Security experts warn that revising Europe’s security architecture would mean meeting a long-standing Moscow demand to renegotiate the post-World War II security order. The warning comes after statements by US President Donald Trump that he discussed this architecture with Russian officials during a meeting at the White House with the envoy of the Russian president, Kirill Dmitriev.
According to Trump, the deal he envisions will be big and will include more than Ukraine. It could even extend to all of Europe, although it remained unclear what he meant by this formulation. US envoy Jared Kushner wrote that Europe and Russia have struggled for more than 30 years to create a stable security architecture.
He was considering a broader European architecture before leaving to meet Russian and Ukrainian representatives in Abu Dhabi. European diplomats immediately pushed back against Washington’s approach to reaching a peace deal in Ukraine. Their concern is that such a deal could restore Russia’s sphere of influence and weaken NATO.
The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, stressed that Europe already has a security architecture, in which NATO and the European Union each have their own role. Ukraine’s integration into this architecture must be ensured, she added. Russia made clear during talks in Abu Dhabi earlier this week that it wanted to discuss a broader European security architecture before concrete war issues were addressed.
Cold War historian Michael Kimmage assessed that formulations about security architecture in Europe are part of Russia’s arguments. To some extent, they are also part of media propaganda efforts to present the war as Russia wants. Russian leaders, including Vladimir Putin, have long claimed that the US and NATO have repeatedly violated promises made in the early 1990s not to expand the alliance toward former Soviet bloc countries.
They have seen NATO enlargement as a humiliating position for Russia. At the same time, in the 1990s the European project brought the creation of the European Union, the common market that guaranteed the free movement of goods and people between member states, the Schengen Agreement for travel without border checks and the euro currency.
The basic idea was to spread and guarantee peace across the continent. Kimmage recalled that the European project was not created for war but for peace, and that during this period there were even proposals for Russia to become a NATO member. This period of relative stability ended after Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
According to Kimmage, Russia wants to reshape all of this by force, which is fundamentally unacceptable for Europe, despite its diversity and internal differences. The historian added that large-scale forcible border changes are simply not part of the European project.
As long as this element remains essential to Russian foreign policy, Russia and Europe are at an impasse. The Trump administration tried very quickly to ensure that existing European security institutions would remain intact. Kushner said late Thursday that the next round of negotiations would also include European partners.
He and Steve Witkoff traveled to Moscow for talks with Putin after negotiations in Abu Dhabi and then flew to Dublin to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. On Thursday, Kushner had earlier signaled some truly extraordinary plans for post-war Ukraine, saying they could not be finalized without Europeans at the negotiating table.
The director of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Hiski Haukkala, warned that Russia must not be allowed to dictate terms that would lead to a kind of neutralization or significant reduction of Ukraine’s military forces in the future. This would make Ukraine extremely vulnerable to future aggression and pressure from Russia.
It would also mean that Ukraine would depend entirely on security guarantees that the US or European countries are able and willing to offer. Haukkala stressed that support for Ukraine is based on international law and the fundamental norms of responsible conduct and international security when it comes to the European security architecture.
The European Union has repeatedly highlighted some of the fundamental agreements and documents that Russia has violated. Among them is the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, which set out ten basic principles of European security, including refraining from the use or threat of force against territorial integrity.
The Paris Charter for a New Europe built on the Helsinki commitments. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is one of the few multilateral security forums where the West and Russia held dialogue. The 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Russia, the US and the UK gave Ukraine and other countries security guarantees in exchange for giving up their nuclear weapons, is also on this list.
According to Haukkala, Russia departed from these principles and, in the process, shattered them. Moscow is not interested in restoring the previous order of the security architecture, but wants something else in its place. As long as this is not on the table, Russia’s way of negotiating is to continue the war, which he described as a form of bargaining.
Haukkala added that Russia is signaling a strategic aim to change the structure of European security, to subjugate Ukraine and to change the very essence of Europe’s security. Former US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs during the George W. Bush administration, Daniel Fried, said that Russia is very skilled at sticking to its demands and that Russians know how to negotiate.
For now they are not negotiating, referring to the talks in Abu Dhabi. Some experts said that at present there is no possibility of creating a new security architecture together with Russia, because both trust and a shared vision on which relations with it could be built are lacking.
Post-Soviet policy expert Balazs Jarabik assessed that Russia is part of the European security architecture, whether Europeans like it or not. The question is whether it is included as their enemy, since it is clear that Russia will not be a partner. According to him, a way of coexistence must be found to reduce the risk of horizontal escalation and potentially of a larger European war, even larger than the one now.
On Friday, a number of European leaders rejected Russian demands to discuss Europe’s security architecture. A German government spokesperson said Berlin aims to organize a meeting of the Coalition of the Willing to secure funding for Ukraine’s defense and reach a common position on upcoming peace negotiations.