While NATO issued a statement on Friday presenting a united front and reiterating President Biden’s speech of unwavering support for Ukraine, officials in Germany, France and Britain were reportedly proposing a limited security pact aimed at promoting peace negotiations . The proposed pact between Ukraine and NATO would give the nation sufficient firepower to repel Russian aggression – while tacitly encouraging talks between Russia and Ukraine – raising questions about the future of the conflict.
The proposal is somewhat at odds with US President Joe Biden’s commitment to unwavering support for Ukraine. In a speech in Warsaw on Wednesday, Biden vowed that “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia – ever.” His surprise trip to Ukraine and Poland marked the one-year anniversary of Russia’s illegal invasion.
NATO’s charter requires unanimous consensus to accept any new proposal, so the tripartite plan is far from settled. And there was a little more urgency to offer greater support from nations in Eastern Europe that are geographically closer to Russia and may themselves be at greater risk of Russian invasion should Ukraine fail to sustain a crushing defeat and all of it reclaim territory.
Whether the defense pact is directly related to efforts to negotiate a peace deal is an emerging question, Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Vox in an interview. But it’s a critical question given Russia’s insistence on continuing this war, despite significant casualties on both sides.
What would the pact include and what is its purpose?
France and Germany in particular have been reluctant to throw their full weight behind efforts to support Ukraine. Whether that’s French President Emmanuel Macron’s willingness to heed Russia’s security concerns or German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s indecisiveness about sending German-made Leopard tanks to Ukraine, the two nations have a regularly frustrating counterbalance to NATO’s efforts to created support for Ukraine. This is in stark contrast to the British position, which has generally been very open to providing military support to Ukraine.
“So far, Britain has tended to have had a position closer to the Central and Eastern European countries, while Germany and France have been the ones who always had the possibility of negotiations in mind,” Fix said. “So it’s a bit surprising to see these three countries together.”
The plan, originally proposed by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, would give Ukraine access to advanced NATO weapons, The Wall Street Journal reports. Sunak has also advocated giving fighter jets to Ukraine in the future.
Expanded access to NATO’s arsenal would clearly be an advantage for Ukraine, but it would be limited should the proposal go through. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Germany-France-Britain proposal would not provide Article 5 protections for Ukraine. This principle of the NATO charter states that the other treaty members are obliged to come to the aid of an attacked member country if the country requests it. Nor would it be a promise to station NATO troops in Ukraine; A particular enemy for Russia was the threat of NATO expansion into Ukraine.
Article 5 protection was of particular concern to other NATO members; Should Ukraine become part of the alliance and be attacked by Russia, the member states would have to come to their defense and potentially risk a massive, disastrous ground war – or worse, a nuclear conflict.
The pact looks like a sort of continuation of the current arrangement, ie Western military support without NATO membership. But Ukraine has already applied for NATO membership and announced its intention to work towards membership throughout the war. One of Russia’s original terms of negotiations after its invasion a year ago was that Ukraine remain neutral and pledge never to join NATO; It’s not clear if the proposed pact would prevent Ukraine from ever joining the alliance, although Fix said Ukraine would certainly work to ensure that wasn’t the case. Vox reached out to a NATO spokesman for comment but had received no response as of press time.
The background to the proposed plan, according to French, German and British officials interviewed by the WSJ, is to promise Ukraine protection and access to arms in the hope that such security guarantees would spur Ukraine to pursue peace negotiations with Russia. As Vox’s Jen Kirby wrote on Friday, it looks like the pressure to negotiate is on the horizon:
For now, the West seems ready to give Ukraine what it needs so Kiev can capitalize on this special moment. But Ukraine is unlikely to reclaim all territory within its internationally recognized borders, and this war could turn into a stalemate. When that happens, it could give way to a new kind of Western solidarity: one that supports Ukraine, but also begins to tacitly urge it to negotiate.
But it’s not clear to what extent the two goals — arming Ukraine and continuing peace talks with Russia — are conditionally linked, Fix said. “It could be that these two issues are being discussed at the same time, but I would find it difficult if there were a connection, and I find it difficult to believe that the connection would be that Ukraine would only provide additional defense and security support receives if it agrees to negotiations.” Rather, the defense pact may be a means of testing the waters and determining the appetite for negotiations.
However, Ukraine is less inclined than a year ago to take part in negotiations. As Anchal Vohra wrote in Foreign Policy on Wednesday, Zelenskyy was once willing to sacrifice Crimea to bring about an end to the fighting; Now the Ukrainian military is said to be making plans to recapture the area that has been under Russian control since 2014.
Are negotiations even possible at this point?
But given Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pledge to continue this war – no matter how many losses Russia suffers, both territorially and in terms of troop losses – it is worth asking whether there is any point in continuing negotiations with Putin at all.
Russia does not have a good track record of fulfilling its obligations under international agreements; For example, the country has violated the 2015 Minsk II accords, which called for an end to hostilities in eastern Ukraine, a withdrawal of Russian troops there and the restoration of the area under Ukrainian control. Moscow nullified this agreement, claiming that it was not a party to the conflict as no Russian troops were involved in the fighting.
Putin has portrayed the West and NATO as aggressors in this conflict and an existential threat to Russia. “They have one goal: to dissolve the former Soviet Union and its essential part – the Russian Federation,” Putin said in an interview for state-run TV channel Rossiya 1 that aired on Sunday, according to Portal. Putin also claimed in the interview that the West plans to partition Russia and take control of its natural resources and destroy the Russian people.
“Doubling up is not only the choice they made, but increasingly the only choice they have left,” Gavin Wilde, a Russia scholar and a senior fellow in the Technology and International Affairs program at the Carnegie Endowment for Internationaler Peace, Kirby said last week. “It’s hard for me to see if this is self-sabotage or an attempt to get the West – or the US in particular – to understand how existentially they chose this conflict, and all the escalating implications that carries with it brings.”
It also potentially opens the door for Russia to use nuclear weapons in accordance with its doctrine, which allows such use in the event of an existential threat, whether from nuclear weapons, conventional forces, or some other existential weapon of mass destruction by the Russian state.
To that end, Putin is again upping the ante for a nuclear escalation, both by suspending the New START treaty and claiming to have deployed new ground-based strategic nuclear weapons systems. The New START treaty was the only remaining nuclear deal between Russia and the US; Its suspension raises the possibility that Russia could resume nuclear tests and expand its already massive nuclear arsenal without US controls.
Given the bleak picture that Putin is painting for the Russian people, it is not clear whether Russia would be interested in coming to the negotiating table even if NATO were to accept the proposed security pact.
“For Putin, his main way to stay in power is to continue this war and make it an eternal war because he might perceive it as so closely linked to his own survival,” Fix said. “So even testing the possibility of negotiations with Ukraine does not mean that it will actually lead to anything on the Russian side.”