Article Summary and Key Points – This piece asks the core postwar question: who guarantees Ukraine’s security when the current fighting stops?
-It argues that “armed neutrality” is far too fragile to deter Moscow and that history shows formal security guarantees matter far more than vague, interest-based assurances.
Lt. Col. Thomas Wolfe, the 455th Expeditionary Operations Group deputy commander, performs preflight checks on an F-16 Fighting Falcon at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, Feb. 1, 2016. The 421st EFS, based out of Bagram Airfield, is the only dedicated fighter squadron in the country and continuously supports Operation Freedom’s Sentinel and the NATO Resolute Support missions. (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Nicholas Rau)
-NATO’s Article V and Western alliance prestige make attacks on members far riskier than strikes on Ukraine today.
-For that reason, Russia fears Ukrainian NATO membership more than a neutral but heavily armed Ukraine.
-The column concludes that any durable settlement must bind Ukraine into a bilateral or multilateral security framework that both restrains Kyiv and credibly deters Moscow.
Why Ukraine Needs Security Guarantees, Not Just More Guns
Who guarantees Ukraine’s security after peace? Does the responsibility lie solely with Ukraine’s armed forces, or can it count on friends to deter another Russian invasion?
As discussed in a previous column, a policy of Ukrainian armed neutrality probably cannot ensure peace in Eastern Europe.
The draft agreement between Russia and the United States (an agreement that is already rapidly evolving) included provisions for both Ukraine’s armed defense and for a formal foreign guarantee of Ukraine’s security. And what of this security guarantee?
Security Guarantees
Here is where details get complicated. Security guarantees come in many forms, from the “secret treaties” of World War I to the sometimes misunderstood Article V of NATO. In the case of Ukraine, a meaningful security guarantee would involve NATO, the United States, or a coalition of European powers committing to the military defense of Ukraine in case of another Russian invasion.
Security guarantees depend on the credibility of the guarantor. Proponents of armed neutrality make much of the claim that “NATO allies have demonstrated that they do not believe the stakes of conflict, while significant, justify the price of war,” and thus that a NATO commitment would not deter Russia.
This kind of argument is known as “revealed preferences,” in which the true interests of a person or state can be inferred from that person’s or state’s behavior.
T-80 Tank Russian Army. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
But any effort to derive interests from behavior deserves great suspicion. In truth, most states (and most people) muddle through, pursuing opportunities and dealing with setbacks as they arise from both internal and external sources.
For example, on February 26, 2022, the United States demonstrated that it would tolerate the installation of a pro-Russian government in Kyiv. By March 5, America revealed its preferences, including exporting military equipment to ensure the survival of the Kyiv government, as well as taking expensive and complex steps to punish Russia diplomatically and in global financial markets.
By the summer of 2022, the US had demonstrated that it would use its vast intelligence and surveillance apparatus to support offensive operations against Russian positions.
More importantly, formal public commitments of alliance matter to state behavior. Washington (not to mention London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Warsaw, and Helsinki) places great value on the history and prestige of the NATO alliance.
It is unlikely to toss that prestige aside casually. This is, after all, why countries make formal alliance commitments; if they could rely on fundamental interests to carry the day, there would be no need to rely on alliances.
Will NATO Hold Against Russia?
All of this is to say that some formal security guarantees can be regarded as credible, and, to a great degree, the formality of the guarantee can ensure its credibility. Evidence from the current conflict attests to this point.
Despite its engagement with Ukraine, Russia still enjoys a substantial 1-to-1 military advantage over several NATO allies along its border, especially the Baltics and Finland.
If Russia believed that NATO guarantees for Eastern European members were specious, it could engage in a campaign of militarized coercion designed to deter those countries from their substantial material support for Ukraine. But Russia evidently believes that London, Paris, and Washington will react differently to attacks on Latvia or Poland than to attacks on Ukraine.
Moreover, policymakers in Helsinki and Stockholm also quite clearly believe that a formal security commitment is worth more than an informal condominium of interests, as they rushed to join NATO following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. All of these people may be wrong, but the balance of evidence demands something more than sophistry.
Instead, Finland, the Baltic States, and Poland have been the most robust supporters of Ukrainian military efforts, almost certainly because they believe that NATO offers substantial immunity from Russian retaliation. Moreover, if Russia truly believed that Western security guarantees were meaningless, it would not work so hard to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, or react so negatively to the prospect of a British or French guarantee of Kyiv’s integrity.
Russia and Neutrality
And there are some affirmative reasons to believe that Russia might be no less willing to bend on its neutrality demand than on its demilitarization demand.
There is no good reason to believe that Russia prefers a neutral Ukraine devoting 5% of its GDP to defense to a Ukraine devoting 3% of its GDP to defense because of the umbrella of an American or an Anglo-French security guarantee. Moreover, military alliances are tools of management, often designed to restrain the behavior of a partner as much as to aggregate capabilities; remember that even the NATO alliance is predicated on keeping America in and keeping Germany down.
The truth is that no country opts for armed neutrality if it has better options. This is why the NATO alliance has been so appealing to the states of Eastern and Central Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union: it is much cheaper, easier, and more stable to rely on the guarantees provided by Paris, London, and Washington than to go it alone.
The only reason to prefer armed neutrality to a security guarantee is if Russia bends on the former but not the latter. But the difference between the two is worth fighting for at the negotiating table and on the battlefield. Ukraine gets a vote on the stability of any future arrangement.
If the war in Gaza has demonstrated anything, it is that disenfranchised peoples have the opportunity to generate immense chaos and disruption in their pursuit of justice. This iteration of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict is exceedingly likely to end with Russian forces in control of substantial Ukrainian territory. Any arrangement that purports to create a better peace between Russia and Ukraine must both restrain Kyiv and deter Moscow.
The initial twenty-eight-point plan included a US security guarantee for Ukraine that, somewhat bizarrely, demanded “compensation” and also included specific actions on Ukraine’s part that could void the guarantee.
We have only a limited understanding now of how that plan has evolved, and no good sense of how Russia will react.
In any case, it would be best for everyone (including Ukraine and Russia) if Ukraine were bound into a multilateral or bilateral framework that includes some kind of security guarantee.
Such a framework would stand the best chance of avoiding another Russia-Ukraine War.
About the Author: Dr. Robert Farley
Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020), and most recently Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages (Lynne Rienner, 2023). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.
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Jim
November 26, 2025 at 12:15 pm
Apparently, after negotiating among themselves, the West has come up with a draft proposal.
But already Russia publicly rejected this proposal as not addressing “root causes” of the conflict.
Discussions of “armed neutrality” versus “security guarantees” while an appropriate discussion, misses the point entirely.
Russia will not accept armed neutrality, period, but has signaled an acceptance of some form of security guarantees, but only if and when “root causes” are satisfactorily addressed and resolved, then security guarantees can be addressed (with Russia promising flexibility).
In that order must negotiations proceed. Resolution of root causes as a necessary prerequisite
then the addressing security guarantees.
Nothing in the above article included root causes.
Until root causes are addressed and discussed, Russia will press on their military advantage as they see it.