Why Proposing Neutrality for Kyiv Will Bring More War, Not Peace

With the Russian full-scale invasion dragging on, the West lacking any unified strategy for its end, and public attention shifting to the Middle East and domestic issues, a growing number of world leaders have started to speculate about the possibility of a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. This desire has spilled the debate out into the open, which had previously been dominated mostly by Russian propagandists and apologists, trying to justify Russia’s aggression with the utmost absurd arguments. One of these arguments was to respect Russia’s “security interest” in keeping NATO away from its borders. Hence, so the argument went, Ukraine should be forced into accepting a neutral status. Proponents of this idea used several historical analogies to justify it, calling it either the Austrian or Finnish model. However, they were usually unaware of the historical peculiarities of either Finland or Austria during the Cold War and never spared a thought pondering whether these realities would also apply for Ukraine. A spoiler alert, they will not! Not to mention that the Finnish model culminated in Finland’s full NATO membership in 2023.

This debate has since moved from obscure academics into the field of politics. U.S. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance thinks that Ukraine’s “guaranteed neutrality” would satisfy Russia.¹ Trump’s designated special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, proposes suspending negotiations on Ukraine’s NATO accession for 10 years.² German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has refused to second Ukraine’s invitation to NATO, unlike Germany’s closest European allies, such as France, the UK, or Poland.³ While Scholz gave no official reasons, the author inquired from several sources that the German Chancellery thinks that Ukraine’s NATO status should not be decided until actual peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia commence. In other words, they think that Ukraine putting its possible NATO membership on the table would be a bargaining chip in future negotiations and that Russia would indeed be interested in it. That, of course, is a misinterpretation.

Certainly, Russia was interested in Ukraine’s neutrality before its full-scale invasion. Under Victor Yanukovych’s presidency, backchannel negotiations on casting Ukraine’s neutrality into a new treaty on the European security order were conducted, with former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and an obscure collection of “experts” playing a role in the talks. As it was later discovered, the Austrian entrepreneur and Russian intelligence asset Jan Marsalek sponsored much of their activities. While there is no clear documentation of what had been discussed substantively between Sarkozy, Yanukovych, and Moscow, it is noteworthy that even then-Ukrainian President Yanukovych never agreed to open formal negotiations on the treaty ideas proposed to him.

Another idea for a “new security order” based on a Ukrainian “neutrality”, crafted by the RAND Corporation, rested heavily on Russian ideas.⁴ The proposal foresaw “consensual institutions” that would determine the “acceptable behavior for major powers, their smaller alliance partners, and other states of the region to prevent future misunderstandings and conflicts.” In other words, great powers would preside over what kind of relations “in-betweens” could have with other countries and international organizations. This proposal represented an unprecedented infringement of state sovereignty, unseen before in European history. The authors of the RAND Corporation study went to great lengths to falsify Austrian history to justify this infringement.⁵ But they did not try to answer the question of what such infringement would mean operationally in the Russo-Ukrainian context. In fact, it would give Russia a tool to veto any Western support for Ukraine, whether it be assistance in carrying out democratic reforms, anti-corruption efforts, domestic security sector reforms, military reforms or, last but not least, delivering military hardware. Cutting off Western assistance would leave Ukraine weak and vulnerable to the Russian assault that Moscow began preparing after Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004.

Russia specified this point already during its “negotiations” with Ukraine in March 2022. Moscow insisted that “neutrality” must mean cutting Ukraine off from the West, explicitly prohibiting military supplies to Kyiv.⁶ For comparison: neither Swiss nor Austrian neutrality has ever prevented these countries from obtaining NATO military hardware ranging from Leopard 2 tanks to HAWK air defense systems, engaging in defense-industrial cooperation with the West, or creating large, well-prepared armies. With Moscow’s first push on Kyiv faltering, the Russian armed forces were regrouping and reorganizing to try again. If Ukraine were to get access to Western weapons, the Kremlin calculated, it might spoil Russia’s military plans. The further course of the war proved the point that Western military supplies have indeed been crucial for Ukraine’s survival. But for Russia, the “neutrality” issue was important in preparing for the war of aggression against Ukraine. Now that the war has started, it has lost its tactical purpose.

