Ukraine’s Western backers have vowed to respect Kiev’s decisions in any deal to end the war with Russia, but with larger global security issues at stake there are limits to how many compromises some in NATO will support in order to to win the peace.
How to end the fighting and help Ukraine will be one of the most heated debates at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels starting Wednesday. The United States and its allies say Ukraine must be the final decision maker when defending itself and should not be pressured into compromise or encouraged to fight longer than it is ready.
But Kiev’s decisions — and any concessions President Volodymyr Zelenskyy might make — will help determine whether the Kremlin is chastised or emboldened, and nations with territorial ambitions over their neighbors, like China, will be watching the outcome. Some NATO allies are particularly cautious about ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia and giving Russian President Vladimir Putin any semblance of victory, according to alliance policymakers and analysts.
While Biden administration officials remain skeptical that the Ukraine government’s negotiations with Russia will result in a quick deal, officials say they are considering how a deal — or an end to the fighting, however it happens — might pan out will affect the security of NATO countries.
“We believe our job is to support the Ukrainians,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said this week. “They will set the military targets. You will set the goals at the negotiating table. And I’m pretty sure they’re going to set those goals for success, and we’re going to give them every resource that we can to help them achieve that success. But we will not define the result for the Ukrainians.”
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Some European countries, particularly ex-communist ones with bitter memories of Russian invasion or occupation, are particularly nervous about the further development of the conflict and see themselves next on the Kremlin’s target list. Eventually, if Putin feels he has benefited from the invasion by gaining territory, political concessions or other advantages, he may be inspired to try the same against other neighbors, policymakers say.
Ukrainians are therefore involved in a broader struggle for Europe, NATO leaders say.
“I hope they will be tough as steel. I support maximum military support and maximum sanctions,” Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks said in an interview. “Russia must lose and criminals should face justice.”
Even a Ukrainian vow not to join NATO — a concession Zelenskyy has made public — could worry some neighbors. That leads to an uncomfortable reality: for some in NATO, it is better for Ukrainians to keep fighting and dying than to achieve a peace that comes too soon or at great cost to Kyiv and the rest of Europe.
“Many of us have, and it is absolutely human, the willingness to ensure that the war ends as soon as possible, that people do not suffer, that people do not die and that there are no bombing raids,” said a senior European diplomat, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak openly on sensitive security issues. “There is an unfortunate dilemma. The problem is that if it ends now, Russia will have some kind of time to regroup, and it will start again under this pretext or some other. Putin will not give up his goals.”
While US officials say they are not trying to pressure Ukraine into a deal, the negotiations have been a frequent topic in the regular talks between Foreign Minister Antony Blinken and his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba. Blinken has provided informal input to the conversations during these calls. Kuleba will travel to Brussels this week to attend NATO meetings.
White House officials are also in “almost daily contact” with Zelensky’s team about the negotiations, Sullivan said.
Ukrainians have their own power: Zelenskyy was ready to criticize his Western supporters when he felt they were not doing enough to help him. If he made any public attempt to pressure him into accepting or rejecting an agreement, that attempt could backfire. And with Ukrainians taking over the fighting, they are not as vulnerable to Western pressures as weaker countries might be.
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If Ukraine and Russia agree to a peace settlement, Washington and the European Union will face a separate question about offering sanctions relief to the Kremlin. The answer is not an automatic yes, said some politicians.
“It’s a bit difficult for the US and other allies. … They don’t want the negotiations to result in something that isn’t workable,” said Alexander Vershbow, a former NATO deputy secretary general. “If Ukrainians accept a deal that includes territorial concessions, it might be good enough for Ukraine depending on what else they get, but it could set a bad precedent for using force and force to change borders.” To further legitimize brutality, predatory conquest, as the Russians are doing in many parts of Ukraine.”
NATO members themselves do not seem to agree on how much Russia poses a direct threat to the alliance, with officials in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere more likely than their allies in Eastern Europe to agree that Putin’s targets at NATO’s border end up. French President Emmanuel Macron – who is facing a rising far-right election opponent, Marine Le Pen, this month – has spoken to Putin at least 16 times since the beginning of the year to try to prevent or end the conflict, French officials said. Le Pen has held pro-Russian views in the past.
For countries closer to war, there is a belief that the stakes are higher.
“This is an important issue for us,” said a senior diplomat from a country bordering Ukraine. “A divided, fragmented, frozen conflict in Ukraine is very bad business for us. An active relationship between Ukraine and NATO is crucial for the Black Sea region. If that is broken, we will have a problem with uncontrolled Russians and the need for an even stronger presence from NATO allies.”
For now, the math that would favor a negotiated settlement doesn’t seem to add up, analysts and policymakers said, despite some upbeat noise following last week’s talks between Ukraine and Russia. As Russia pulls out of Kyiv and other cities, Ukrainians feel the momentum is on their side. And reports of atrocities under Russian rule in Bucha, Lotskyne and elsewhere are making it difficult for Kyiv to cede even an inch of territory as there are now fears over the fate of Ukrainian citizens under Russian rule.
“Who are we to tell Ukrainians what to do? How can we imagine a situation where, with all the destruction, all the massacres, we just say, ‘okay, that’s fine,'” said Nathalie Tocci, head of Italy’s institute for international affairs and adviser to EU policymakers in Italy Brussels .
The Kremlin may not be able to back down either, as its citizens have been fed a constant stream of lies and propaganda about what is happening on the ground, and told they were going to win.
“I don’t see any signs that we’re anywhere near a negotiated settlement,” said Andrew Weiss, a former top White House adviser on Russia who is now vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment. “The Russians are ready to keep doing terrible things in Ukraine to make the Ukrainians surrender and the West withdraw, and the Ukrainians are ready to fight. I don’t see the conditions for a comparison.”
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While NATO officials say they are not trying to impose terms on Kyiv for a possible deal, some Western officials have provided Ukraine with an analysis of the country’s options and possible outcomes related to the negotiations and the war.
The countries of the Alliance – and particularly the United States, given the scale of its military aid to Ukraine – may have exercised their greatest influence in indirect, perhaps unintentional ways in their decisions about which weapons to supply or not to supply to Ukraine. These decisions had a direct impact on the situation on the battlefield and, as a result, on the Ukrainian government’s approach to peace talks.
Ukraine has said that in exchange for agreeing to abandon its NATO aspirations, it would require legally binding security guarantees from the United States and others to defend if attacked. A US official said the US military had not been consulted about what Western security guarantees for Ukraine would look like. The official said there wasn’t much appetite for such a performance among senior military leaders.
“It looks like they’re looking for the same thing as Article V without being a NATO nation, and that would probably be a very tough argument with the international community,” the official said, referring to NATO’s Central Collective Defense Guarantee .
Regardless of how the war ends, the United States plans to review its military stance in Europe. Before the conflict, more than 80,000 US troops were on the continent. Today there are more than 100,000 on temporary deployments aimed at supporting NATO’s eastern flank, the official said.