Connecting Russia to NATO?
To negotiate a ceasefire in Ukraine, the U.S. has to take Putin’s fears seriously
It has often been proposed that a ceasefire should take place in what Donald Trump has aptly labeled the “ridiculous” war in Ukraine. If a ceasefire takes hold and continues, extended negotiations can then be held in comparative quiet to deal with other outstanding issues, including, in particular, the country’s partition. Key to these negotiations would be to take Russia’s security concerns seriously. And connecting Russia to NATO in some way might be helpful in assuaging those concerns.
In envisioning a ceasefire-and-partition scenario, a comparison with the Korean War armistice of 1953 is imperfect but instructive. To begin with, Ukraine would remain partitioned, and the warring parties, Russia and Ukraine, would establish a sort of demilitarized zone between them festooned with mines and tripwires and policed by cameras, drones, snipers and watchtowers.
Although the fighting stopped in Korea by agreement nearly three-quarters of a century ago, the “war” there technically continues. Something like that could evolve in Ukraine—far from an ideal outcome, but preferable to continual fighting. At base, however, Ukrainians and Russians probably get along better than the politicians running North and South Korea do, so the long-term prospects for progress in the talks are perhaps better—though a final deal might not happen until the war’s author, septuagenarian Vladimir Putin, leaves the scene.
In order for a ceasefire to take place in Ukraine, however, those involved will have to work out two “security guarantees.” One, demanded by Ukraine, would be to guarantee its security in the event that Russia breaks the ceasefire and attacks again. Ukraine is unlikely to gain NATO membership, but it can likely get a firm guarantee, from alliance members and others, of more extensive and better-prepared assistance than it has received thus far after the 2022 invasion. Both Ukraine and its supporters could spend time and money to make sure such assistance would be timely and abundant if Russia were to break the ceasefire.
Russia and NATO
The other security guarantee, demanded by Russia, is that NATO will not invade Russia. This may be a paranoid fantasy, but it is necessary for NATO members somehow to deal tangibly with it and to convince Russia that NATO doesn’t (and never did) have plans to invade. Simply saying repeatedly that NATO is a defensive alliance is not enough.
Judging in particular by his speech as he launched the invasion of 2022, the issue is central to Putin’s thinking on the war. He had concluded that his venture was essentially a preventive war because he deemed that NATO was moving in Ukraine toward a direct, Hitler-like invasion of Russia. He had “no other choice,” he argued, and it was “only a matter of time.” When Tucker Carlson, looking for a snappy way to begin his postinvasion interview with Putin, called this vision “paranoid,” he was rewarded with a tendentious half-hour diatribe by Putin on Russo-Ukrainian history. That perspective on the war seems to have been widely accepted in Russia.
It might be pointed out that similar bloviations have repeatedly been put forward over the decades for NATO, calling it “the most successful alliance in history” because it supposedly deterred a Soviet attack on Western Europe. The overwhelming evidence, however, is that diplomat George Kennan was correct when he argued that there was essentially nothing to deter: “I have never believed that they have seen it as in their interests to overrun Western Europe militarily, or that they would have launched an attack on that region generally even if the so-called nuclear deterrent had not existed.”
In line with its perspective on the NATO threat, Russia has demanded that the alliance reduce its presence in Ukraine, refrain from sending its troops to be part of a peacekeeping force and ban Ukraine from membership. The last of these has already been effectively granted by the Trump administration, but it has been obvious to observers for years that to be eligible for admission to NATO, Ukraine would have to deal with its internal difficulties of mismanagement and corruption, which would likely take decades to accomplish.
One device, albeit not without complications, might be eventually to invite Russia to have some sort of connection to NATO—perhaps a form of observer status in which it would not have a vote or a veto but would have a direct and coherent inside forum for its grievances. And that might eventually lead to the broader discussions about European security that Putin has strongly advocated. The basic idea is that having the Russians on the inside by some arrangement might be reassuring because they would likely feel they would be able to get wind of any upcoming invasion.
Actually, Putin says he once discussed the idea of Russia’s joining NATO with President Bill Clinton, who replied, according to Putin, “Why not?” However, other American officials, says Putin, did have some objections. One of these might have been horror at the notion that the alliance would then have two countries possessing an excessively absurd number of nuclear weapons. The U.S. would have had to deal with that. Another objection was that, if Russia joined NATO, the alliance would then extend to the borders of China, which might then feel threatened.
The proposed observer connection wouldn’t carry the same baggage as full NATO membership. But it might be a vehicle to help ameliorate Russia’s current concerns, however fanciful.
Some observers might stress that a Russian connection is impossible because NATO is a club of democracies. But Portugal, decidedly illiberal at the time, was a founding member of the alliance, and Greece stayed in later when it became a military dictatorship for a decade or so. So that criterion is clearly not set in stone, even if some might argue it should be.
Prospects for Success
Getting inside the mind of Vladimir Putin is not easy, but he may now be ready to agree to a ceasefire if he can get sufficient security guarantees. The widely reported phenomenon of war exhaustion in all quarters may help the process.
There is a popular, and not unjustified, worry that, if the fighting stops, Russia will use the pause to regroup and rearm and then attack again in Ukraine—and perhaps continue into the Baltics or Poland or even Western Europe.
Putin has labeled this notion as “utter nonsense.” And it does seem highly unlikely that, after the self-destructive failures of his military invasion, Putin will try it again. It has been variously argued that he launched his war to take control over Ukraine and stop its drift to the West, to weaken NATO and Western Europe and to protect those in Ukraine who spoke Russian. If any or all of these were the goals, the venture has been a spectacular failure: Ukraine has become intensely hostile and its move to the West has been accelerated; NATO has been expanded, is more militarized and is focused on the Russian threat; Western Europe has become more united and may never again become a trusting customer; and the Russian language in Ukraine is in greater peril. Moreover, at Russia’s 2024 rate of advance in Ukraine, it would take 116 years for it to conquer the rest of the country.
In his commencement address at West Point in 1947, General Dwight D. Eisenhower declared war to be “mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly.” There have been wars more tragic than the one in Ukraine, but none more stupid.
A little-noticed indicator of potential success in the current negotiations is that Russia seems to have dropped its killer demand of last June. Then, the country had stipulated that, for a ceasefire to take place, Ukraine would have to withdraw its forces from the portions it controls of the four provinces Russia annexed in 2022—areas that include the capitals of two of them.
In addition, it is far from irrelevant to note that both Putin and Trump stand to benefit politically from a successful ceasefire. Putin will be able to claim that he has effectively waylaid a prospective NATO invasion of Russia, however imaginary—and, moreover, that he has secured a land bridge to Crimea, although that was not one of his justifications for the war when he launched it. And if the ceasefire eventually leads to broader discussions about European security, he will, in the eyes of many Russians, have put their country back on the map.
And Trump will be able to claim that he has ended the war. The Korean analogy may be instructive once again. Although President Eisenhower’s armistice there similarly ended the fighting, not the war, the war-weary public was more than happy to move on to other subjects. And, as he left office eight years later, Eisenhower’s ending of the fighting in Korea was commonly hailed as his greatest achievement.
On the other hand, there are problems with obtaining a ceasefire agreement beyond those involving security guarantees. As a former foreign minister of Ukraine has recently pointed out, any Ukrainian leader who accepted what seems to be the signing over of parts of its prewar territories to Russia might well be assassinated by what he called “Ukrainian patriots.” Nevertheless, addressing Russia’s security concerns—regardless of how fanciful they might seem—would be an important step toward achieving relative peace in the region.
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