Russia’s now unstoppable advance across eastern Ukraine ushers in the inevitability that Ukraine has lost, and the war will end. The election of Donald Trump ushers in the inevitability that the war will end with a negotiated settlement. Two things are now clear about that settlement: Ukraine will not be in NATO, and Russia will be in Ukraine.
Ukraine will not be in NATO because Russia will continue the war if NATO membership is on the agenda in the negotiations. But Ukraine will also not be in NATO because Trump has made it clear that he will not support NATO membership for Ukraine.
Russia will be in Ukraine because Russia will not return Crimea or, at least part of, the Donbas. But Russia will also be in Ukraine because Ukraine has now accepted that de facto reality. Though he refuses to legally acknowledge it, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has conceded that Crimea and the Donbas are lost to Ukraine. “De facto,” he said, “these territories are now controlled by the Russians. We don’t have the strength to bring them back.”
That leaves security guarantees for the remaining sovereign Ukraine as the key issue in the coming negotiations. Zelensky seems to now recognize that. In a January 22 Bloomberg interview, Zelensky said, “The only question is what security guarantees and honestly I want to have understanding before the talks. If [Trump] can guarantee this strong and irreversible security for Ukraine, we will move along this diplomatic path.”
Though Zelensky has said that “the only guarantee, currently or in the future, is NATO,” he will have to settle for his second choice. That second choice is a large European peace keeping force with the fully committed support of U.S. troops.
Zelensky is insisting, not just on a large peacekeeping force, but a very large peacekeeping force. He says that Ukraine “need[s] contingents with a very strong number of soldiers.” Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Zelensky said what that number must be: “From all the Europeans? 200,000, it’s a minimum. It’s a minimum, otherwise it’s nothing.”
Zelensky later tried to clarify that he had not fixed the number at 200,000. But the clarification only left open the possibility that it might need to be even more. “I did not say, by the way, that we need 200,000… it could be more, it could be less.” The calculation, he says, would be based on Ukraine maintaining a force of a million troops. “If we reduce the army by 200,000, 300,000, 500,000, this will mean that we need other troops instead, in the amount by which we have reduced. This is what I was talking about.” But given the attrition of Ukrainian troops, the level of desertion and the failure to boost recruitment, that could mean an even larger peacekeeping force.
And that large peacekeeping force, Zelensky insists, cannot come only from Europe. “It can’t be without the United States,” Zelensky said in his Bloomberg interview. “Even if some European friends think it can be, no it can’t be. Nobody will risk without the United States.”
And nobody will risk it without the United States. “French officials have made clear that the idea would need to involve some kind of U.S. backup.” And officials familiar with the talks between Ukraine, NATO, the UK and Europe at which the idea of a European peacekeeping force was discussed have also said that “[b]inding security guarantees from European capitals that would potentially involve them in a war with Russia if Ukraine was attacked again are unfeasible without a guarantee that the US would support those European armies.”
The problem is, Ukraine’s second choice is also unacceptable to the United States. Trump has said that Europe must bear the responsibility of providing a peacekeeping force. Guaranteeing U.S. forces on the ground in Ukraine to confront Russia militarily is precisely the escalation that both Biden and Trump have been unwilling to make. NATO in Ukraine with Article 5 in its pocket and the U.S. on the ground in Ukraine with a guarantee in its hand to defend it are the same unacceptable risk by another name.
And the risk is not just that Russian might again invade Ukraine and trigger an American-Russian war. It is not just Ukraine that is afraid. There is also the fear that if Ukraine were ever to attempt to recapture Crimea or the Donbas, a Russian defense could draw the U.S. into the war. Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed this sort of fear in the weeks before the war.
So, what’s to be done? In order to enter into negotiations, Ukraine insists that the U.S. offer security guarantees that the U.S. is not willing to give. But the U.S. does not have to give them just because Ukraine insists, and Ukraine cannot go on fighting, and avoid negotiations, without U.S. support. What security guarantees the U.S. is willing to give is a matter for the U.S. to decide, and it must take the security of American citizens at least as seriously as the security of Ukrainians. Perhaps, as Anatol Lieven has suggested, security arrangements will be a decision that the U.S. will have to make independent of Ukraine and will have to negotiate with Russia before inviting Ukraine to the talks.
Russia is no more likely than the U.S. to accept a large American force on its border in Ukraine. Perhaps, there is no security arrangement that can untie the Ukraine-Russia-U.S. knot. Perhaps any security arrangement that is acceptable to Ukraine is unacceptable to the U.S. and Russia. Perhaps, the security arrangement will, at last, have to be the one that could have happened at the end of the Cold War.
That solution might be a security arrangement that transcends Ukraine and Russia and embraces all of Europe. The solution may be the broader European security structure that Russia sought, and the U.S. rejected, at the end of the Cold War.
Russia expressed an openness to such a solution in the security proposal it offered the U.S. and NATO two months before the war. Putin made the suggestion again on May 15, 2024 when he said that Russia is “open to a dialogue on Ukraine, but such negotiations must take into account the interests of all countries involved in the conflict, including Russia’s. They must also involve a substantive discussion on global stability and security guarantees for Russia’s opponents and, naturally, for Russia itself.”
Perhaps the most hopeful way to end the war between Russia and Ukraine is to transcend Russia and Ukraine and draft a broader security architecture that embraces all of Europe.
Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.
