“We’re giving away pure gold,” Yuri Kostenko declared in 1994, “and getting back ore.”
In the years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the West was cobbling together the scaffolding for a new global security architecture. And Kostenko, then a Ukrainian legislator, was one of the negotiators trying to figure out how to trade the “gold” of nuclear weapons and strategic bombers for long-term security.
Kostenko proposed “security guarantees,” signed by the United Kingdom and the United States, which would commit Ukraine’s allies to the country’s defense.
But Kostenko was eventually removed from the negotiating team. His successors received no guarantees in the final deal, dubbed the Budapest Memorandum—only vague “assurances.” It was on that deal that Europe’s promises of protection to Ukraine were built. And it is that system that “has burst like a soap bubble,” as Kostenko wrote last year.
Today, talk of security guarantees is back in vogue. U.S. President Donald Trump promised to resolve the conflict “on day one” of his term. (The promise was subsequently revised down to the first “100 days” of the administration, which began on Jan. 20.)
Ukraine’s Western allies are already tripping over themselves to promise protection for Kyiv against further Russian aggression. And just like three decades ago, they are playing fast and loose with what’s on offer.
Ukrainians are as skeptical today as Kostenko was in 1994.
There are two types of security guarantees that NATO countries could offer Ukraine in the context of a peace deal with Russia, one senior Western official told Foreign Policy while speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The first kind would see NATO members committing to sending substantial economic and military aid to Kyiv for years after a cease-fire deal. Eventually, under this guarantee, Ukraine might be allowed to join the trans-Atlantic alliance.
The second type of guarantee would extend NATO’s Article 5 protections over Ukraine immediately, effectively extending the West’s nuclear umbrella over the country and committing the rest of Europe, the United States, and Canada to defending Ukraine. This would deter Russia from invading, these nations hope, but it would also commit NATO to the conflict with Moscow if it did.
The second option, the official agreed, was unlikely to be endorsed by either NATO or Russia. The first, they accepted, was basically just an extension of the status quo.
This is the problem that has faced Kyiv for more than a decade: Real security guarantees are difficult, while meaningless promises are easy.
When Russia and Ukraine first met at the negotiating table in 2014, after Russian special forces crossed the border to aid separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk, it was France, Germany, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) that promised to help keep the peace. A cease-fire deal, the first Minsk Agreement, committed the OSCE to monitoring violations of the truce. The agreement defined, however, little in the way of consequences for breaking the deal.
Unsurprisingly, the agreement was thoroughly ignored by the separatist groups, as the OSCE bemoaned often, and the Minsk II agreements in February 2015 did not fare much better.
When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, elected on a platform of bringing peace to Ukraine, met with his Russian counterpart in 2019, he opened their meeting with a quote from Leo Tolstoy: “The path on paper looked so smooth, we all forgot about the pitfalls.”
Those meetings didn’t even produce a path on paper. Both sides wouldn’t properly negotiate again until the days and weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. These negotiations occurred first in Belarus and then in Turkey.
Even as Russian troops advanced on, and then retreated from, Kyiv, negotiators were meeting to hammer out a peace treaty. The two sides, surprisingly, came close to agreement on many fronts.
The talks produced the so-called Istanbul Communiqué, draft copies of which were obtained by the New York Times. The deal, drafted from February to April 2022 and not published until 2024, envisioned an unaligned Ukraine—forbidden from joining NATO, free of foreign military bases, and with a considerably reduced military.
In exchange, other powers were to provide security guarantees for Ukraine, committing themselves to act should Ukraine face reinvasion from Russia. Both sides agreed that this list of possible guarantors should include Great Britain, China, the United States, France, and Russia itself—the draft obtained by the Times indicates that Moscow also wanted Belarus added to this list, while Kyiv wanted Turkey.
But the negotiations never produced a deal. The war raged on. And as the conflict crawls toward its third year, many armchair generals have returned to those early negotiations as evidence that a deal was possible—but spurned by Ukraine and its allies.
In recent months, writers in left-leaning publications have claimed that “global powers are actively dashing the chances of a diplomatic resolution to Russia’s war” and that this draft treaty was never signed because “the West isn’t ready for the war to end.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov himself claimed in December 2024, in a chummy interview with American broadcaster Tucker Carlson, that the Istanbul Communiqué was “rejected by Boris Johnson,” who was the U.K. prime minister at the time.
Sergey Radchenko is tired of these arguments.
Radchenko, the Wilson E. Schmidt distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, co-authored an article in Foreign Affairs earlier this year that investigated “the talks that could have ended the war in Ukraine.”
“The main problem,” Radchenko told Foreign Policy, “is that people read the title and then do not try and understand what the article is about.”
First off, he said, the British prime minister did not scuttle the deal.
“This never happened,” Radchenko said. Nor, though both sides seemed to be negotiating in good faith, was it true that “peace was anywhere around the corner,” he continued.
One of the biggest problems came from Washington, not Moscow. In exchange for Ukraine’s neutrality and its commitment to never join NATO, Kyiv expected firm commitments from the West to rush to its defense, should Russia reconstitute its forces and invade once more.
“This was not raised previously with the Americans,” Radchenko said. “When the Ukrainians raised this, the Americans said: ‘Wait, that’s not in our interest.’”
It’s also not clear just how serious Russian President Vladimir Putin was about the talks. Under the framework being negotiated in Istanbul, the guarantors would only come to Kyiv’s defense in the event of an attack “on the basis of a decision agreed upon by all guarantor states.” In other words, Russia would have a veto over any decision pertaining to the collective defense of Ukraine.
Despite these issues, negotiations continued, even after evidence of war crimes and atrocities believed to be committed by Russia emerged from Bucha and elsewhere—evidence that was met with disinformation from Moscow.
