Russia demands role in guaranteeing Ukraine’s postwar security

Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump begin to leave the stage after making statements following their meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, Aug. 15, 2025. After that meeting, Trump adopted Putin’s preference for pursuing a sweeping peace agreement that would require Ukraine to cede territory to Russia. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

By Anton Troianovski

Russia’s top diplomat Wednesday said the country would insist on being a part of any future security guarantees for Ukraine, a condition that European and Ukrainian officials widely see as absurd.

It was the clearest sign yet that enormous gaps remain in the negotiations over a possible end to Russia’s invasion. And it added to the uncertainty over how a European effort to rally a “coalition of the willing” to protect a postwar Ukraine, possibly with Western soldiers stationed inside the country, would fit into President Donald Trump’s plans for a peace deal with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

“Seriously discussing issues of ensuring security without the Russian Federation is a utopia, a road to nowhere,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters in Moscow after a meeting with his Jordanian counterpart.

Kyiv’s supporters largely dismiss the idea that Russia could be a part of ensuring Ukraine’s future security, given that it launched its military intervention there in 2014 and its full-scale invasion in 2022. But Lavrov signaled that Putin had not budged from his insistence on having a decisive say over Ukraine’s future sovereignty as part of any peace deal.

“We cannot agree that now it is proposed that security issues, collective security, be resolved without the Russian Federation,” Lavrov said. “This will not work.”

The Trump administration has trumpeted a breakthrough in talks with Russia this month, claiming that Putin had accepted a proposal for the West to provide security guarantees for Ukraine as strong as Article 5 of the NATO charter, which stipulates that an attack on one alliance member is considered an attack on all.

Trump said Monday that Putin had “agreed that Russia would accept security guarantees for Ukraine,” calling it a “very significant step.” Steve Witkoff, a special envoy for Trump, said that Putin had made the “game-changing” concession of letting the United States and Europe offer “Article 5-like protection” to Ukraine.

The Kremlin has long said it is open to offers of such guarantees for Ukraine from foreign countries. But with a catch: Russia, the Russian government says, should be one of the guarantors, and no Western troops should be based in Ukraine.

Those caveats remain in place, Lavrov indicated Wednesday. He said that the kind of security guarantee for Ukraine that Russia would accept was of the sort that Russia and Ukraine were negotiating when they held peace talks in the early months of the war in 2022.

The draft peace treaty that Russia and Ukraine negotiated at the time, which they never finalized before talks fell apart, would have banned Ukraine from entering into military alliances like NATO or allowing foreign troops to be based on its territory. It stipulated that a group of “guarantor states” — including Britain, China, the United States, France and Russia — would come to Ukraine’s defense if it were attacked again.

Russia’s negotiators wanted to go even further, seeking a clause that would have required all guarantor countries, including Russia, to agree on military intervention in response to a future attack on Ukraine. In effect, that condition would have allowed Moscow to invade Ukraine again and then veto any military intervention on Kyiv’s behalf.

“If Russia is offering what it offered in 2022, it’s hard to see how we’ve moved,” said Samuel Charap, a Russia analyst at Rand Corp. who has studied the 2022 talks. “It does not seem that there has been much of a shift in the Russian position.”

European officials have already acknowledged the disconnect. President Alexander Stubb of Finland said Monday, “I should think that Russia’s view of security guarantees is quite different from our view.”

Some analysts say that Western countries could deploy troops to Ukraine after the fighting ends without Russia’s approval. Others argue that Russia wouldn’t agree to a peace deal in the first place if that possibility remained on the table, given Putin’s fierce opposition to the presence of NATO troops in Ukraine.

“It would be unsurprising if that prospect were to disincentivize Russia from agreeing to end the war,” Charap said.