Russia will insist on its own “ironclad” security guarantees as part of any ceasefire deal to end the conflict in Ukraine, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said in remarks published on March 17.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been pushing hard to win security guarantees, most recently in his victory plan that he presented at the end of last year that starts with accelerated Nato membership.

From the Kremlin’s perspective, granting Ukraine security guarantees without including Russia is to continue to class Moscow as an “enemy” and leave its security uncertain. Nato was specifically set up to fight the Soviet Union if needed, but the Kremlin has argued that since the collapse of the USSR it needs to be updated to take account for the vast geopolitical changes that have taken place since the end of the Cold War. An inclusive grand security deal, that also means restarting the Cold War missile deals, would asway Russia’s security concerns and create a lot more common ground on which to build a lasting peace deal.

This is the first time that the Kremlin has explicitly said it also wants security guarantees. Grushko echoed the Kremlin’s call for “ironclad guarantees” that Ukraine would not join Nato, which were spelled out as Russia’s top priority in an eight-point list of demands issued by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in December 2021 in the run-up to the start of the war.

Those demands were rejected by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in January and Russia invaded Ukraine a month later. Since then, Zelenskiy has tried to capitalise on the implicit promise of Nato membership that were alluded to in the Bucharest memorandum in 2008 that declared that Ukraine and Georgia "will become members of Nato" but did not set a timeline or conditions.

The Kremlin has been adamant that Ukraine return to its pre-2014 constitutionally mandated neutrality and never become a member of Nato.

Grushko’s comments come in the wake of the start of ceasefire talks that kicked off in Riyadh on February 18 and US President Donald Trump’s comments at the weekend that he intends to talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin himself on March 18.

Bankova has already accepted a call for a 30-day ceasefire while talks continue, but while Putin left the door open for accepting the pause in the conflict, he added that there were “nuances” to be taken into account. This was widely interpreted that Putin will stick to a maximalist position at the start of the negotiations. Amongst the things that the Kremlin has been demanding is that Ukraine recognise Russian sovereignty over Crimea and the four regions it annexed in 2023. Putin is also insisting on Ukraine giving up its Nato aspirations and downsizes its army.

Talks have been progressing with the US delegation meeting with its Ukrainian counterparts in Jeddah last week and US envoy Steve Witkoff flew to Moscow to talk personally with Putin in long, but closed, discussions, which he described as a “positive” meeting with the Russian leader.

In an interview with Izvestia, Grushko made no mention of the 30-day ceasefire proposal but reiterated Moscow’s stance on long-term security arrangements.

“We will demand that ironclad security guarantees become part of this agreement,” he said. “Part of these guarantees should be the neutral status of Ukraine, the refusal of Nato countries to accept it into the alliance.”

Grushko also ruled out the possibility of Nato observers being deployed in Ukraine, reinforcing the Kremlin’s opposition to any Western military presence, which the Kremlin sees as a de facto deployment of Nato forces in Ukraine.

The UK and France have both expressed their willingness to send a peacekeeping force to oversee a ceasefire, while Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said his government is open to requests for support. Initially it was proposed to send 30,000 European peacekeepers – Trump has already said that US troops will not participate – but questions have been raised over Europe’s ability to field so many peacekeepers. UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer suggested over the weekend that the number might be downsized to only 10,000, far fewer than the 120,000 experts say is needed to patrol the 1,200-km long line of contact.

“It does not matter under what label Nato contingents were to be deployed on Ukrainian territory: be it the European Union, Nato, or in a national capacity,” Grushko said. “If they appear there, it means that they are deployed in the conflict zone with all the consequences for these contingents as parties to the conflict.”

However, he acknowledged that the potential deployment of unarmed post-conflict observers could be discussed once a peace agreement is in place. “We can talk about unarmed observers, a civilian mission that would monitor the implementation of individual aspects of this agreement, or guarantee mechanisms,” he said. “In the meantime, it’s just hot air.”

French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview published on March 16 that the decision on stationing peacekeeping troops in Ukraine rests with Kyiv, not Moscow. Under international law, a government is entitled to invite foreign troops into its country in times of crisis. Putin himself used this as a justification for sending Russian troops to fight the terrorist insurrection in Syria after Russian forces where invited into the country by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Despite the legality of such an invitation, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has made it clear that the Kremlin would consider the presence of Nato-backed troops, whatever their actual designation, in Ukraine as a major provocation.

Grushko argued that European allies of Ukraine must recognise that only excluding the country from Nato membership and preventing the deployment of foreign military forces on its territory would bring long-term stability. “Then the security of Ukraine and the entire region in a broader sense will be ensured, since one of the root causes of the conflict will be eliminated,” he said.

Golden opportunity

This is not the first time that Russia has asked for security guarantees from the West. When Dmitry Medvedev took over as president in 2008, his first trip was to Brussels where he offered the EU a new pan-European security deal that included Ukraine and ironically would have prevented the Russian invasion if it had been adopted. However, Brussels rejected the deal out of hand.

The document, which is still on the MFA website, was very specific, based on the Charter of the United Nations and grounded in international law. The preamble of the draft opens with "Reminding that the use of force or the threat of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other way inconsistent with the goals and principles of the Charter of the United Nations is inadmissible in their mutual relations, as well as international relations in general."

Frustrated with the lack of interest, tensions continued to build until they broke with Lavrov’s famous “new rules of the game” speech delivered in February 2021 at a joint press conference with EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who is also publicly humiliated. A year later Putin made one last attempted at striking a deal with the MFA’s eight-point list of demands issued by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in December 2021, this time backed with the threat of war.

Creating a security deal that includes Russia could also provide Ukraine with the security deals that it so desperately wants and needs. The West remains extremely reluctant to give Ukraine any real promise of military aid should Russia invade a second time, beyond the half-baked “security assurances” of more money and arms. However, a pan-European framework would necessarily have to include commitments by Russia not to invade Ukraine again, but also a limit on Nato’s further expansion and some sort commitment by Europe to support Ukraine if faced with more Russian aggression. Moreover, this would be an easier sell to Moscow as it would be done outside the framework of Nato.

More specifically, both the US and Russian side have already mentioned reviving the Cold War missiles treaties that would be a concrete step to improving security. Trump has already mentioned that he would like trilateral talks between the US, Russia and China on ways to reduce military spending by half. He has also made vague comments about wanting to reduce number of nuclear missiles in the world.

The Kremlin has also made it clear it would like to renew the Cold War-era missile deals. In former US President Joe Biden’s first week in office he met with Putin and renewed the START missile treaty in January 2021 – the first Cold War-era deal to be renewed. Over the last two decades most of the deals have fallen fallow, starting with former President George W Bush’s decision to unilaterally withdraw from the ABM treaty (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) in 2002 that put the US on a collision course with Russia that culminated in the Ukraine invasion.

The Kremlin hailed the agreement as a major breakthrough but has since suspended its implementation, but held the door open to talks by not withdrawing from it. START III is due to expire again next year, but the Kremlin has already said it remains open to renewing the treaty again.