This is not a peace plan

Richard Branson

Published on 21 November 2025

"I am in utter disbelief at the 28-point American peace plan for Ukraine that has been circulating in the news media. Unless it turns out to be an elaborate hoax or a sinister Russian disinformation plot, it marks the lowest point yet in US diplomacy on Ukraine.

For starters, this is not really a peace plan at all, but articles of surrender, legitimising Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and the illegal annexation of its territory while brazenly dividing the spoils of war.

There is too much in this shameful document to discuss in detail here. The main takeaways are these:

Time and again, it implies that Ukraine and Russia are equally culpable for a brutal war Putin started.

It creates no mechanism for accountability and justice, even granting general amnesty for Russia’s countless and horrific war crimes.

It forces Ukraine to relinquish control over vast swaths of its sovereign territory in exchange for vague (and potentially costly) security guarantees.

It robs the Ukrainian people of the agency to freely choose alliances such as NATO or to determine the size of their armed forces.

And it creates plenty of opportunities for the US to cash in on whatever reconstruction arrangements will be put in place.

It’s a deal, alright - a great deal for Russia. Putin’s negotiators must have walked away from those consultations with a sense of total victory: all their central demands were met, with complete impunity for the horrors they unleashed on the brave Ukrainian people.

President Zelensky and his European allies should reject this plan and develop a realistic, fair, and feasible proposal of their own, with conditions that are acceptable to Ukraine and respect international law. This is a bamboozle of epic proportions.

As if the terms of this plan weren’t already terrifying enough, the document also marks a remarkable retreat of US leadership, signalling to Putin’s Russia and other authoritarian regimes that violent aggression is perfectly acceptable and, I suspect, even respectable to the US government.

Virgin Galactic "Delta" spacecraft,

Virgin Galactic is preparing for a breakthrough step in its suborbital flight program. The company announced that in March 2025, the assembly of the first example of the new generation of space aircraft, called Delta, will begin.

source

additional info etc. under the cut

Low orbit space flights are far safer than deep-sea dives. There’s still a lot of ways to fuck it up, but the most dangerous parts are launch and atmosphere re-entry, and the technology for that is incredibly established and has been practiced far more than manned deep-sea dives. Not to mention, they will be bound to government regulations regarding aviation safety unless they’re somehow launching from and landing in international waters.

Generally speaking, space tourism is nowhere near as extreme as deep-sea tourism, and has been something that the the entire field has been working towards for decades. It’s also far more likely to become a widespread practice within our lifetimes, and may become accessible to working class people relatively soon.