Putin links Ukraine peace to a new European security order and revived NATO demands
Vladimir Putin says he wishes “eternal peace” for Ukraine while still rejecting a comprehensive ceasefire, nearly five years after ordering the full-scale invasion. After talks with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the Kremlin framed peace as requiring a new, long-term architecture of “indivisible security and peace” in Europe — in Moscow’s terms, a rewrite of the post–Cold War security order to Russia’s advantage, potentially the largest such change since the Soviet collapse.
The Kremlin has revived its December 2021 draft treaties with the United States and NATO. Those texts would have barred Ukraine and Georgia from joining the alliance and rolled back NATO military infrastructure in central and eastern European states that joined after the USSR dissolved. Western leaders rejected the package as an ultimatum; two months later Russia invaded. Putin’s foreign-policy aide Yuri Ushakov has said Moscow may add further demands, citing Western efforts “to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.” BBC Russia editor Steve Rosenberg reports that simply putting European security on the agenda is treated in Moscow as a win. Komsomolskaya Pravda argued that after forcing the West to think about security, diplomats now want it to heed Russian objections to NATO enlargement.
EU diplomat Kaja Kallas called the architecture demand a “trap” to divert attention from a ceasefire, arguing talks should sequence a ceasefire, then a peace agreement, and only then Europe’s wider security system. Europe is not at the table: this week’s talks in Abu Dhabi involved Ukraine, Russia and the United States. Witkoff suggested Putin had accepted European representatives at the next round, but on Friday Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said a decision would wait until Moscow judged Europe’s “true intentions.” Last month the leaders of Norway and Finland reached out to Putin. Next week in Shenzhen, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit, he may meet Donald Trump and Xi Jinping; Russian media have likened that trio to Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in 1945. After nearly five years of war, Russia has taken huge battlefield losses, its economy is under growing strain, and Ukrainian drone strikes keep hitting Russian oil refineries.
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