“We believe that this is genocide. We believe that they must all be punished,” Zelensky told reporters in early April. “But we have to find opportunities to meet.”
By May, though, the peace talks had basically fallen apart. Russia, which had poured enormous human and economic capital into the war, would effectively increase its demands by asserting control over all of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts—which include huge swaths of territory that Russia did not manage to capture. Negotiations between both parties continued, but they turned mostly to the issue of prisoner swaps.
As the war raged on, Zelensky increasingly dismissed the idea that Putin would ever accept reasonable terms—even the ones that Moscow’s negotiators had proposed in the spring of 2022.
Radchenko pointed out that the skepticism is warranted.
“It goes into this question of what Putin wants,” he said. Is it merely control of Crimea and Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region? Is it Ukraine’s nonaligned status? Rights for Russophones in Ukraine? Control over the government in Kyiv?
“It’s not always that we don’t know,” Radchenko said. “I think Putin himself does not know the answer to this. He’s playing it by ear.”
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg is likely to be tasked with laying the foundation for a peace deal in Ukraine.
As a co-chair of the pro-Trump Center for American Security within the America First Policy Institute, Kellogg has already laid out his vision for what a deal could look like.
In his proposal, published in April last year, Kellogg suggested that the United States should orchestrate an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine while continuing to arm Ukraine “to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again.” As talks continue, the retired lieutenant general imagines, NATO would close the door to Ukraine’s membership “in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal with security guarantees.”
But nowhere does Kellogg explain what, exactly, those security guarantees would look like.
Other NATO countries have started using similar language. Mélanie Joly, Canada’s foreign minister, insisted onstage at the Halifax International Security Forum in November that NATO’s core focus should be on preventing Russia from merely using a cease-fire to reconstitute its military power. She held up a series of bilateral security agreements, inked between Ukraine and its allies, as being an effective deterrent so that, in her words, “Putin cannot just leave, rearm, and reinvade.”
But when pressed by moderator Garry Kasparov to explain how these bilateral agreements would differ from the empty promises of the Budapest Memorandum, the Canadian minister insisted that Ukraine would “eventually” be a member of NATO and that in the interim, “it’s military aid, it’s financial aid.”
Finland’s foreign minister has echoed that sentiment, telling Reuters this month that NATO membership could come “further down the line and hopefully not in [the] too-distant future.”
Tobias Lindner, the German minister of state—responsible for trans-Atlantic relations—told Foreign Policy in a roundtable with journalists at the Halifax Forum that “there are various ideas for security guarantees—one of them is NATO membership. But it’s not the only one.”
But, he added, “what I know is that Ukraine will not accept something like Minsk III or Budapest 3.0.”
These promises did little to impress Hanna Hopko, a former Ukrainian legislator who sat next to Joly at the event.
“It’s great to have security agreements,” Hopko said, “those agreements mean this—” she held up a sheet of paper, as if to say: This paper can’t stop an invasion. “We do remember the Budapest Memorandum. Even if you have all the Ramstein Coalition security partners [sign] paper security agreements, it will never be security guarantees.”
As Radchenko points out, fudging the language—using the word “guarantee” when they really mean to invoke this nebulous concept of “assurance”—is disingenuous for Western leaders. “A general commitment to provide some military support for Ukraine, looking into the future—it’s certainly not comparable to anything solid, like Article 5.”
This all brings Ukraine back to square one. Any peace deal is almost certain to forbid Ukraine’s ascension to NATO for the indefinite future. And Trump has already closed the door to U.S. support for Ukraine’s ascension to NATO—saying that he could “understand” Russia’s concerns about the prospect.
Moscow, meanwhile, continues to insist that it wants to use a peace deal to seize more Ukrainian territory—land it currently holds, land that was recaptured by Ukraine, and land it has never held. Lavrov went even further in an interview given shortly before the new year, rejecting nearly every part of Kellogg’s peace plan.
It’s not clear whether the Trump administration has prepared itself for this intractable situation.
“I have two concerns,” Radchenko said. “I don’t think that the Trump administration has understood what the Russians are likely to demand and what their endgame is, and secondly I don’t think they have the strategic patience, necessarily.”
Foreign Policy also asked Republican U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds, who attended a bipartisan congressional delegation that attended the Halifax Security Forum in November, about a possible deal and about these security guarantees.
“Guess who broke [Budapest]?” Rounds answered. “It wasn’t one of the allies that we have. It was Russia, and very specifically Mr. Putin. That tells you the reasons why we are very suspect of any offers of a security agreements by Mr. Putin at this time.”
The congressional delegation in Halifax insisted that U.S. support for Ukraine, particularly in the Senate, remained steadfast.
On Wednesday, Trump posted a message to Truth Social proclaiming “I’m not looking to hurt Russia,” but insisting that “if we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.”
Russian exports to the United States, thanks to sanctions imposed by the Biden administration, have fallen by more than 90 percent since the war began.
In December, Foreign Policy reached Kostenko by phone in his home in Kyiv.
“Ukraine has to be a member of NATO’s collective system of defense,” Kostenko said.
Kostenko’s line then crackled and dropped as he sat in the darkness of his home in Kyiv—a consequence of Russia’s relentless bombing of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
The same issues that the former politician faced when he tried to secure these security guarantees in 1994 are still hanging over Ukraine today, he said. Back then, the risks were hypothetical. Today, they are very real.
The main difference, Kostenko said, is that the West has woken up to Russia’s taste for imperialism. When it negotiated with then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Kostenko said, “the Western world hoped that Russia would move to democracy and would be integrated into different structures—including NATO. And now? Everything has changed.”
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