Ukraine’s security future must be integrated into Europe’s, and squarely into the process of refashioning the U.S.-Russian relationship.
Normalizing U.S.-Russian relations while ending the war in Ukraine, as the Trump administration hopes to do, can be done in one of two ways—well or badly. Done well, the challenge needs to be understood as one with many parts, the parts then carefully integrated, and the approach to them comprehensive and coordinated. A healthy, productive U.S.-Russian relationship, a Europe with guardrails removing the constant threat of war, and a Ukraine safe and sovereign are a single package. Breaking its pieces apart is how to do things badly.
A thirty-day ceasefire is the right way to begin. But the way the administration is going about it is loaded with “ifs.” If a halt to strikes on energy and other infrastructure and a maritime ceasefire are achieved, while welcome, such an agreement scarcely guarantees that a full ceasefire follows. If it does lead to a broader but shaky ceasefire, the path to a comprehensive peace agreement remains obscure. If against the odds, a peace agreement of sorts is reached, as the administration is proceeding, it will not be within a context in which the future of European security is addressed. Europe may get a less querulous counterpart in Moscow, but with U.S. allies in flight, an unstable Europe as a looming security threat, and the United States viewed by much of the democratic world as a threat rather than a partner.
To achieve a better outcome, the administration needs a more expansive and integral strategy. One that integrates Ukraine’s security future into Europe’s security future, and both squarely into the process of refashioning the U.S.-Russian relationship. Rather than seeing a thirty-day ceasefire as the gateway to a unilateral U.S. diplomatic effort to engineer a peace settlement, it should be conceived as the necessary condition for launching and sustaining a multilevel set of negotiations addressing the challenge in its full complexity.
One set of negotiations should be with the European Union (EU). Reports suggest that the administration has begun considering when and how to lift Russian sanctions, and, indeed, has begun to do so as part of the proposed maritime ceasefire. But it remains unclear whether major sanctions would be lifted to entice Russian president Vladimir Putin to halt military operations or only after a peace agreement. Either way, however, the administration does not have the economic leverage to achieve its objectives.
To turn sanctions into a useful tool with a chance of motivating Putin to stop the war and make the concessions essential for a comprehensive peace agreement, the United States will need European partners—admittedly, scarcely the administration’s current approach. Before the war, EU trade with Russia was eight times larger than that of the United States with Russia; its direct foreign investment in Russia was three times larger. Thus, the EU is responsible for the sanctions relief that matters most to Moscow. To make the point, U.S. representatives have reportedly initiated talks with Gazprom, but Gazprom’s market is Europe—to reach Europe, the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline would have to be rehabilitated, and that decision does not rest with Washington. Getting to a ceasefire, preserving it, and launching productive peace negotiations will inevitably be a phased process, which, to work, will require U.S.-EU coordination. The United States and EU will need to calibrate which specific sanctions should be eased to launch the process and, if the process begins, which next to use to move it forward.
As the administration proceeds with its bilateral Russian diplomacy, optimizing the role of sanctions addresses only one major aspect of the challenge. Unless President Donald Trump has in mind setting aside the United States’ long-standing core security concerns and making common cause with Putin’s Russia, normalizing U.S.-Russian relations also contains a two-sided security challenge. One side involves returning to managing an increasingly complex and dangerous nuclear relationship, complicated by the new China dimension. If, as reported, the Russians are signaling a readiness to reengage in strategic stability talks without their prior conditions and even suggesting that this could be a three-way dialogue with China, that would be an excellent start. Qualitatively new weapons systems, the new cyber and space war fronts, and the role of conventional strategic-strike weapons will make the task magnitudes more difficult. However, central to renewed U.S.-Russian relations, the first step is to explore whether and where they can find common ground from which to relaunch the nuclear arms control process.
The other side of the security challenge is the future of European security. Twice before, in 1914 and 1939, the United States left it to the Europeans to deal with their security problems. The U.S. national interest was not well-served. The administration’s push for a thirty-day pause in the war in order to probe the concessions the warring sides are willing to make to end the conflagration, while worthy, misses the larger stakes involved and their crucial interdependence.
Few among Ukraine’s supporters question that Ukraine’s postwar security must be a part of any settlement. Ukraine’s postwar security, however, is intimately bound up with the stability of the postwar security setting in Europe. How the two are to be integrated has two dimensions. At one level, if the administration genuinely means it when it says that a peace agreement will require a Ukraine whose security is assured, then it will need to do its part to achieve this. Achieving this requires collaboration in building a defensible Ukraine capable of deterring future Russian military aggression. A key vehicle for this collaboration is the bilateral security agreements that Ukraine has with twenty-nine countries, including the United States. They form the basis for aiding Ukraine to build a robust defense industrial base and a well-equipped, well-trained military. It is in the administration’s interest to see them fully resourced, not least because doing so is central to the fraught issue of Ukrainian membership in NATO.
