The flurry of diplomacy around Ukraine in late 2025 is about much more than stopping the shooting. The competing peace frameworks emerging from Washington and Europe are attempts to rewrite the security order of the continent. For Central and Eastern Europe, they read less like technical documents and more like a test of whether the region is a subject of history this time – or once again merely a bargaining chip.

At the centre of the storm is the US-backed 28-point peace plan, drafted largely in Washington with quiet input from Moscow, then presented to Kyiv as a framework it was expected to “work with”. The draft would lock in many of Russia’s battlefield gains by recognising its control over Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, and by effectively freezing the front lines in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Ukraine would have to give up forever its ambition to join NATO, cap its armed forces at around 600,000 troops, and accept restrictions that would leave it militarily weaker than the neighbour that just invaded it. In return, it would get vague security assurances from the West and access to some US-brokered reconstruction funds built in part on frozen Russian assets.

European governments – above all the so-called E3 of France, Germany and the UK – have rushed to assemble a counter-proposal. Their document takes the US plan line by line and carefully rewrites it. It re-affirms Ukraine’s sovereignty, strips out the most explicit language about recognising Russian annexations, and suggests that negotiations should start from the current front line but leave the final status of occupied territories to a later process. It raises the ceiling on Ukraine’s armed forces to 800,000 and stresses that this is a peacetime cap, not a tool for keeping the country permanently vulnerable. It also softens the absolute ban on NATO membership into a more ambiguous sequencing: peace and implementation first, strategic alignment later.

On paper, then, the European plan is less punitive for Ukraine and less generous to Russia than the original American draft. It insists more clearly on principles – sovereignty, territorial integrity, conditional sanctions relief. But for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the contrast between the two documents is only part of the story. What matters just as much is the pattern they both reveal: the key texts shaping the future of their security are again being written somewhere else.

For Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Bucharest, Prague or Bratislava, the 28-point US plan is alarming not only because of what it demands from Ukraine, but because of the precedent it sets. A major nuclear power launches a war of conquest in Europe, is stopped short of full success, and then sits down at a table where a superpower offers to stabilise the situation largely on its terms. A settlement built on territorial concessions by the victim, constitutional neutrality, and an expectation that there will be “no further NATO expansion” looks, from the eastern flank, like a blueprint not just for ending this war but for managing the next crisis at their expense.

European leaders have themselves been stunned by how closely the US draft tracks long-standing Russian demands, from blocking NATO enlargement to formalising changes of borders achieved by force.Their counter-proposal is in part an attempt to drag the process back toward the letter of the UN Charter and the normative language the EU has spent decades preaching. Yet the way it has been crafted – in a tight circle of Western capitals – underlines for Central and Eastern Europeans that even “European” security is still often defined without them. When the existence of the US plan first became public, both Ukraine and many EU governments learned its full details from the media, not from allies’ briefings.

This is where history weighs heavily. Societies that remember partitions, secret protocols and the Yalta Conference instinctively read any great-power bargain over their region through that lens. The fear is not abstract. If Washington is prepared to trade away parts of Ukraine’s territory and its NATO path in exchange for a ceasefire and a reset with Russia, what guarantees that, in a future crisis, it will not be tempted to do something similar with the security interests of Poland, the Baltic states or Romania – especially if domestic fatigue with foreign commitments deepens in the US?

The Kremlin’s own reaction hardly reassures anyone. Moscow has dismissed the European counter-proposal as “not constructive” and “not working for Russia”, signalling that it still believes it can push for more, or wait for more concessions as pressure on Kyiv and Western unity grows. That reinforces the sense in Eastern Europe that a deal which leaves Russia with significant territorial gains, while putting only soft constraints on its future behaviour, would not be a stable peace but a pause before the next round.

For the countries along NATO’s eastern flank, the two plans also expose a hierarchy within the West itself. The United States decides the outer frame: how much military aid flows, how hard to squeeze Moscow economically, how urgent a ceasefire truly is. The big Western European powers position themselves as the reasonable mediators who translate American and Russian demands into something the EU can live with. The states that actually border Russia or Ukraine are consulted, but rarely empowered to draw the red lines. Their security is, in practice, a variable inside someone else’s equation.

Yet no sustainable peace architecture in Europe can afford to treat the region merely as a buffer zone. Central and Eastern European states bring more than emotional arguments; they bring a track record of correctly reading Russian imperial behaviour when many in the West preferred to look away. They warned about energy dependence, about the militarisation of Kaliningrad, about the use of frozen conflicts as leverage. Ignoring those warnings once helped pave the way to the current war. Ignoring their security instincts again in designing the peace risks paving the way to the next one.

None of this means that Eastern European governments are naïve about the costs of a long war. They understand better than most what protracted conflict on their doorstep means for budgets, social cohesion and political stability. But for them, the question is not “war or peace at any price”, it is “which peace?” A settlement that entrenches Russian gains, locks Ukraine into second-class status, and leaves NATO’s eastern flank in a permanent grey zone would be a peace that erodes their long-term security rather than strengthening it.

A genuinely inclusive peace process would look different. It would treat the Bucharest Nine and other frontline allies as co-authors of Europe’s security order, not as an afterthought. It would tie any ceasefire in Ukraine to concrete, visible reinforcement of NATO’s presence on the eastern flank and to a long-term pathway for Ukraine into Western institutions, even if the timelines are phased. It would make clear that borders in Europe are not up for negotiation under military duress – not now, and not in ten years when attention has drifted elsewhere.

The US and European plans now on the table represent two versions of an uncomfortable compromise. One leans heavily toward great-power deal-making; the other attempts to smuggle some principles back into the bargain. For Central and Eastern Europe, the real dividing line is not between “American” and “European” peace, but between a settlement that is imposed over their heads and one that recognises them as equal stakeholders in the continent’s future. Without their voice, any peace for Ukraine will look, from the east, less like the end of a war and more like the opening chapter of the next crisis.