Russia has put a striking offer on the table for America’s NATO allies: sign a non-aggression pact with Moscow one country at a time and receive Russian security guarantees in return. Alexey Drobinin, the director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Foreign Policy Planning Department, laid out the proposal at a security conference in Moscow on Wednesday, presenting it as one building block of a new European security architecture that is now being discussed as part of the Ukraine peace process.
Drobinin set out three models for that new order. The first was a collective defensive alliance, or bilateral mutual-assistance agreements of the kind Russia already has with Belarus and North Korea. The second was political agreements under which each side undertakes not to help the other’s adversaries in the event of aggression, modelled on the pact Moscow has with Iran. The third — the one aimed directly at the West — was bilateral mutual non-aggression pacts. “Agreements of this kind could be reached, among other things, with individual NATO member states, which would then receive additional individual security guarantees from the Russian Federation,” he told the conference.
The offer lands in the middle of the renewed Ukraine peace talks. Russia’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, said a new security framework for Europe was the central theme of two days of negotiations in Abu Dhabi between Moscow, Kyiv and Washington — the first such talks since February — reporting some progress and consensus on certain points while insisting that “a temporary solution will not be sufficient.” In substance, Moscow is reviving the demands President Vladimir Putin put to Washington in December 2021, weeks before the invasion of Ukraine: halt NATO’s expansion, roll back the alliance’s military presence in countries that joined after 1997, and restrict Western military cooperation with post-Soviet states outside NATO, Ukraine above all.
Europe’s answer, so far, is no. Some European politicians refuse to discuss the continent’s overall security architecture at all until there is progress on Ukraine, starting with a ceasefire, and they suspect Moscow is raising the subject to divert attention from the war and to win a say over decisions that are not Russia’s to make. The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, put it bluntly this week: “We already have a European security architecture. The only one violating this security architecture is Russia,” she said, demanding clear concessions from Moscow in the negotiations. Germany’s foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, answered the same way: Europe does not need a new security architecture, he said, but the restoration of the existing one. There is also a structural objection Europeans keep returning to: security guarantees handed out by Moscow country by country would cut across NATO’s Article 5, the collective-defence promise that an attack on one ally is an attack on all, and would let Russia deal with Europe’s nations one at a time instead of facing the alliance whole.
For the United States, this is not somebody else’s argument. American officials have made clear they are open to discussing Europe’s security architecture, and Washington is sitting at the Abu Dhabi table where the subject is now the central theme. That puts the weight of the decision where it has rested since 1949: on the American guarantee. If individual allies start collecting side guarantees from Moscow, the Article 5 promise that has kept American troops out of a European great-power war for three quarters of a century begins to fray — and the United States would face the bill for holding Europe together by itself, or the risk of watching the alliance loosen piece by piece.
For ordinary American families, the stakes are concrete. A Europe that stays whole and deters war is a Europe that does not pull American sons and daughters into a wider conflict, does not send energy prices spiking the way the Ukraine war did at American pumps, and does not force Washington into ever-larger defence bills to cover allies who no longer trust the common shield. A genuine settlement that ends the killing in Ukraine and lowers the temperature between Russia and the West would help every household that pays for fuel, food and taxes. The question the Abu Dhabi talks now have to answer is whether Moscow’s one-country-at-a-time offer is a step toward that peace — or a way to buy, cheaply, the divided Europe Russia has wanted all along.
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