Security Guarantees for Ukraine Are Useless Without Action to Back Them Up

Security Guarantees for Ukraine Are Useless Without Action to Back Them Up

Dalibor Rohac

Tue, December 23, 2025 at 7:08 AM UTC

6 min read

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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP, eager to make good on a fanciful campaign promise to end the war in Ukraine within twenty-four hours of taking office—or even sooner—has encountered a conundrum. To wit: Wars don’t end unless all sides agree, and Ukraine and its allies can’t agree with Putin on what the post-war world should look like—which, by the way, is why there’s a war in the first place. The president’s latest, and perhaps last, hope is that Ukraine might agree to an unjust ceasefire in which it would surrender land and people to Russia in return for security guarantees needed to prevent a future Russian re-invasion. But “guarantees” from Western powers with waning credibility are not going to work. What counts are not promises, but real action of the kind to which Western governments seem to be allergic.

Kyiv is told that “NATO-like,” “Article 5–style,” and even “platinum” security guarantees are on the table, to ensure that the United States and its European allies would never allow a repetition of 2022. The Ukrainians have good reasons to be skeptical.

It has long seemed that the main obstacle to a war-ending bargain was the fact that any sufficiently strong Western guarantees, which would be enough for Ukraine to trade for the fortified cities of Donetsk, would also be unacceptable to Russia. The Kremlin, after all, seeks to end the war on terms that will leave Ukraine vulnerable to future Russian aggression or subversion—a demand Putin repeated last week in his annual televised press conference.

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There is a kernel of truth behind the search for acceptable security guarantees for Ukraine: The only way Ukraine can survive in the long term if Putin’s demands are met is if other countries are willing to defend Ukrainian sovereignty. Putin demands Ukraine make itself almost indefensible by ceding land and people, limiting the size of its military, and curtailing its ability to join alliances. But it’s hard to imagine any Western guarantees that would be worth exchanging for such concessions. Even if Ukraine were allowed to join NATO, does anyone believe that the United States would send its military to defend Ukraine in the case of a future Russian attack?

If anything, America’s current European allies are wondering whether NATO itself is a sufficient deterrent against Russian of their own territory, never mind of Ukraine’s. As Mark Galeotti, a Russia scholar at University College London, pointed out, the wording of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is quite noncommittal. In the event of an attack on one of the allies, “each of them . . . will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary.” Speaking to Fox Business in September about possible Russian incursions into NATO territory, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent suggested Europeans should not be complacent: “The one thing I can tell you is the U.S. is not going to get involved with troops or any of that. We will sell the Europeans weapons.” There might be Republicans in Congress committed to the alliance, but the new National Security Strategy makes it clear that, from now on, deterring Russia is a job for Europe, not the United States.

Alas, promises made to Ukraine by leaders overseeing Europe’s undernourished militaries are not worth much more than those coming from the Trump administration. The latter appears open to making promises it has no intention of keeping; the former appears open to making promises it has no capability to keep. It may be better to retire the talk of guarantees altogether, rather than to risk extending a set of false promises to Ukraine. False promises are likely to provoke Russian opportunism and aggression, as with Russia’s deliberate attacks on NATO airspace. Russia’s testing of the guarantees would create a dilemma for Ukraine’s allies: Allow the promises to be exposed as hollow or risk a direct confrontation with Russia.

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A credible, well-designed security guarantee works as a deterrent, reducing the risk of future confrontation. For promises made by the United States or Europe to Ukraine to pass the muster, they would have to be backed by real action—e.g., willingness to deploy Western (though not necessarily American) military assets in Ukraine, as well as troops along a future line of contact, with the mandate to repel future Russian attacks. Whether such a deterrent would be acceptable to Russia is immaterial for now because no Western leader dares to seriously contemplate it.

A willingness to inflict pain on Russia now would also signal credibility. One obvious test, which the EU just failed, was whether Europeans could summon the courage to use €200 billion of Russian sovereign assets, currently immobilized in Europe, to help Ukraine. Although the European Council decided to extend a €90 billion, no-interest loan to Kyiv, which will just about cover its financial needs in 2026 and 2027, the EU will do so by its own borrowing, not by leveraging the Russian assets as originally planned. The stated reason is the potential legal risk to Belgium and other countries where the assets are located. Unsurprisingly, there are also reports that the Trump administration pressured European governments not to touch the Russian money, which the administration considered a bargaining chip in the negotiations pursued by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

Whatever the exact reasons, the message to Kyiv is abundantly clear. If EU countries cannot agree even to take on a hypothetical, and limited, financial risk, how can they be trusted to come to Ukraine’s defense in more meaningful ways in the future?

The Kremlin is able to read these displays of weakness. Strikingly, Europe’s leaders failed to act on the question of Russian sovereign assets just one day after Vladimir Putin had called them “little pigs” and reiterated his commitment to unconditionally “liberating [Russia’s] historical lands”—“on the battlefield” or through diplomacy.

The muddled thinking about guarantees for Ukraine reflects the broader failure of strategic thinking in the West. It did not start with Trump, but it has certainly been compounded by his misreading of the war as a dispute over territory, rather than as an effort to annihilate Ukraine as an independent country and undo the end of the Cold War. Unless the collective West can show that it is serious about stopping Russia, that effort may well succeed.

Yes, Ukrainians are brave and fully understand the importance of the cause that they are fighting for. Everything suggests that they are willing and ready to continue in their fight on their own, if need be. But they are also human and may be susceptible, in the depth of a dark, cold winter and in the midst of Russia’s genocidal tactics, to accept an oppressive, tenuous peace, well-aware that it would be a prelude to Russian aggression and interference to come.

If that happens, let us not delude ourselves into thinking that this outcome is somehow a product of clever diplomacy and well-crafted “guarantees.” It would instead be a product of Ukrainian desperation and Western betrayal—and Ukrainians, Europeans, and American alike would end up paying a hefty price in not-too-distant future.

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