The war in Ukraine is heading to its inevitable conclusion. It may still take many months, but Russia will win the war on the battlefield, and Ukraine will be without some of its territory and without NATO membership. In such a situation, Kiev has every incentive to make a deal rather than wait for crushing defeat.
There is no doubt that Ukraine will require reliable security guarantees, as even Russia now accepts. But there is an important historical context to that requirement that needs to be considered when satisfying it.
Ukraine must have security guarantees to be sure Russia won’t invade again. But Russia would not have invaded Ukraine had the U.S. and NATO been willing to negotiate the security proposals that Russia presented to them in December 2021. A key demand was that NATO guarantee that Ukraine would not become a member. Former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has conceded that the security proposal laid down the denial of Ukrainian membership as the “pre-condition for not invad[ing] Ukraine.” When the U.S. and NATO “rejected that,” Russia made the decision to invade. Had NATO closed the door to Ukrainian membership, Russia likely would not have invaded.
Once again, after the war had started, Russia was prepared to call it off if Ukraine agreed not to join NATO. The head of Ukraine’s negotiating team at the talks in Istanbul in the first weeks of the war says that the “key point” Russia demanded to end the war was a guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO: “They were prepared to end the war if we… committed that we would not join NATO.” Had the U.S. and Britain not encouraged Kiev to abandon diplomacy in favor of fighting Russia, Moscow would likely have quickly concluded its war.
While Kiev would like its security guarantee to come in the form of NATO membership, the most important guarantee of its future security is the opposite: a credible commitment from Kiev and from NATO that Ukraine will remain neutral and never join the Western alliance. The historical record suggests that the growing Ukraine–NATO partnership is the main reason that Russia invaded. If the war concludes with a legally binding promise that NATO will not be in Ukraine and Ukraine will not be in NATO, then the cause will have been removed, the problem will have been solved, and Ukraine will have its strongest security assurance.
It has been argued by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by European leaders, and by the Western media, though, that Russian assurances are not to be trusted. Entered as evidence is Russia’s supposed betrayal of the Budapest Memorandum.
Signed in December 1994, Kiev agreed to give up Ukraine’s nuclear weapons in exchange for security commitments. The argument is that when Russia invaded Ukraine, it violated that agreement. But there are two weaknesses in that argument.
The first is that, whereas the current war would have to end with security guarantees, the Budapest memorandum offered only assurances. While the distinction may sound pedantic, Glenn Diesen says that former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer, who was part of the Budapest negotiating team, has explained that the U.S. was explicit in not allowing assurances to be confused with guarantees, among other reasons, to avoid a “legally-binding commitment.” In 2013, when Washington imposed sanctions on Belarus—another nation protected by the Budapest Memorandum—the U.S. embassy in Belarus justified the move by saying, as Diesen reports, that “the Memorandum is not legally binding.”
The second is that, by the time of Russia’s invasion in 2022, things had changed since 1994, and the Memorandum had already been broken and rendered obsolete. The NATO military alliance was marching toward Russia’s borders, Ukraine was becoming a heavily Western-weaponized anti-Russian bridgehead, the rights of ethnic Russians in Ukraine were under threat, and Ukraine was militarily threatening Donbas. Russia now saw itself as the party with its own security needs that had to be met.
The essential change in the situation began when America—not Russia—first violated the Budapest Memorandum. The Memorandum states that Ukraine’s sovereignty cannot be violated by a signatory nation subordinating it to its own interests. But in 2014, the U.S. did just that when it supported a coup in Ukraine.
Diesen cites former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock as pointing out that Russia “strictly observed its obligations in the Budapest Memorandum” but that the 2014 coup created “a radically different international situation” and that Russia was now “entitled to ignore” the agreement. That does not legitimize Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it weakens the argument against not trusting Russia, and it strengthens the argument for legally binding security guarantees this time around, rather than mere assurances.
Reality has started to dawn on Kiev that it won’t be joining NATO anytime soon, but there are challenges to the security guarantees that it and its Western backers are now pushing.
The security guarantee being discussed by Ukraine, Europe, and the U.S. seems to involve three facets. 1) Eastern Ukraine becomes a demilitarized zone manned by neutral peacekeepers from a country agreed upon by Ukraine and Russia. 2) The Ukrainian armed forces remain armed and trained by NATO countries. 3) European nations station troops in western Ukraine.
There are three problems with that last facet—all potentially fatal to peace talks.
The first is that, as European leaders have consistently pointed out, it does not work without a U.S. commitment to militarily back the European forces if they come under attack. But the Trump administration has specifically and repeatedly ruled out American boots on the ground. While President Donald Trump has suggested that Washington could supply air support of some kind, Europe may lack the troops and finances to keep their promise without more extensive U.S. involvement. Europe’s most powerful economies—France, Germany, and Britain—are all facing financial crises. France and Britain, among the most willing nations in Europe to contribute troops in some capacity, combined can only come up with a peacekeeping force of 6,000-10,000 troops. Europe had talked of a peacekeeping mission of 30,000 troops, and estimates of what is necessary are closer to 50,000-100,000. Without the American “backstop,” as European leaders have consistently admitted, the security guarantee won’t work.
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The second problem is that the security plan is a nonstarter because Russia will not allow it. The key motivation for Russia’s invasion was to keep Ukraine out of NATO and NATO out of Ukraine. The European arrangement specifically places NATO troops in Ukraine. Russia is not going to agree to stop a war it is winning only to see the outcome it went to war to prevent.
Lastly, it is not just Russia that opposes European troops in Ukraine; it is also Europeans. The Wall Street Journal reports that opposition to the scheme is high in Eastern Europe, where the public is wary of diverting forces from their own borders, and in Italy and Germany. Support in Britain and France is contingent and unstable. Poland has made it clear that they will not send troops: 87 percent of Poles say their country should definitely not or probably not send troops to Ukraine.
A successful diplomatic end to the war will require a security architecture that addresses the historical and contemporary realities. Such a security architecture should embrace not just Ukraine, but all of Europe, including Russia, perhaps finally putting in place the foundation for peace that was passed up by the missed opportunity at the end of the Cold War.
