So here's a question I'm having a hard time answering.

Is this moment right now some kind of turning point for Ukraine?

Tonight, an ultimatum, nearly four years into this bloody war.

Going into the weekend, it seemed like maybe.

But then again, we've been here before.

President Trump now telling Ukraine, accept a new peace plan by Thanksgiving Day or risk losing

U.S. support.

The choice for Ukraine's leadership, President Trump implied, was between accepting a new 28-point peace plan or going it alone against Russia. Volodymyr Zelensky called it a choice

between losing Ukraine's dignity or losing a key partner.

Slate's Fred Kaplan thinks Zelensky is right here, for what it's worth.

He spent the weekend trying to figure out where this 28-point plan even came from.

Well, I wrote a column on Friday saying that the peace plan amounts to Ukrainian surrender.

Now we learn that this whole document was just something that was arranged by Steve Whitkoff

and Jared Kushner, as they were flying back from the Middle East, and then kind of gone over again by Whitkoff and a guy who is basically Putin's Whitkoff.

It didn't go through Rubio, who at first told some congressman at a security conference in Halifax that it was a Russian document. He took that

back. But nonetheless, this is what happens when you basically don't have a national security

council. In the past, if there was going to be negotiations on something this momentous,

you would have a deputies meeting. If there was a document already

existing, you would have them go over that document. Sounds like instead this was written on a

cocktail napkin. Well, a big one since it's 28 points. As ad hoc as this plan may have been, the world has been forced to take it seriously.

Ukrainian and European negotiators spent the weekend tweaking it, all in the hopes that maybe

something could stick.

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