By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

While the world is on the brink of the largest military offensive in Europe since World War II, the US  contacted all Americans in Ukraine, asking them to leave immediately also Britons have been told to leave Ukraine immediately. A fixation on nonstarters - such as Putin’s demands for a NATO expansion moratorium or the West’s insistence that Russia withdraws from Crimea - will make reaching a new security agreement impossible. But negotiators could progress by focusing on other issues and then embedding intractable problems into a larger deal. Widening the aperture of the negotiations could create opportunities for deals that are currently not available. For instance, if Russia withdraws support for the so-called separatists in Donbas, the United States could commit to not installing offensive missiles in Ukraine and not deploying missile defenses in Europe that can intercept Russian weapons. And why Western diplomats must insist again that Putin obtain permission before placing troops in other countries, which would keep Russia in line with agreements signed by its previous leaders.

In December, Putin unilaterally drafted two extraordinarily aggressive treaties designed to constrain the organization and its members. They contain such nonstarters demands - most centrally, closing NATO’s open the door to Ukraine and prohibiting organizational forces and weapons in nations that joined after May 1997 - that they read more like predicates for war rather than sincere overtures for negotiations.

Nonetheless, U.S. President Joe Biden and NATO provided detailed written replies in January, attempting to dialogue with the Russian leader. If Putin spurns these offers, war is likely. But Moscow has not yet meeting with Western leaders.

If Putin does agree to negotiate, then Western diplomats should not just offer defensively minimal concessions to freeze the crisis. Instead, they should seize the diplomatic offensive and counter with a comprehensive, grand bargain for enhancing European security in concert with allies and partners similarly to something like the Helsinki Accords signed during the Cold War, which stabilized the continent even as U.S.-Soviet competition grew in other parts of the world. It could resuscitate and amend defunct arms control agreements and provide a bigger framework for European security, and in the process, help solve the issues surrounding Ukraine.

Convening a major summit to renegotiate European security will give Russia an international platform that Putin does not deserve. But that symbolism shouldn’t stop Western diplomats. The Helsinki Accords recognized the Soviet Union as a superpower, and that affirmation helped persuade Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to make concessions. Putin also likes attention, and the West should be prepared to offer cheap pageantry not only to prevent a new Russian invasion into Ukraine but also to repair Europe’s broken security architecture. The United States and Europe must have the courage to move beyond defensive patchwork fixes and instead pivot to bold, aggressive initiatives to make the continent safer.

The first two decades after the accords were signed, Europe saw an explosion of new security agreements and treaties, particularly after Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. In 1987, he joined U.S. President Ronald Reagan to sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, eliminating a whole class of highly destabilizing weapons. In 1990, the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty came online, substantially reducing the size of conventional forces deployed on the continent. The 1990 Vienna Document, signed by Canada, the Soviet Union, the United States, and most of Europe and Central Asia, expanded transparency about weapons and military training exercises.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia and the West continued to make deals that helped keep Europe secure. The 1992 Open Skies Treaty, which followed the Vienna Document, allowed signatories to fly reconnaissance missions through one another’s territories to collect information on military activities. The ambitious 1990 Charter of Paris trumpeted that all European signatories would “build, consolidate and strengthen democracy as the only system of government of our nations.” It declared prematurely that “the era of confrontation and division of Europe has ended.” The 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances for Ukraine sent Kyiv’s nuclear weapons to Russia to promise that Moscow, the United Kingdom, and the United States would respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity. The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act established mechanisms for the two parties to collaborate, marking a high point in cooperation.

But during the following decade, ties between the two sides deteriorated when Putin came to power in 2000. The West, meanwhile, grew disenchanted with Moscow after Russia launched the second Chechen war; grew more autocratic; invaded Georgia and recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent countries in 2008; annexed Crimea in 2014; and then supported separatists in eastern Ukraine, leading to ongoing war and thousands of deaths.

European security agreements from the previous two decades began to break down. Russia stopped implementing the CFE Treaty in 2007. Putin then violated virtually every European and international security agreement his Kremlin predecessors signed. The United States stopped meeting its CFE obligations in 2011, and under former President Donald Trump, pulled out of the INF and Open Skies treaties, as well. The Vienna Documents today do little to enhance transparency. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) - the successor to the CSCE - has become feckless in large measure because Moscow objects to its efforts to monitor elections protect human rights.

