This post is only for paid subscribers of Aaron Mate. Thank you for your support. Ukraine’s best security guarantee is the peace that NATO sabotagedAs Trump drops his demand that Putin accept a ceasefire, Zelensky and allied proxy warriors cling to a backdoor NATO commitment that could be used to "strike Russia."
In recent high-profile meetings with Russian, Ukrainian, and European counterparts, the most significant breakthrough on the path to ending the Ukraine war came from President Donald Trump himself. After threatening Vladimir Putin with punishing new sanctions unless he agreed to a ceasefire, Trump dropped that demand and accepted the Kremlin leader’s insistence on negotiating a final settlement. Trump’s shift reflects the battlefield reality. As Russian forces continue their advance in Ukraine, Putin has no interest in freezing a conflict that his much larger army is winning, albeit at a slow pace. Trump, by contrast, ran on a pledge to end the war, and his administration has continued to promise, as Vice President JD Vance recently put it, that “we're done with the funding of the Ukraine war business.” Trump’s stance has created a new quandary for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who was enticed by the US and UK to abandon a peace deal with Russia three years ago in Istanbul with tens of billions of dollars in funding for the Ukraine war business. “This is a stab in the back,” a senior Ukrainian official told the Financial Times of Trump’s shift. “It looks like Trump has aligned with Putin and they both might be starting to force us to accept a peace treaty, which means in reality capitulation of Ukraine,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee. Ukraine’s far-right, which has exerted considerable influence over Zelensky’s government, has long viewed any form of compromise with Russia and allied eastern Ukrainians in the Donbas region as “capitulation.” And for Zelensky to accept a peace treaty with Russia, it will undoubtedly be far less favorable than the one he walked away from in Istanbul. In the Donbas, Moscow is demanding that Ukraine cede the roughly 12% of the territory that it still controls, all of it in Donetsk. In Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, where Russia controls 73%, Moscow has only offered to freeze the current front lines. Aware that he has presided over Ukraine’s likely transformation into a rump state, Zelensky is attempting to extract what he can from the NATO sponsors that pushed him there. While NATO membership remains a non-starter, Zelensky continues to insist – as he did in his disastrous White House meeting with Trump in February – on NATO-like security guarantees that would obligate Western powers to come to Ukraine’s defense in the event of another attack. Trump’s top envoy, Steve Witkoff, fueled this prospect last week when he claimed that Russia had made a “game-changing” acceptance of the US and Europe providing Kyiv with “Article 5-like protection.” But the Trump administration has since walked that back, with one Pentagon official telling European allies that the US would only play a minimal role in any security guarantees for Ukraine. More significantly, the Russian line appears unchanged from Istanbul, when it proposed security guarantees for Ukraine modeled on the UN Security Council, which would require unanimous consent – including from Moscow and Beijing -- for any military action in Ukraine’s defense. Moreover, the Kremlin remains opposed to the deployment of any NATO forces in Ukraine, even under the auspices of a peacekeeping force. In a statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry reaffirmed its “categorical rejection of any... military contingent with the participation of NATO countries, which is fraught with an uncontrolled escalation of the conflict with unpredictable consequences.” To grasp the unfeasibility of Russia agreeing to accept Western forces next door, one only needs to hear from one of the scheme’s strongest advocates. Earlier this year, senior Biden State Department official Victoria Nuland argued that for Ukraine to reach a peace agreement, one solution “would be to have western forces or international forces offshore who could... strike Russia if it broke the deal.” In other words, Nuland’s vision for a peace settlement in Ukraine would be structured to encourage World War III. Nuland inadvertently reveals a major cause of Russia’s invasion. Because Western proxy warriors tried to turn Ukraine into a NATO proxy on Russia’s border, and refuse to rule out placing offensive weapons there, Moscow opted to neutralize the threat by force. To make her case for an international deployment that could “strike Russia” if need be, Nuland argued: “Without those kinds of guarantees, why would Putin just not come back for more when he gets bored of this deal? Because he's made very clear that he doesn't consider Ukraine a country, and his aspiration is to control all of it.” In real life, Putin’s aspiration since 2014 has been that Ukraine declare neutrality – in line with the country’s declaration of state sovereignty -- and respect the rights of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. Had Kyiv implemented either the 2015 Minsk accords or the April 2022 Istanbul talks, rather than bow to the influence of war hawks like Nuland and allied Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, Putin would not have tried to control any part of Ukraine. Zelensky’s push for a security guarantee overlooks a key obstacle: the US and its partners have refused to provide them long before Trump. After Ukrainian officials publicly floated the idea of a mutual-defense pledge at the Istanbul talks in March 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Western officials are balking.” Rather than offer a security guarantee, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson envisioned flooding Ukraine with NATO weaponry to stoke a perpetual conflict with its Russian neighbor. “We, I hope, will be in a position with willing partners to offer not an Article 5 security guarantee to Ukraine, but a different kind of future, a different kind of commitment,” Johnson said as the Istanbul talks began. “So that Ukraine is so fortified and so protected — the quills of the porcupine have become so stiff — that it is ever after indigestible to Putin.” Johnson’s vision of using Ukraine as a militarized anti-Russia “porcupine” was soon achieved via deception. According to Ukrainian diplomat Oleksandr Chalyi, a senior member of the Istanbul delegation, the US and UK told Zelensky that Ukraine would receive security guarantees only if he abandoned negotiations with Russia. In a 2023 essay, Chalyi recounted that Washington and London deemed the Istanbul peace deal with Moscow “unacceptable,” and “assured” Kyiv “that they were ready to give security guarantees to Ukraine independently or in a multilateral format without the participation of the Russian Federation.” But when Zelensky walked away from Istanbul, his sponsors abandoned their promise. Ukraine was told that Western allies would provide “only a set of soft security guarantees in the form of military and defence assistance, but which completely excluded hard security guarantees, i.e. any possibility [of] the use of their armed forces to restore and maintain security of Ukraine.” Having already been deceived by his NATO sponsors, Zelensky is clinging to the hope that they will somehow have a change of heart. He has not yet realized that Ukraine’s best hope for a security guarantee is to stop being used for a proxy war aimed at weakening his country’s more powerful neighbor. |