With political will in the West to further support Ukraine fading, Moscow is not even interested in considering a ceasefire with Ukraine.⁷ Russia’s main political aim was never about its security or stopping NATO’s alleged Eastern expansion. It was always about subjugating Ukraine, destroying it as an independent nation, and incorporating its territory into Russia. To achieve that, Ukraine needed to be weakened and isolated. “Neutrality” was a tool, not the desired end-state.

Until 2014, Moscow tried to achieve capturing Ukraine with corruption, subversion, and election-interference, then in 2014-2022, by creating puppet republics and forcefully integrating them into a “federal state” to gain control over Kyiv via diplomatic means. As all these strategies failed, Russia is now trying to achieve its goals with brute force. Along the way, Russia has radicalized both in means and ends. It makes no secret that the full destruction of Ukraine as a nation is the explicit goal of its “special military operation”, and that it will not revert to more limited war aims.⁸ Accepting Ukraine as a sovereign and independent state, whether neutral or not, is not in the cards for Moscow. Russia uses “neutrality” as a fig leaf to force Kyiv into the status of a vassal state like Belarus.

The belief in Washington and Berlin that the promise of a neutral Ukraine would be an incentive to Moscow to negotiate is ridiculous. The West understands a country’s neutral status as not belonging to any military alliance, as Switzerland or Sweden, while remaining a sovereign state with independent trade and arms procurement relations with other countries. When Russia invaded Crimea and Donbas in 2014, Ukraine was a declared non-aligned country. This status was enshrined in Ukraine’s law on national security: not all the way in the constitution, but it was still the valid document of its time. No offer to integrate Ukraine into NATO was on the table. On the contrary, since Bucharest 2008, opposition to bringing Ukraine into NATO had grown, including in the United States. The Obama administration, as part of its Reset policy with Russia, let the case rest. It was not NATO; it was Ukrainians daring to decide for themselves whom to govern them that infuriated the Kremlin. However, Kyiv’s sovereignty right to choose its leaders is not for sale.

Like Olaf Scholz, the upcoming Trump administration believes that putting Ukraine’s NATO aspirations on the negotiating table would lure Moscow into peace talks. It will not. Putin may be lured by the proposed Kellogg Plan to enter a “negotiation process” to limit arms supplies to Ukraine.⁹ But like the Normandy format negotiations, just because the Kremlin agrees to engage in a formal negotiation process does not mean that anything will be done substantively, let alone result in peace. This is, because Russia does not fight to keep Ukraine out of NATO, it fights to destroy it as a country.

Whether there will be a ceasefire or not depends on the Kremlin’s belief in its ability to still fulfil its overall aim of destroying Ukraine by military means. This can only be influenced by increasing Western aid to Ukraine, quantitatively and qualitatively. The subsequent chances for peace will depend on whether the Kremlin sees a chance to achieve more success militarily after re-arming. This will depend on the postwar security framework for Ukraine. The only security guarantee that has worked in the past was NATO accession. However, neither Biden nor Trump is willing to move on this portfolio. Hence, a temporary ceasefire is the most that can be achieved here. Peace in the real sense of the word, unfortunately, would command stronger commitments to Ukraine.

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/us/politics/vance-trump-ukraine-russia-war.html

² https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/america-first-russia-ukraine

³ https://drstefaniebabst.substack.com/p/olaf-the-deceiver?r=1zdswf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

https://warontherocks.com/2023/08/frances-policy-shift-on-ukraines-nato-membership/

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2021-0208/ https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/poland-supports-ukraines-accelerated-accession-to-nato/

⁴ https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/conf_proceedings/CF400/CF410/RAND_CF410.pdf

⁵ https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE200/PE297/RAND_PE297.pdf

⁶ https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/11/04/journalists-obtain-russia-s-initial-proposals-from-march-2022-negotiations-revealing-putin-s-plans-for-post-war-ukraine

⁷ https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/7283219?tg

⁸ https://www.ng.ru/news/805748.html

⁹ https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/keith-kellogg-er-will-den-kurswechsel-in-der-ukraine-politik-110140782.html