 

The world must try if Putin signals a commitment to negotiate

After decades of division, it will be difficult - and maybe impossible - for Russia and the West to strike any security deals on Europe. They have little faith in each other and plenty of reasons for suspicion. But given the stakes, the world must try. If Putin signals a commitment to negotiate, Biden and his European partners should go big. After all, Europe’s security architecture needs genuine repair and creative renewal.

They should start with steps toward revamping transparency, which will allow each country to keep tabs on the other’s activities and better predict each other’s actions. Right now, Russia, the United States, and Europe have less information about the deployment of rival soldiers and weapons than ever since the end of the Cold War. A new grand bargain on European security could commit all signatories to more frequent monitoring of troop deployments, weapons deployments, and military exercises. The United States and Russia have learned how to successfully implement an obtrusive inspections regime from the New START Treaty, limiting the number of nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles each country can deploy. New START is one of the few U.S.-Russian deals that still operate, and a broader agreement could share the treaty’s obligations to short-notice inspections and close probing of weapon systems. Helsinki 2.0 could allow Russian inspectors to visit the sites of U.S. missile defenses in Poland and Romania, and NATO monitors could have similar access to Russia’s Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad.

Moscow and Washington could further bolster transparency by rejoining, amending, and modernizing previously effective agreements, such as the Open Skies Treaty and CFE. To avoid dangerous miscalculations, both states must also revive the Vienna Documents. That means Russia and every NATO country should offer specified notifications about training and impose new limits on the scale and locations of exercises, especially because exercise preparations can appear very similar to planning for an actual attack.

Diplomats should also dust off, modernize, and implement old ideas that never came to fruition. Russia and the United States failed to implement a 2000 memorandum of agreement on sharing data about missile launches, known as the Joint Data Exchange Center (JDEC), because of technicalities and mounting hostilities in U.S.-Russian relations. But an initiative of its kind between Moscow and NATO or among all OSCE members would enhance all of Europe’s security (including Russia’s) and could have better odds of succeeding.

Transparency, of course, is just one aspect of arms control. After Russia and the West agree to open their systems for inspections, diplomats will need to turn to the issue of control itself. They should begin by addressing the most destabilizing forces: the troops and weapons stationed on or near the Russian border. All sides should pull these back on a reciprocal and verifiable basis, beginning with the massive Russian army mobilized around Ukraine today. They should also pull back their rockets. This may seem like a hard ask of Moscow, but Putin has already proposed that signatories not deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles in areas where they can reach other signatories. Russian commentary has emphasized keeping all such weapons out of Ukraine. Their demand is reasonable as long as Moscow places similar restraints on short-range rockets that can hit Kyiv, Riga, Tallinn, Vilnius, or Warsaw.

The Biden Administration could also propose some limits on missile defenses in Europe. Washington could agree to refrain from deploying defense systems on the continent with capabilities against Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles in return for limits on Russian missile defenses in the European theater. This may sound like a big U.S. concession, but it’s not. The U.S. interceptors currently deployed (SM3s) have no capability against Russian strategic weapons. The smartest place for interceptors that can defend the U.S. homeland against Russian or North Korean weapons (the Ground-Based Interceptor, or GBI) is Alaska, where they are mostly already located.

Negotiators must try to reduce the overall number of missiles - especially nuclear missiles to better safeguard the United States and Europe from quick, devastating attacks. Ideally, Russia and the United States would rejoin and credibly implement the INF treaty. To do so, Russia would have to agree to include its 9M729 missile in the agreement. If a complete ban on intermediate-range ground-based ballistic and cruise missiles in Europe proves impossible, negotiators could at least prohibit these kinds of rockets from being armed with nuclear warheads. Although this would be difficult to verify, negotiators should also try to restrict or ban the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe (including Russian territory west of the Ural Mountains).

Diplomats must also attempt to reduce the amount of conventional weaponry on the continent, going beyond the original or adapted CFE treaties. If new limits on conventional weapons prove impossible, negotiators could consider more modest regional limits, such as in the Baltic or the Black Sea regions. They should try to place limits in Europe on cluster bombs and cyberweapons, which can target civilians and critical infrastructure.

