Lise Howard is a professor of political science at Georgetown University. Michael O’Hanlon holds the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at the Brookings Institution.
As Ukraine, Russia and the United States get ready for another round of negotiations in Abu Dhabi this week, Russia continues to pummel Ukrainian infrastructure, threatening to plunge its civilian population into darkness and cold, while Ukraine is realizing limited gains on the battlefield and continuing to hit refineries deep inside Russia. Although a limited ceasefire could emerge from the talks, a war-ending breakthrough seems unlikely.
President Donald Trump is shifting his focus to foreign policy since he knows he will have little chance to advance his domestic agenda after the new Congress is sworn in, and he is looking for wins. His administration has been pushing for a comprehensive settlement, one that could include both the economic reintegration of Russia and Ukraine with Europe in some kind of energy deal and the creation of a new security architecture for the continent that would address Russia’s security concerns.
It thus behooves us to think of ideas that may, at some point, prove useful in attaining stable, long-term peace. Specifically, how can the international community help protect Ukraine in the future — without bringing it into the NATO alliance? The latter has always been a red line for Russian President Vladimir Putin, if not for most Russians, even though NATO, as a defensive alliance, has never posed a direct military threat to Russia.
Although there are no serious discussions about bringing Ukraine into NATO right this minute, the idea of doing so eventually remains official NATO policy, which dates back to a 2008 promise made after the alliance’s Bucharest Summit. We may have largely forgotten we made that promise by now, but Putin and other Russians surely have not.
A promise that is even harder to forget is the one made in the Budapest Memorandum by the U.S., the United Kingdom and Russia in 1994 to uphold Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine handing over nearly 2,000 nuclear weapons stationed on its territory after the end of the U.S.S.R. The Trump administration’s professed reasoning for the war with Iran is to prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon. If the U.S. is so bent on non-proliferation, surely it must respect the promises made some 30 years ago to safeguard Ukraine and thus devise a way to help ensure Ukraine’s long-term security.
To date, a number of European countries have offered long-term security assistance packages to Ukraine that would build onto their current efforts to provide Kyiv with weapons and financial assistance. That is useful but inadequate. Something more than a grab bag of bilateral and possible future European Union security assistance packages, yet different from NATO membership, is needed.
The U.S. should help promote an understanding that involves Russia, Ukraine, NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (which monitored the ceasefire from 2014 to 2022). First, the parties would agree that Ukraine will not join NATO in the future. Second, a new security organization or architecture separate from NATO would be created that would allow members to help each other defend their own territory in the event of crisis or conflict. The organization could be open to Russian membership at some future time as well, provided Russia agrees to permanently cease its aggressive attempts to redraw borders.
This new security system would allow Western countries to send their own troops to Ukraine to do things like operate air and missile defenses, and perhaps also repair and maintain equipment, in the event of another Russian attack on Ukraine. It would not, however, station forces on Ukrainian soil in peacetime. Nor would it make plans to conduct counteroffensives on Russian soil. Its military purposes would be strictly defensive.
But outside countries could do a great deal to help protect Ukraine from within its own borders in the event of a future war. Impartial United Nations and OSCE monitors could also be stationed on the border between Russia and Ukraine as a mechanism for detecting and reporting ceasefire violations. But unlike the OSCE alone, this new architecture would have teeth.
Some will say that changing our minds now would violate NATO’s so-called open door policy, which goes back to the early days after the Cold War. But that policy is misguided, and indeed misunderstands NATO’s founding document, the North Atlantic Treaty, which says any new memberships should be helpful to the security of the North Atlantic area.
Putin might not love this idea, either. But at some point, he may want a deal. Getting desirable outcomes on sanctions relief, along with a promise that NATO will never seek to include Ukraine, may be enough to do the trick.
As the late, great American strategist and former Reagan administration official Fred Iklé said in the title of his famous book, “Every War Must End.” Yet the early theories about how the Russia-Ukraine conflict might be brought to a rapid close have by now all been disproven by events. It is time for a fresh round of thinking.
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