envoy will be meeting with President Putin again shortly. Fears have been expressed about what is being offered to Putin by Trump’s envoy. (Photo by Gavriil Grigorov / POOL / AFP) (Photo by GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Trump’s Ukraine peace plan appears to be trying an end run on Ukraine. In The Telegraph of November 28th, 2025, an article by Joe Barnes explains that President Donald Trump is taking a unilateral approach to ending the Ukraine war. According to his report, Trump is ready to recognise Russia’s control over Crimea and other occupied Ukrainian territories as part of a peace agreement. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s self-described peace envoy, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, have reportedly been sent to Moscow to present Trump’s Ukraine peace plan to Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin, for its part, has confirmed receiving a revised strategy after emergency talks in Geneva, and Putin has publicly indicated that formal U.S. recognition of Crimea and the “republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk is a key condition for negotiations.

In Plain Terms

The White House seems prepared to exchange legal acknowledgment of conquest for a ceasefire. If Trump formalizes that offer, it won’t just “end a war.” It will undermine the legal and political framework that the United States itself helped establish at the end of ​World War II. It will also shake up the international rules of engagement between nations for years to come. While Congress may not have the power to directly veto a presidential recognition decision, it can, and ought to, send a very clear message before it’s too late.

The Core Problem: Recognizing Land Taken By Force

Trump isn’t operating in a legal vacuum. He’s operating on top of a mountain of existing commitments.

Under the U.N. Charter, all member states—including the United States and Russia—must “refrain… from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” That is the post-1945 rule against seizing land by force.

After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the U.N. General Assembly passed its Territorial Integrity of Ukraine Resolution, affirming that Crimea remains part of Ukraine and declaring the so-called referendum invalid. Following the full-scale invasion in 2022, the U.N. General Assembly again passed an Aggression Against Ukraine Resolution, supporting Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders and insisting that “no territorial acquisition resulting from the threat or use of force shall be recognized as legal.”

Furthermore, the International Law Commission’s Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts outline a duty of non-recognition: when a serious breach of a peremptory norm (such as the prohibition of aggression) occurs, other states must not recognise the resulting situation as lawful, nor aid or assist in sustaining it.

In the alliance system, the North Atlantic Treaty supports NATO’s “open door” policy: any European country that promotes the Treaty’s principles can be invited to join. No third country has a veto.

What Trump’s Peace Deal Proposes

Trump’s Ukraine peace deal that proposes accepting Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territory, freezing Ukraine out of NATO under a de facto Russian veto, and quietly burying accountability for atrocities is not just “different diplomacy.” It completely ignores those commitments. This isn’t hypothetical. During Trump’s second term, the U.S. has already shifted to a “neutral” stance at the U.N., pushing resolutions that avoid blaming Russia and even voting against a Ukraine-backed text that explicitly condemned Russian aggression—drawing sharp criticism from European allies. Barnes’ reporting indicates that the next step may be moving from neutral language to openly recognising Russian gains.

The Constitutional Catch

It is true that the U.S. Supreme Court has determined that the President alone has the authority to recognise foreign states and their territorial boundaries. Congress cannot compel the Executive to adopt a specific recognition stance or oppose the President’s formal recognition decision.

But that is not the end of the story. Congress still controls the crucial levers: the funding that determines what the U.S. government can actually do with any recognition decision, the sanctions and legal definitions that govern how U.S. law treats Crimea and the occupied Donbas, and the public record that defines what America’s policy is supposed to be. That’s exactly where a proposal for a brief, pointed “sense of Congress” resolution could make such a huge difference.

What A Sense-Of-Congress Resolution Should Say

For once, Congress doesn’t need lofty rhetoric or a lengthy preamble. It needs a clear statement of the red line. Something like this would do the trick:

It Is The Sense Of Congress That:

1. Under the U.N. Charter and subsequent resolutions concerning aggression against Ukraine, the United States must not recognise as lawful any territorial claim by the Russian Federation to Ukrainian territory seized by force, including Crimea and the occupied regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
2. The President and all officers of the United States should refrain from supporting, endorsing, or implementing any peace proposal that conditions a ceasefire on such recognition, restricts Ukraine’s sovereign right to choose its alliances in contradiction of NATO’s open-door principle, or offers impunity for war crimes and other serious violations of international law.
3. It is the policy of the United States to uphold its treaty commitments and the customary duty of non-recognition of territorial conquest, and to support Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders.

What Such A Resolution Would Do

While such a resolution may not be legally binding on Trump, it accomplishes three key things. It establishes the baseline by clearly and publicly stating what U.S. policy is meant to be, both on paper and in law. It also reaffirms that Trump’s decision to recognise Russian control over occupied Ukrainian territory diverges from that baseline, rather than being a natural progression of existing policy. Additionally, it sets the stage for more stringent measures later—such as laws that solidify sanctions and define occupied Ukrainian territories in U.S. legislation as “Ukrainian territory under Russian occupation,” regardless of what the White House declares.

Such a resolution may not physically stop Witkoff, Kushner, or anyone else from sitting down in Moscow and trying to trade pieces of Ukraine for a handshake photo op. But it will raise the political cost of any White House move to ratify Russia’s land-grab, signal to Kyiv and European capitals that Congress is not silently complicit, and make it easier, in retrospect, to see who defended the rules—and who helped rewrite them for the sake of a quick “win” or a possible Nobel Peace Prize.

Time To Act

Trump’s Ukraine peace plan is out of step with America’s historical policies. For decades, the United States has upheld a straightforward principle: you cannot change borders through invasion and then expect the world to endorse the outcome. That principle distinguished the post-1945 international order from that of the 1930s. If the current President now chooses to abandon this principle and recognise Russia’s gains in Ukraine, Congress cannot stop him. However, it can make it unmistakably clear that, when history reflects on Trump’s Ukraine peace plan proposal, the surrender of Ukraine’s territory will be seen as his decision—not America’s.