 

That Putin obtain permission before placing troops

Finally, Western diplomats must insist again that Putin obtain permission before placing troops in other countries, which would keep Russia in line with agreements signed by its previous leaders. Putin will dispute who the legitimate host nation is in Crimea, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. But he might be persuaded to relinquish Russian claims of consent in certain breakaway regions, such as Transnistria in Moldova and Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine if, in return, NATO allies could drop a demand from the CFE treaty that placed constraints on Russian troop movements between different regions - or “flanks” - of Russia. (Of course, this new provision would not mean greenlighting buildups on the borders of other countries.) Such a deal is unlikely, but Western diplomats must affirm the principle of host-nation consent.

Throughout the current crisis, Moscow has argued that every state’s security is connected to the security of others. In interviews and meetings with his Western counterparts, Lavrov has repeatedly cited Istanbul and Astana OSCE declarations, which proclaimed that “the security of each participating State is inseparably linked to that of all others” and that “each participating State has an equal right to security.” As part of his draft treaties, Putin proposed that no signatory “strengthen their security individually, within international organizations, military alliances or coalitions at the expense of the security of other Parties.”

The Kremlin is correct that every state has an equal right to security. But Russia’s behavior belies Lavrov and Putin’s rhetoric. Moscow has taken many actions “at the expense of the security of other Parties,” including cyberattacks against Estonia in 2007; military interventions in Georgia and Ukraine, annexing Crimea; and supporting a separatist war in Donbas. Putin cites Russian security concerns to bar Ukraine from joining NATO, but NATO soldiers and operatives have never killed anyone in Russia. By contrast, Moscow’s troops and intelligence officers have carried out assassinations in Berlin, London, and Salisbury. They also attempted to kill one of the most famous European opposition leaders, Russia's own Alexei Navalny, in the Russian city of Tomsk.

A fixation on nonstarters - such as Putin’s demands for a NATO expansion moratorium or the West’s insistence that Russia withdraws from Crimea - will make reaching a new security agreement impossible. But negotiators could progress by focusing on other issues and then embedding intractable problems into a larger deal. Widening the aperture of the negotiations could create opportunities for deals that are currently not available. For instance, if Russia withdraws support for the so-called separatists in Donbas, the United States could commit to not installing offensive missiles in Ukraine and not deploying missile defenses in Europe that can intercept Russian weapons. That kind of trade is not available through the Normandy Format assigned to negotiate a Moscow-Kyiv peace settlement, limited to France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

Helsinki 2.0 must also include new provisions on individual security, human rights, and noninterference. Most obviously, signatories need to pledge not to assassinate other European citizens within or outside of their borders. The deal should also ban kidnapping; Belarus cannot go down jets to arrest opposition figures. The signatories must all commit to improving their treatment of refugees. A new deal could also prohibit states from meddling in one another’s elections. That means Moscow would stop funding or supporting indirectly political parties and candidates in other countries. Biden could commit to doing the same since the United States does not do so now.

Individual countries, however, should not have the right to unilaterally declare that other countries are threatening their security or meddling in their internal affairs. Russia cannot claim that a pro-European government in Ukraine is by itself a menace to Moscow or that U.S. statements defending human rights in Russia are tactics of regime change against the Kremlin. To sort through the legitimacy of complaints, the architects of Helsinki 2.0 should try to create an independent arbitration tribunal that can adjudicate security claims, akin to the World Trade Organization’s mechanism for trade disputes. In today’s polarized environment, such a tribunal would not be effective. But it would create an institution that could establish precedents, build momentum, and perhaps find value in the future.

Diplomats will not solve every issue bedeviling relations between Russia and the West in Helsinki 2.0, just as they purposely did not try to resolve all U.S.-Soviet or European problems in the original Helsinki Accords. The negotiators must be ready to agree to disagree. To ensure that unresolved disputes do not derail the broader agreement, diplomats could note them in nonbinding, unilateral side letters. Writing down disputes may seem counterintuitive, but these letters can signal a state’s plans should major conditions outlined in the agreement change. They can also communicate principles to domestic constituencies that diplomats may need to win ratification. Side letters, for example, helped the United States and Russia agreed on the New START Treaty in 2010. They gave Washington space to outline its objections to missile defense constraints and allowed Russia to spell out responses to U.S. missile defense expansions. In Helsinki 2.0, NATO and other European partners could clarify in a side letter that they refuse to recognize the annexation of Crimea or the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states. Russia could lay out its objections to NATO expansion.

 

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