Follow us on social

Zelensky Macron Starmer

A different kind of security guarantee for Ukraine

A crisis consultation mechanism would provide a platform for effectively hashing out disputes among Russia, NATO and the EU

Analysis | Europe

President Donald Trump has made clear that achieving a negotiated settlement to the Russia-Ukraine war is one of his administration’s top priorities. To endure, a deal will need to address the concerns and bottom-line demands of Russia, the West, and Ukraine.

One of Ukraine’s primary demands, on full display during Friday’s clash between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, is reliable security guarantees —how Kyiv can ensure that a cessation of hostilities is not merely a prelude to another round of Russian aggression.

The ideas proposed so far, from NATO membership to the stationing of Western troops on Ukrainian soil, are largely unworkable, in no small part because they represent developments that Russia went to war precisely to prevent.

The inevitable conclusion is that deterrence-related measures alone will not provide Kyiv with sufficient guarantees of its security. Dialogue and diplomacy with Russia will need to be part of the mix as well.

One method of strengthening Ukraine’s security through diplomacy would be to establish a crisis consultation mechanism not only for U.S.-Russia relations, but for the European security order more generally. Such a proposal was fleshed out recently in the Quincy Institute’s Better Order Project, which brought together more than 130 experts and practitioners from around the world to develop measures aimed at stabilizing an international order in transition.

The current standoff between Russia and the West stems partly from the application of competing principles on how to organize European security. These include a state’s right to choose its geopolitical orientation (including membership in military alliances) and the notion of indivisible security, which posits that one state should not increase its security at the expense of another.

Despite the tensions between these ideas, both appear in the Charter of Paris, which brought the Cold War to an end.

It is not possible to overcome these tensions in their entirety. Security relations in Europe since the end of the Cold War have often been marked by a dialogue of the deaf: Western pronouncements that Ukraine’s NATO membership was purely a matter for Kyiv and NATO capitals to decide have clashed with Moscow’s repeated insistence that it should have a say in matters that it believes threaten its security.

Tensions and contradictions that cannot be resolved must be carefully managed. The establishment of a crisis consultation mechanism, aimed at providing a less public-facing setting for discussing competing principles and the tangible disputes that flow from them, could assist with this task.

This new body would meet regularly, say quarterly, with the aim of forging new habits of interaction among the leading Euro-Atlantic players and encouraging them to assess threats to continental stability more collectively. States and other actors would use the body to game out and prepare for potential crises. Its purpose would be to build trust and shape norms of behavior for geopolitical crises — not to resolve crises definitively.

The new body would need to be nimbler than the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which operates based on consensus among its 57 members. Yet it would still need to balance efficiency and representation, while ensuring the ad hoc participation of an affected party in a given crisis. Most important, it must be based on the geopolitical realities of today’s Europe.

Today, most European states are members of either NATO, the EU or both. That number may grow in the years ahead as the EU advances its enlargement agenda. The United States will continue to be a major factor in continental security — even if with a diminished role in NATO — while Russia will remain the only major country whose membership in NATO or the EU is for all practical purposes inconceivable. In these circumstances, managing European security in the future will almost certainly entail the creation of some consultative platform between NATO/EU and Russia.

To be effective, the mechanism would have to be much smaller in membership than the OSCE — ideally composed of the United States, Russia, and NATO and the EU. The latter two would be represented either as institutions or by one or two members each, perhaps on a rotating basis. (The Collective Security Treaty Organization could be included in some guise to dilute the Western numerical domination of the group, if Moscow insisted.)

Countries could be added on an ad hoc basis, depending on the specifics of any quarterly agenda. Because this would be a consultative rather than a decision-making body, Russia would have no veto over NATO or EU decisions, although it would be able to voice its concerns.

Over recent decades, institutions such as the NATO-Russia Council and the OSCE were tasked with fostering cooperation and shared aspirations among states in the Euro-Atlantic space. As such, this new mechanism will fill a gap in the post-Cold War European institutional tapestry: Its focus will be to help Western countries to manage their adversarial relationship with the Russia that actually exists, rather than the Russia onto which they projected their own ideals and preconceptions after the fall of communism.

The creation of this body would also represent a qualitative change to the de facto situation that prevailed on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Its establishment would ensure the existence of a contact group that boasts flexible methods and composition and a political commitment to talk through crises, incidental or otherwise.

While such a body may not have prevented Moscow’s war of aggression outright, it may have offered a space where Russia and the West could have identified and pursued off-ramps at an earlier stage of the conflict, before the positions of all parties had hardened.

After more than a decade of war and three years of full-scale aggression, Kyiv understandably wants ironclad guarantees that it will not suffer the same fate once Russia has had the opportunity to reconstitute its forces. This is especially so, given that the mere “assurances” of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum proved inadequate to the task of blunting Russian revanchism.

But the truth is that there are no “guarantees” of perpetual peace in this world. Only an evolving mix of deterrence and diplomacy – along with an ongoing commitment to talk through crises rather than talk at one another – can ensure the security of Ukraine, Russia and a common European home.


Top image credit: French President Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy pose during a group photo at a summit on Ukraine at Lancaster House in London, Britain, March 2, 2025. Christophe Ena/Pool via REUTERS
Analysis | Europe
Latin America's hidden role in shaping US foreign policy
Top image credit: President Getulio Vargas of Brazil confers with President Franklin D. Roosevelt at a conference aboard a U.S. destroyer in the Potengi River harbor at Natal, January 1943 (via US LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

Latin America's hidden role in shaping US foreign policy

Latin America

For much of the Washington D.C. foreign policy apparatus, Latin America — a region plagued by economic instability, political upheaval, and social calamity — represents little more than a headache or an after-thought.

Not for Greg Grandin.

keep readingShow less
Hiroshima
Top image credit: Dennis MacDonald / Shutterstock.com

Symposium: Why was Japan the only nuclear holocaust in 80 yrs?

Global Crises

Eighty years ago today, August 6, 1945, the U.S. military dropped an atomic weapon nicknamed “Little Boy” on the city Hiroshima, Japan, resulting in a blast equivalent of 15 kilotons of TNT, killing approximately 66,000 people immediately and some 100,000 more, the vast majority civilians, by the end of 1945.

Three days later, the U.S. deployed another nuclear bomb — this one “Fat Man” — on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, leaving upwards of 80,000 people dead by the end of the year.

keep readingShow less
Paul Biya
Top image credit: Cameroonian President Paul Biya, July 26, 2022. Photo by Stephane Lemouton/Pool/ABACAPRESS.COM via REUTERS

How an aging despot's grip on power could unravel Central Africa

Africa

A few weeks ago, 92-year-old Cameroonian President Paul Biya announced his intention to run for an eighth term in the country’s forthcoming election. This announcement, shocking, albeit widely anticipated, is already fueling fear that the country’s stability could be at risk, with wider implications for regional security.

The aged leader, who has ruled Cameroon with an iron fist since 1982, is easily the oldest president anywhere in the world. Indeed, only a few Cameroonians alive remember a time without Biya in power. Yet recent health scares seem to suggest that he may have reached the limit of his natural abilities. In 2008, his regime carried out a constitutional amendment to annul the two-term limit — clearing Biya’s path to rule for life through elections that, although regular, have been neither free nor fair.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.