• NATO
• Russia
• Ukraine

August 27, 2025, 4:58 AM View Comments ()

Let’s consider some relatively recent history. In 1999, NATO waged a 78-day war against Yugoslavia, aiming to halt a bloody ethnic cleansing campaign by Serbian troops in the restive province of Kosovo. The Serbs ultimately withdrew, and the Western alliance filled the resulting vacuum by dispatching peacekeeping troops. The number of forces deployed was 50,000—even though Kosovo is a tiny piece of territory, a bit smaller than the U.S. state of Connecticut or about one-third the size of Belgium. Today, 26 years later, there are still approximately 4,500 peacekeepers stationed there.

So now we turn to Ukraine—a country, it should be noted, that is 55 times the size of Kosovo. Since the recent flurry of diplomatic activity in Alaska and Washington, the discussion about ending the Russia-Ukraine war has turned to the notion of “security guarantees”—a strikingly fuzzy concept that means very different things to different people. The pundits in Europe and the United States are busily jawboning over what form it might take. But the entire discussion is permeated with a palpable sense of unreality.

The aim of any security guarantee for Ukraine should be to provide it with security—in other words, to keep it safe from Russian invasions going forward. A piece of paper saying “guarantee” will not do; that has already been tried and failed. Russia, the United States, and Britain did not honor their guarantee of Ukraine’s borders, which was signed in Budapest in 1994. Russia’s invasions of Ukraine since 2014 also violated multiple other agreements signed by Moscow.

It is hard to imagine how any form of protection for Ukraine would not entail the presence of a large body of troops on the ground. The Europeans have been referring to this theoretical entity as a “reassurance force,” a term with a distinctly Orwellian ring. Are we talking about a military operation or a therapy session?

And who, precisely, would contribute service members to this force? The British, traditionally among the more martial of the Europeans, originally spoke of contributing 30,000 troops to a possible Ukraine contingent, but that figure seems to be trending downward—influenced, at least in part, by Britain’s shrinking military capabilities and slow-motion financial collapse. The French, although proudly styling themselves among the leaders of the “coalition of the willing,” have been conspicuously reluctant to commit any troops. (In February, indeed, President Emmanuel Macron ruled out immediately sending any, though his position could be changing.)

And those are the two countries that have been pushing the idea of a “reassurance force” the hardest, with decidedly mixed results. (A headline in the Wall Street Journal five months ago proclaimed: “France-U.K. Plan for European Troops in Ukraine Falters.”) Who will pick up the slack? When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was asked on Aug. 18 whether his country would commit to sending troops, he replied: “It is too early to give a definitive answer.”

It’s hard to blame him for hedging his bets. In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the head of Germany’s military published a social media post saying that the Bundeswehr, Germany’s military, was “more or less broke.” Even though Berlin has committed vast sums to defense since then, it will take time for the money to trickle down to the troops. One recent poll showed that two-thirds of Germans surveyed fear that dispatching troops to Ukraine will trigger war with Russia.

So who’s left? The Italians? They’re also facing serious financial problems and a public that is deeply skeptical of support for Kyiv. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said in March that a troop deployment to Ukraine “is not being planned.” The Poles? “There are not and will not be any plans to send the Polish military to Ukraine,” wrote a top Polish official on X in May, saying that Poland was partly responsible for defending NATO’s eastern flank and providing logistical assistance to the Ukrainians.

Spain and the Netherlands have also declined to commit troops (though leaders have hastened to add that they will offer support in other ways). Hungary and Slovakia, each with a Russia-friendly government, have given a hard “no.” Among those who have so far declared themselves willing to put boots on the ground are Belgium, Lithuania, and Estonia, with a combined population of 16 million. If I were Ukrainian, I’m not sure that I would feel especially reassured by any of this.

As for the United States, the Trump administration’s interest in security guarantees appears to be bound up with the desire to minimize U.S. involvement. Among the Europeans, there has been a great deal of earnest talk about the need for a U.S. “backstop” for any potential troop presence in Ukraine. (Translation: The Europeans want the U.S. military to bail them out as soon as it gets serious, as if we were in the 1980s.)

Who knows where the Americans will end up? The Financial Times just reported that U.S. President Donald Trump has offered to add U.S. intelligence support and other capabilities to the mix. That’s encouraging enough—but who’s to say that he won’t change his mind tomorrow, especially if Russian President Vladimir Putin gives him a flattering call?

Trump’s envoy, the feckless Steve Witkoff, said after the Aug. 15 Alaska summit that the West could provide “Article 5-like” guarantees to Ukraine—another highly ambiguous choice of words. The whole point of NATO’s mutual defense clause is that it rests on U.S. might. Why should anyone—much less the Russians—fear Witkoff’s version of NATO Lite?

Witkoff also claimed that Moscow had agreed to the notion of “robust security guarantees.” More Orwellian doublespeak. The Russians have made it abundantly clear that they prefer a system in which they can retain a veto over any efforts to boost Kyiv’s security, as they suggested at the so-called peace talks—in reality, terms-of-Ukraine’s-submission talks—in Istanbul in 2022. Just within the past few days, Putin reiterated that the Russians refuse to countenance any Western troops in Ukraine. On Aug. 24, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared that Moscow will only allow members of the United Nations Security Council to guarantee Ukraine’s security—which would presumably give Russia (and its friend, China) a veto.

This is nonsense, and it shouldn’t be countenanced. The Ukrainians need the security guarantees because they’re the ones who are being invaded.

“When Russia raises the issue of security guarantees, I, frankly speaking, do not know who is threatening them,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rightly said during an Aug. 22 meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in Kyiv. “They attacked us, and I do not quite understand what guarantees the aggressor needs.”

But do the Americans really understand that? On Aug. 19, Trump gave an interview in which he once again seemed to blame Ukraine for defending itself from aggression: “It’s not a war that should have been started, you don’t do that. You don’t take on a nation that’s 10 times your size.” Can the coalition of the willing really forge a credible deterrent with an ally who can’t distinguish aggressor from victim?

The whole idea of providing Ukraine with security guarantees is a chimera—and one senses that the Europeans understand this. They deftly used their Washington meeting with Trump to deflect the threat of an incipient U.S. deal with Putin over the heads of the Ukrainians. They are betting that the Russian president’s dithering— his unwillingness to attend a summit with Zelensky, his refusal to allow a cease-fire, and his continuing attacks on Ukraine’s civilian populations—will soon raise Trump’s ire beyond repair.

The Europeans understand that the best way forward is to keep up the pressure on Putin. That means supplying Ukraine with more and better weapons (and helping it build them), continuing financial and economic support, and intensifying sanctions on Russia and the buyers of its oil. Seizing the roughly $300 billion of Russian assets frozen in European banks and giving them to Kyiv would send exactly the right kind of signal. Now, that would be just the sort of commitment to Ukrainian security that Putin would actually understand.