Behind Zelensky’s push for a security guarantee: extremist threats and Western betrayal

Ahead of US-brokered peace talks in Saudi Arabia this week, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has finally acknowledged that Russia has achieved a key goal in the war – preventing Ukraine’s membership in NATO. “Ukraine is not being invited to NATO, and there is nothing to discuss here,” Zelensky said last week.

At the same time, Zelensky remains adamant about obtaining NATO-style security guarantees from the US and other NATO states, which, he said, are “definitely needed… Otherwise, Putin will come again with war.”

Overlooked disclosures from Western and Ukrainian sources underscore that it is not just Russia that Zelensky is fearful of.

At home, Zelensky faces the traditional obstacle of Ukraine’s radical and heavily armed far-right, which remains steadfastly opposed to any negotiated solution with Russia. According to a 2024 survey, fifteen percent of soldiers and veterans would join an armed revolt if Ukraine and Russia reached a peace deal on unfavorable terms.

As the Financial Times noted last year, Zelensky’s “biggest domestic problem… might come from a nationalist minority opposed to any compromise, some of whom are now armed and trained to fight.” Entering “any negotiation” with Russia, a Ukrainian official said, “could be a trigger for social instability. Zelensky knows this very well.” Oleksandr Merezhko, chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a member of Zelensky’s political party, was even more blunt. “There will always be a radical segment of Ukrainian society that will call any negotiation capitulation. The far right in Ukraine is growing. The right wing is a danger to democracy,” Merezhko said.

The view that Ukrainian extremists pose an obstacle to peace has newly been confirmed by an unlikely source. In a recent interview, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson acknowledged that Zelensky was undercut by radicals who stood in the way of the Minsk Accords, the UN Security Council-endorsed pact for ending the post-2014 Maidan coup civil war. Zelensky, Johnson explained, “was elected as a peacenik,” and “in 2019, he tried to do a deal with Putin.” But “his basic problem was that Ukrainian nationalists couldn’t accept the compromise.” That compromise was predicated on granting the Russian-backed Donbas rebels limited autonomy inside of Ukraine and effectively abandoning hopes of joining NATO. [https://x.com/aaronjmate/status/1901663404776960096]

Johnson’s admission was ill-timed for Zelensky, who recently blew up a White House meeting with Donald Trump and JD Vance over his insistence that Putin can’t be negotiated with. As I wrote earlier this month, Zelensky falsely blamed Putin for the failure of their December 2019 agreement – an argument that has now been deflated by Johnson, who is arguably Zelensky’s most vocal foreign champion.

What Johnson failed to acknowledge is that both his government and the US also failed to “accept the compromise” and sided with the same nationalists who undermined it. Even as the radicals threatened Zelensky with regime change or even death if he went ahead with Minsk, the US and UK never used their critical influence to back him up. In fact, when Zelensky took limited steps to pursue Minsk, he was discouraged by people like William Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, who told him it was “a terrible idea.”

Western rejectionism continued even after the Russian invasion, when Johnson flew to Kyiv and advised Zelensky to walk away from the peace deal that his negotiators had brokered with Russia in Istanbul. To underscore his commitment to compromise-refusing Ukrainian radicals, Johnson later hosted members of what he called “the heroes of the Azov Brigade” – a neo-Nazi militia – and urged NATO states to give them more weapons.

In an overlooked disclosure after the Istanbul talks collapsed, a senior member of the Ukrainian negotiating team revealed that the US and UK had not only opposed the peace deal with Russia, but deceived Zelensky into walking away. According to veteran Ukrainian diplomat Oleksandr Chalyi, the US and UK told Zelensky that Ukraine would receive security guarantees only if he abandoned negotiations with Russia. But when Zelensky complied, the US and UK immediately abandoned their promise.

In the post-invasion talks, Chalyi writes, “Ukraine insisted on… effective and reliable security guarantees for Ukraine from the permanent members of the UN Security Council, including the Russian Federation.” Because Kyiv held that Russia had violated its pledges under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and refrain from violence against it, Ukrainian negotiators insisted that any new security guarantees “be as close as possible and equal to the security guarantees set forth” under the NATO charter, which constitute a mutual defense pact. This demand “was a key Ukrainian requirement during all the negotiations,” and Russia did not oppose it. In fact, he writes, “Russia fully agreed with the position of Ukraine on this issue,” a stance reflected in the jointly drafted Istanbul Communiqué of late-March 2022.

The joint Ukrainian-Russian agreement on the paramount issue of security guarantees then ran into an obstacle. In “mid-April 2022”, after allegations of Russian war crimes in Bucha and other areas, Chalyi recounts, “the United States and Great Britain declared that it was unacceptable for their states to participate” in an agreement “together with the Russian Federation.” However, the US and UK offered Ukraine a way out: “At the same time, they assured that they were ready to give security guarantees to Ukraine independently or in a multilateral format without the participation of the Russian Federation.”

The US-UK insistence on excluding Russia from any deal made “the provision of joint security guarantees… fundamentally impossible,” Chalyi concludes. Therefore, “the relevant negotiations with the Russian Federation were terminated.”

But that was not the only termination. When Ukraine then followed up with the US and UK on those promised security guarantees — including by submitting a new draft “Treaty on Guarantees of Ukraine’s Security” — the US and UK balked. According to Chalyi, Ukraine was told in early May 2022 – right after it walked away from the Istanbul deal — 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 the use of their armed forces to restore and maintain security of Ukraine.” Moreover, “even with regard to soft security guarantees for Ukraine, they were not ready to give them the form of legally binding agreements.”

In short, the US and UK got Zelensky to abandon his team’s peace deal with Russia by baiting him with a promise of security guarantees that they immediately abandoned. This betrayal has cost Ukraine hundreds of thousands of lives and now left Zelensky even more vulnerable to the far-right extremists who have undermined peace for more than a decade.

In this context, it is no wonder that Zelensky is now desperate for a security guarantee to safeguard Ukraine not only from Russia and his own country’s extremists, but another Western betrayal.