First, the good news: President Donald Trump, just before a Sunday meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in Florida, said that peace talks to resolve Russia’s war in Ukraine are in the “final stages.”
The bad news? In context that quote turns out not to be good news. Standing next to Zelensky, the U.S. president told reporters,
We’re in final stages of talking and we’re going to see. Otherwise, it [the war] is going to go on for a long time. It’ll either end, or it’s going to go on for a long time, and millions of additional people are gonna be killed. Millions. And nobody wants that.
Sounds bad.
During a joint press conference that followed their behind-closed-doors meeting, the two presidents sounded notes of optimism, but signs of tangible progress were scarce, and Trump alluded to unnamed “thorny issues.”
Perhaps the thorniest of all: the issue of security guarantees. Both Ukraine and Russia, before making a deal, want some assurance that the other won’t treat peace as a mere pause in fighting and then restart the war at an opportune moment. As always in the high-stakes game of international politics, no leader wants to be a sucker, and every state tends toward paranoia about its security.
One big reason this issue has proved so thorny is that measures which would enhance Ukraine’s security would seem to diminish Russia’s, and vice versa. Zelensky wants to join NATO, the Western military alliance, but that’s a nonstarter for the Kremlin. Moscow wants to “demilitarize” Ukraine, but that would leave Ukraine defenseless against its larger neighbor. (Though this Russian war aim seems to allow some wiggle room, and foreign policy analysts have outlined the kind and quantity of indigenous military capabilities that would enable Ukraine to deter, but not threaten, Russia.)
Now, some actual good news: There’s a creative way out of this impasse. Moscow has indicated it would permit Kiev to join the European Union. And the EU has a mutual defense arrangement that would amount to a long-term security guarantee for Ukraine if it joins the Union.
This guarantee would be credible. The relevant clause of the EU treaty doesn’t actually require signatories, when one member is attacked, to fight a war on its behalf, but instead to render it assistance. After Putin’s limited invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and its full-scale invasion in 2022, European nations demonstrated their unwillingness to fight Russia over Ukraine, but they’ve certainly provided a great deal of military assistance.
Ukrainian accession to the EU would solve other problems as well. It would serve as an alternative to unattainable NATO membership, allowing Kiev to join the West—an aspiration of most Ukrainians—and Zelensky to say that the war hadn’t been in vain. And since EU membership entails an obligation to respect minority rights, Moscow would gain some assurance that Ukraine’s ethnic Russians would be protected.
Unfortunately, a major roadblock hinders Ukraine’s path to the EU: Members are wary about admitting Kiev, in part because its huge wheat and grain exports would threaten their own farmers. And even if they greenlighted its accession, the process to join would take several years, perhaps a decade or longer. But to make peace, Ukraine needs security guarantees now, not a promise of guarantees in 2035.
Here’s where some creativity is needed. The EU could incorporate Ukraine into its mutual defense arrangement tout de suite while outlining a years-long path to its full economic and political membership.
Call it the “reverse Ireland.” The EU’s mutual defense clause includes this important qualifier that, in effect, allows members to opt out of the policy: “it does not affect the neutrality of certain Member States.” Ireland, most famously, invokes this qualifier to maintain its neutrality, as have a few other states including Austria.
Ukraine could do the opposite, opting into the benefits and obligations of mutual defense while forgoing other features of EU membership during a transition period. This arrangement would be unusual, even sui generis. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and since World War II, few times, if any, have been more desperate for Europe and Ukraine than this one.
European leaders have repeatedly pledged to give Ukraine security guarantees and to support Ukraine’s accession into the EU. With peace talks apparently moving into the end game, its put-up-or-shut-up time.
Washington should nudge Europe’s pro-Ukraine capitals toward this creative solution, and it should lean on those EU members, notably Hungary, who most resist Ukrainian membership. The Trump administration has prioritized military retrenchment from Europe, which requires that European nations take more responsibility for security on their continent. A “reverse Ireland” for Ukraine would help accomplish this top foreign policy goal of the White House.
Putin, facing the prospect of Ukraine’s imminent participation in the EU’s defense framework, likely would raise objections. But the Trump administration has done a good job of repairing U.S.–Russia ties and building mutual trust. Through careful diplomacy and credible pledges to shut NATO’s door to Ukraine in exchange, the White House, I suspect, could induce the Kremlin to sign off on the scheme.
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Zelensky, for his part, would regard the solution as inferior to security guarantees provided by the U.S., the world’s leading superpower. Indeed, Zelensky is now complaining that even the security guarantees which Trump is evidently offering Ukraine are insufficient, since they would last for “only” 15 years. “I told [Trump] we would really like to consider the possibility of a 30, 40, 50 year [guarantee],” Zelensky revealed after the Sunday meeting.
Zelensky’s presumptuous demands, if honored, could doom negotiations. Strong American security guarantees for Ukraine wouldn’t be credible, and they’d cause serious political and geopolitical headaches for the Trump administration. Moscow might continue the war to prevent a military partnership between the U.S. and Ukraine, and Trump’s MAGA supporters wouldn’t be happy if the U.S. entered yet another entangling alliance with a faraway nation.
Trump should make clear to Zelensky, as he did in February, that Ukraine doesn’t “have the cards.” And he should insist that Europe, not America, take the lead in providing Ukraine security guarantees. A “reverse Ireland” for Ukraine might just be the best way for Europe to do so.
