By Gram Slattery and Erin Banco
(Reuters) -The U.S.-backed 28-point peace plan to end the war in Ukraine, which became public last week, drew from a Russian-authored paper submitted to the Trump administration in October, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
The Russians shared the paper, which outlined Moscow's conditions for ending the war, with senior U.S. officials in mid-October, following a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
in Washington, the sources said.
The paper, a non-official communication known in diplomatic parlance as a "non-paper," contained language that the Russian government had previously put forward at the negotiating table, including concessions that Ukraine had rejected such as ceding a significant chunk of its territory in the east.
This is the first confirmation that the document - whose existence was initially reported by Reuters in October - was a key input in the 28-point peace plan.
The U.S. State Department and the Russian and Ukrainian embassies in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
The White House did not comment directly on the non-paper but cited Trump's comments that he was optimistic about the 28-point plan's progress.
"In the hopes of finalizing this Peace Plan, I have directed my Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to meet with President Putin in Moscow and, at the same time, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll will be meeting with the Ukrainians," Trump wrote.
It is unclear why and how the Trump administration had come to rely on the Russian document to help shape its own peace plan. Some senior U.S. officials who reviewed it, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, believed the demands made by Moscow would likely be rejected outright by the Ukrainians, the sources said.
SKEPTICISM OVER RUSSIAN INFLUENCE
After the paper's submission, Rubio held a call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during which the paper was discussed, the sources said.
Speaking to reporters in Geneva this week, Rubio acknowledged receiving "numerous written non-papers and things of this nature," without elaborating.
Since the peace plan was first reported by Axios last week, skepticism has mounted among U.S. officials and lawmakers, many of whom see the plan as a list of Russian positions and not a serious proposal.
The United States has put pressure on Ukraine, nonetheless, warning it could curb its military assistance if Ukraine did not sign.
The plan was composed at least in part during a meeting between Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, special envoy Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, the head of one of Russia's sovereign wealth funds, in Miami last month. Few inside the State Department and White House were briefed on that encounter, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Witkoff had offered advice to high-ranking Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov regarding how Putin should speak to Trump. According to call transcripts obtained by the news agency, Ushakov and Witkoff alluded to a possible "20-point plan" as early as October 14. The scope of that plan apparently widened during subsequent conversations with Dmitriev, it added.
PLAN REVISED AFTER GLOBAL BACKLASH
The U.S. proposal, which caught officials in Washington and Europe off-guard, triggered a flurry of diplomacy across three continents. The original plan has changed dramatically since then: Nine of the original 28 points have been cut following talks between senior U.S. and Ukrainian officials, according to ABC News.
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators said on Saturday that Rubio had told them the 28-point plan was not a U.S. plan but instead a Russian wish list, although the White House and State Department vigorously denied that Rubio had characterized it as such.
In the discussions that followed, a senior U.S. delegation that included Rubio agreed to excise or modify some of the most pro-Russian parts of the plan during meetings in Geneva with European and Ukrainian officials.
Driscoll is currently meeting with a Russian delegation in Abu Dhabi. A Ukrainian delegation is also in the UAE for talks with the U.S. team, according to a U.S. official.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said they supported the modified peace deal framework that had emerged from the latest talks, but stressed that the most sensitive issues - territorial concessions are especially contentious - needed to be fixed at a potential meeting between Zelenskiy and Trump.
(Reporting by Erin Banco and Gram Slattery; Additional reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by Don Durfee and Edmund Klamann)
