What will security guarantees secure?
As the prospect of peace at last hovers, however distantly, on to the horizon in Ukraine, there is much talk of ‘security guarantees’. They are assumed to be a necessary element of any peace deal, the key that will ensure that war does not recommence in the future. Zelensky, in particular, has been vociferous in his demands for western powers to guarantee any peace agreement with military force. Much western commentary, perpetually unquestioning of Ukrainian positions, follows and repeats this line.
In recent months, largely at the instigation of the French and British, there have been attempts to cobble together a force that could be physically placed on the ground in Ukraine. This has become enmired in inevitable problems with assembling a body of more than token size given a lack of enthusiasm beyond a handful of countries and the stretched commitments of the principals. Considerable effort has also been expended on attempts to inveigle a reluctant Trump into backing any such force with significant military support, short of boots on the ground.
Yet there is a vicious circle here that is frequently overlooked: when the major cause of the war was the threat of NATO membership, security guarantees which amount in practice to an Article 5 commitment to act in defence of Ukraine are not going to be acceptable to Moscow. Putin will hardly agree to end a conflict that he is currently winning by enshrining in an international treaty the very thing that he went to war to prevent.
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, at the start of the year strongly objected to troops on the ground in Ukraine from EU nations. Russian diplomats, and even Putin himself more recently, have stated that Western soldiers deployed in Ukraine without a UN mandate would be regarded as ‘legitimate targets for strikes’. As has been the case since their own diplomats told Washington in 2008 that alliance membership was ‘a red line’ for the entire Russian elite, the West collectively closes its ears and looks away.
A further significant issue, even more off the radar, concerns the danger of security guarantees leading to further escalation. This is absolutely not to be underestimated. The assumption of almost all who speak of security guarantees is that their function is to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine in the future. This presumes that it is only Putin who might wish to restart the conflict, a rather naive view that is telling of how underinformed most in the West are about the political forces at work in Ukraine.
Repeatedly since the invasion Zelensky has demanded immediate NATO membership or a clear pathway to it. The reason he has not been given it is because this would necessarily lead to direct western involvement in the current war. This was very obviously something ardently desired by much of the leadership in Ukraine, unsurprisingly given it is the only plausible route to any sort of victory. It might be suspected that after three years of brutal fighting, many in the regime in Kyiv are less keen on peace than on drawing western countries into the conflict thereby finally giving them the means to defeat Russia. Only last autumn Zelensky was threatening to acquire nuclear weapons if Ukraine was not given alliance membership.
If we look to the past, the omens for the future are not good. The Minsk agreements were not implemented due to persistent recalcitrance on the part of Kyiv. In particular, the of militias associated with far right factions was long a notable barrier to settling the conflict in the east. Any form of autonomy for Donbass was unacceptable to them and they repeatedly intervened violently to prevent that. The UN and Amnesty International have accused them of war crimes. A presentation of the National Platform for Reconciliation and Unity on 12 Match 2020 was broken up by the intervention of seventy members of Azov paramilitary group. It would be naive to think that this force, now officially a regiment of the Ukrainian army, will cheerfully pack up their weapons and head home, content with Putin occupying four eastern oblasts. There are many prepared to pay a steep price for peace in Ukraine but that is not what Azov fought on the worst end of a merciless war for three years for.
For western powers to commit to back Ukraine come-what-may is not to secure peace but to almost guarantee a resumption of war. It is to effectively have NATO stand behind any and every Ukrainian militant, of which there are many, that wishes to stir the embers and keep the conflict alive. It would appear that in 2022 a rogue Ukrainian group sabotaged the Nord Stream gas pipeline. There are plenty of opportunities to similarly launch devastating attacks on targets such as the Kerch Bridge. The low cost and high accessibility of drone technology means Russian infrastructure will remain highly vulnerable.
Far from ensuring peace, security guarantees risk giving incentives to militant groups inside Ukraine to again ramp up hostilities. Given the leading roles being played by France and UK, they open on to the prospect of a direct confrontation between nuclear armed powers. This is a scenario that the West has spent most of the post-War period seeking to avoid yet now appears to run heedless towards. Famously, one of causes of the First World War was a system of alliances that drew powers unwittingly into conflict. We should beware of again sleepwalking into a major European war.
President Stubb of Finland has become the most recent champion of security guarantees, contending that they would act as a deterrent. I have argued elsewhere that the political science literature shows that deterrence frequently does not work in the case of an adversary that feels itself existentially threatened. Experience demonstrates that the only way to diffuse such a situation is to genuinely engage diplomatically and address their concerns.
In Ukraine a lasting peace can arguably only be built through acknowledging the causes of the conflict. Neutrality, a status which would recognise Russia’s profound objections to military alignment with the West, is the only true guarantee for peace in Ukraine. It is odd that Stubb does not suggest it as the obvious solution given it served his country well through seven decades. Finland did not join NATO in 2023 because of any realistic threat from Russia but rather out of solidarity with Ukraine following a wave of public sympathy.
Oleksiy Arestovych, a former advisor to Zelensky who was involved in the Istanbul talks that almost reached a peace deal in March 2022, has gone on the record as saying the Russians ‘were ready to end the war if we accepted neutrality like Finland once did. And we would make a commitment that we would not join NATO’. Sadly, this proposal collapsed in the face of outrage over the Bucha massacres and promises from Boris Johnson of military support to help Ukraine win a conflict.
After three years of war in which Putin clearly now has the upper hand, the future neutrality of Ukraine still remains the only basis for bringing the fighting to a close and for achieving peaceful coexistence with Russia. Security guarantees cannot secure peace and risk escalation into direct military confrontation.
Dr Mihail Evans is Research Fellow at the New Europe College, Bucharest. He is the author of ‘How the European Union failed to prevent the Ukraine conflict‘ and ‘Is Russia really a threat to Europe?‘.
