Thomas Graham: No Ukraine Settlement Unless Washington Talks to Moscow

The primary task of the incoming Trump administration is not to compel Ukraine and Russia to sit down across the negotiating table. It is opening up a sustained, substantive dialogue with Russia on the full range of issues.

To be sure, the U.S. position makes sense if the war is viewed, as it is in Kyiv and much of the West, as an unprovoked act of Russian imperial aggression against Ukraine driven by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s delusion that Ukraine is a part of Russia’s patrimony. The belligerents are then Russia and Ukraine, even if the West has assisted essential to sustaining Ukraine in the fight. 

Two countries will logically decide when the war ends. That Moscow and Kyiv sought to settle in the early weeks of the war only reinforces this view.

Reality is Quite Different

From the Russian standpoint, the war is but one aspect, granted currently the most acute, of a broader conflict between Russia and the West, led by the United States. Russia is fighting not solely because Putin believes Ukraine is Russian by historical right but also because the Kremlin is determined to revise the post-Cold War settlement, which it believes was imposed on Russia at a time of debilitating strategic weakness.

The settlement drove Russia to the margins of Europe.

The expansion of NATO and the European Union deprived Russia of the buffer zone in Eastern Europe that it had long considered essential to its security. Russia also lost the central role in European affairs that it had played for more than three centuries and defined it as a great power. Putin and much of the Russian elite reinterpreted U.S. actions in the first post-Cold War decades as designed not to build a partnership with Russia, as U.S. leaders declared, but rather to eliminate Russia as a great-power competitor. 

That goal posed an existential threat to Russia, in the view of its rulers. Russia’s status as a great power lies at the very core of its national identity. As Putin wrote in a manifesto released on the eve of his ascension to the presidency a quarter century ago, “Russia was and will remain a great power. That is due to the inherent characteristics of its geopolitical, economic, and cultural existence. They determined the mentality of Russians and the policy of the state throughout the history of Russia. They cannot but do so now.”  

Or, as Dmitry Medvedev put it more starkly articulated when he was president, “Russia can exist as a strong state, as a global player, or it will not exist at all.

Tellingly, the draft treaties on security guarantees with NATO and the United States that the Kremlin released two months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 mentioned Ukraine only briefly. 
The key Russian demands were aimed at defanging NATO: The alliance would cease to expand, it would agree not to deploy offensive weapons capable of striking Russian territory, and it would withdraw its infrastructure back to the lines of 1997, when the NATO-Russian Founding Act was signed and before the first round of post-Cold War expansion occurred.

For Russia, the war with Ukraine is thus about the structure of European security and its status as a great power. Even if the war were miraculously resolved tomorrow, the bigger issues of managing relations between Russia and the West in Europe would remain.  

More to the point, the only path to an enduring resolution of the Russian-Ukrainian war lies through a broader agreement on a framework for the future of European security. The larger geopolitical settlement needs to precede the final resolution of the narrower issue of Russia’s relations with Ukraine.

Two Key Conclusions

First, critical negotiations will have to take place between the United States and Russia. Only those two countries can unilaterally alter security arrangements in Europe. No arrangements will hold absent their consent. 

Moreover, the need for frank discussions requires that no Europeans or Ukrainians be physically present, even on matters of central concern to them.  

Moscow would welcome such talks. They would legitimize Russia as a great power. The Kremlin would be talking to the only country that it believes matters as far as European security is concerned. 

The Kremlin is, of course, wrong in its belief that the two countries could negotiate a resolution of the war and a framework for European security over the heads of the Europeans and Ukrainians. The United States cannot completely impose its will on allies and partners like a puppetmaster to its playthings.   

At most, as the leader of the Transatlantic community, it has considerable leverage. Anything agreed between Moscow and Washington would have to be adjusted to take into account the interests and concerns of U.S. allies and the Ukrainians. For that reason, Washington would be wise to remain in close consultation with its allies and Ukraine as it proceeds in talks with Moscow.   

Second, the appropriate way to think about resolving the Russian-Ukrainian war is not to consider various models and modalities for ceasefires between two belligerents, including monitoring missions and third-party guarantors.  

The resolution will come through the adaptation of arms control measures and confidence-building messages agreed between the Soviet Bloc and the West in the late stages of the Cold War and the first post-Cold War years, such as the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. The parties to the agreements would themselves monitor their implementation through national technical means, joint commissions, or other agreed procedures.   

As during the Cold War, the goal would be to stabilize the NATO-Russia frontier, which now stretches from the Barents Sea through the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Whatever ceasefire line runs through Ukraine would become part of that longer frontier, making the part of Ukraine that lies west of the frontier effectively a security ward of the West.

In this light, the primary task of the incoming Trump administration is not to compel Ukraine and Russia to sit down across the negotiating table. It is opening up a sustained, substantive dialogue with Russia on the full range of issues on the U.S.-Russia agenda, which has been neglected in recent years. Ukraine will be on that agenda, as will European security.  

However, the two countries will also want to talk about strategic stability, such as the Middle East, the Arctic, Northeast Asia, and energy markets, among other things. This will not mark a reset in relations. No one should suffer under the illusion that a strategic partnership is possible. But it will mark an effort to transform the current bitter adversarial relationship, which is fraught with the risk of direct military confrontation, into a relationship of competitive coexistence or constructive rivalry, starting with Europe.  

That could lay the foundation for a stable structure of security in Europe and an enduring resolution of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, was the senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff during the George W. Bush administration.