Putin has demanded, even for a ceasefire, and certainly as part of any peace agreement, a guarantee that Ukraine will be shut out of NATO. Trump appears ready to comply or, at least, publicly he insists that membership is not in the cards. Trump can and may assure Putin that the United States will veto any effort to admit Ukraine to NATO, but, if so, the administration shortsightedly shuts the door to the broader context within which the problem should be addressed. The result may be to satisfy Putin’s demand (during Trump’s term in office), but without laying the groundwork for a peace in Ukraine conducive to and supported by a safer and more stable European security order.
For that, the administration needs to activate another level of diplomacy. To integrate the future of Ukrainian security with that of European security, NATO allies must be part of the process. U.S. and Russian diplomats may sketch the outlines of a peace agreement whose feasibility the U.S. side could then explore with the Zelenskyy government, but transforming this into a genuinely durable peace in Ukraine, while opening the pathway to a safer Europe, will require wider buy-in.
The forum for this is the NATO-Russia Council, shuttered to this point by the Western powers. Whatever the outcome of the war in Ukraine, the Europe left in its wake will be cleaved by a new central front stretching from the Arctic along a new 830-mile Finnish border to the Black Sea, with a reinforced NATO facing off against a war-tested and strengthened Russian military. Multiple flash points for a future conflagration—more than in the original Cold War—will exist all along this line. Ukraine, even if protected by a fortified demilitarized zone as part of a peace agreement, will be one of them. Thus, the path to peace in Ukraine will need to have as its superstructure measures preventing military force from being unleashed wherever a political crisis may erupt.
What these are is no mystery. In the last years of the Cold War and the decade after, countries came together to negotiate a series of agreements—including the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, and the Vienna Document—that increased the transparency and predictability of military activity, reduced the risk of surprise attack by constraining the number and deployment of certain weapons systems, and limited the size and number of military exercises. Versions of these guardrails, adapted to Europe’s new reality, will have to be replicated, if a permanently unstable Europe is to be avoided, and the appropriate venue for designing them is the NATO-Russia Council.
Putin, as many argue, may have no interest in framing the issue in this fashion, counting on the limited capabilities of NATO’s European members, Ukraine’s battlefield disadvantage, and the United States’ waning support for Ukraine to allow him to dictate the future he wants. If that is so, and the Trump administration’s bid to heal U.S.-Russian relations is disembodied from the future of Ukraine’s security and that of Europe itself, then the argument here is a waste of the reader’s time. If, however, the administration’s strategy does include creating a defensible Ukraine and, if its architects do recognize the hazards for the United States of a permanently war-prone Europe, the process could take on a fundamentally different character.
Putin has set as a precondition for a ceasefire addressing the “root causes” of the conflict. He means by this rolling back NATO’s encroachment into what was once Russia’s East European buffer and parts of the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine. This in turn appears to be part of a larger and more recent preoccupation—the notion that the primary threat to Russia is a deep and enduring war with a U.S.-led “collective West.” The war in Ukraine, he now argues, is secondary and only a piece of the larger struggle.
The Trump administration, therefore, is right to assume that ending the war in Ukraine must be done in the broader framework of an altered U.S.-Russian relationship. Successfully altering that relationship, however, can only be done by dealing with the European dimension of the relationship’s demise.
History cannot be rolled back. NATO will not shrink. Instead, because of the war, NATO, with Sweden and Finland added, will emerge militarily more formidable. At the same time, Ukraine will not be admitted to NATO, and Ukrainians know this. These two realities should frame the larger context within which the administration goes about recasting the U.S.-Russia relationship. The diplomatic matrix is complicated. Creating a defensible Ukraine outside NATO is essential to reaching a peace agreement and coordinating with Ukraine’s allies to achieve this is key to dealing with a peace-averse Putin. His willingness to bend will depend even more on a Europe that by its own resources can deter any Russian military threat, and U.S. assistance in bringing this about will be key to unfreezing the peace process and ensuring that any peace agreement reached endures. Ensuring that the peace endures, however, requires that it be safe for all—including Russia. Here, U.S. leadership, within the NATO-Russia Council, is also necessary to put in place guardrails curbing the temptation to use military force. So is U.S. leadership essential in persuading the EU to join in employing sanctions relief to induce Putin to take seriously a peace process and to reawaken in him a sense of what restored economic relations with the EU and the United States could mean for Russia.
None of this can be done overnight. Some elements, such as reinforcing Ukraine’s defense capabilities, strengthening a European-led NATO, coordinating sanctions policy, and establishing a framework for nuclear arms talks should be pursued early and ambitiously. Steps that move toward larger, longer-term objectives, such as negotiating guardrails enhancing European security; negotiating actual measures constraining the nuclear forces of the United States, Russia, and China; and slowly reestablishing economic relations with Russia can only be small and tentative. Incorporating them into U.S. strategy, however, would, by creating the lodestar for a better long-term outcome, add incentive for the sides to accept a sustainable ceasefire and facilitate the effort to reach a comprehensive peace agreement.
Integrating all these pieces in a carefully calibrated fashion may be beyond the diplomatic prowess of any U.S. administration. However, the success or failure of the Trump administration’s Russia policy will depend on the extent to which it does—or does not—try.
About the author: Robert Legvold
Robert Legvold is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, where he specialized in the international relations of the post-Soviet states.
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