At the end of 2021, when Russia tabled its draft documents on “legal and security guarantees from the United States and NATO”, demanding a halt to NATO enlargement, a rollback of Allied deployments, and a fundamental restructuring of European security, Western analysts dismissed them as unserious. They were labelled maximalist, delusional, or simply a pretext for war as Putin was already massing his armies around Ukraine. Weeks later, Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border and the drafts were filed away as historical curiosities, to be remembered perhaps as only the last written evidence of a diplomatic route Moscow never really intended to take.
Four years of war might prompt a rethink. Not because the Russian texts have become more reasonable, but because Europe has become more fragile. The US, preoccupied with Asia, has already drawn down elements of its posture in Romania. European budgets are stretched and domestic patience thin. And while the open-door formula remains in every NATO communiqué, senior US and Alliance officials now state openly that Ukraine’s accession is impossible while the war continues and implausible for years beyond it.
The take-away from the Alaska talks – however underwhelming their practical result – suggests that Washington and Moscow recognise that some form of structured de-escalation may eventually be necessary. And now there are new US-Russia negotiations on a 28-point peace plan that is said to cover peace in Ukraine, security guarantees, security in Europe, and future US relations with Russia and Ukraine. Whatever is being discussed right now, it will very likely have to engage with the 2021 proposals because from a Russian point of view they remain the Kremlin’s starting position, especially on the wider points of European security.
In this context, it is worth taking a fresh look at those pre-war drafts and bracing for their “second coming”. Doubtless, the 2021 Russian proposals are still unacceptable as when first issued. Yet, in a worst-case scenario where peace in Ukraine cannot be achieved without a broader settlement, consideration must be given to which parts of them could be made to work, with careful framing and negotiation.
Any such exercise must start with the core misreading of 2021. Russia’s texts were not simply diplomatic nonsense but are better understood as maximalist opening bids. In fact, they were well within the Soviet and then Russian tradition of starting out from almost absurdly high positions in order to create room to “trade down” during talks. Unlike other times when great East-West negotiation processes were undertaken in the past, especially in the Cold War, in 2021 the Russians were attempting to talk during a crisis of their own making, while holding a gun to Ukraine’s head; This is perhaps the main reason why no actual negotiations around these proposals even got off the ground.
Consider the most inflammatory clause: A legally binding halt to NATO enlargement and a categorical exclusion of Ukraine (Article 6 from the NATO Agreement draft). No Western state can sign up to such a treaty. But the political reality of 2025 is that Sweden and Finland have now already joined; while with respect to Ukraine or Georgia – the only other seriously strategically relevant candidates for membership – NATO’s open-door policy remains intact rhetorically while being quietly frozen in practice anyway. It’s not impossible to imagine, now, a diplomatic formula that restates the standard OSCE language – sovereign choice paired with “no state strengthening its security at the expense of others”, for example in the Astana Declaration from 2010 – that can acknowledge Russia’s longstanding obsession without surrendering principle. A long-term moratorium on new Membership Action Plans, never described as a concession, would simply codify what everyone already knows: Ukraine will not join NATO while the war continues, nor for many years after.
Likewise, Russia’s demand to limit NATO deployments to 1997 baselines – i.e. no Western forces “deployed” east of Germany – sounded outrageous in 2021. Yet NATO itself has maintained the same fiction for decades. The 1997 NATO–Russia Founding Act declares that no “permanent stationing of substantial combat forces” would occur in the in new member states in the “foreseeable security environment”. And indeed it has not: Every Allied battlegroup deployed to Eastern Europe since 2014 is rotational, reversible, and politically framed as temporary, thus conforming to the text of the Act even though the security environment has changed dramatically since 1997.
If truly necessary, a carefully drafted clause reaffirming the Founding Act – rather than rewriting it – could give Moscow a symbolic victory while changing nothing of substance. Western deterrence depends on the nuclear umbrella and (rapid) reinforcement capability, not on brick-and-mortar bases. One exception is the US-owned and now NATO-integrated Aegis Ashore ballistic defence system deployed in Romania and Poland, but that is a separate matter that can have a separate solution as noted below.
Even the sweeping ban suggested by Russia in 2021 (Article 7 of the aforementioned draft text) on NATO activity in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia – on its face a demand for a Russian sphere of influence – is open to reinterpretation. If “NATO activity” is defined narrowly as formal Alliance operations under NATO flag, then bilateral military cooperation would still remain possible. Indeed, the bulk of Western support to Ukraine since 2014 has been delivered precisely through national channels: British training missions, US intelligence, Turkish drones. NATO has an important role in coordinating the aid, but all actual Western “military activity” in Ukraine has been bilateral. Furthermore, as a point of practical statecraft, the potential reasons why NATO might even want or – given US attitudes to the Alliance – could aim to play an assertive role in those regions, are becoming less clear in the wake of this war.
The most militarily impactful and difficult elements of the 2021 proposals, such as Russian demands to limit US bomber routes or naval deployments (in the draft treaty with the US), were likely never meant to be accepted. They are quite obviously bargaining chips. The United States will not abandon global freedom of navigation but it can negotiate flightpath deconfliction, expanded Incidents-at-Sea protocols, or geographical missile limits – as it has done before. In fact, the US response to the Russian proposals, which was leaked in January 2022, already offered inspections at the Aegis Ashore sites in Romania and Poland – to allay Moscow’s concerns that these locations might host Tomahawk missiles – in exchange for transparency at similar Russian bases.
If there has to be diplomatic engagement with the Russians exchanges on such themes would not be signs of weakness but rather standard elements of arms control negotiations that we have seen before. Of course, scepticism towards the value of any new agreements with Russia, given Moscow’s behaviour, is justified; but unless it is seriously proposed to never have any kind of a negotiated political basis for relations with a nuclear-armed Russia ever again, the work of agreeing new treaty-based security frameworks will need to resume at some point.
Only one Russian demand from 2021 remains fundamentally irreconcilable in any way with Western security: The de facto abolition of NATO nuclear sharing, which Moscow requested in Article 7 of the US draft treaty. Without forward-deployed US nuclear weapons in Europe, which can also be used by Allies in an Article 5 situation, American extended deterrence collapses. No European government could absorb that shock, and it would be the end of NATO. Everything further in the Russian proposals beyond what’s been discussed above – from mutual limits on military exercises to missile-deployment exclusion zones – is, again, a matter of diplomatic compromise of the kind that we have seen before, and not of conceding absolute vulnerabilities. The issues must be judged carefully and negotiated forcefully, but this is what diplomacy is for – especially the war-ending kind.
None of this is an argument for simply accepting the 2021 drafts as put forward by the Russians. But it is is an argument for recognising that if the war drags on into a military and political dead end, a settlement will require more than addressing the Ukraine conflict itself. It will require addressing the architecture around it – which is what the 2021 proposals set out to do – because from Moscow’s point of view Russia’s fight and security concern is with the West overall. Given that Ukraine has been called a “proxy war” by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio himself, it’s hard to call that Russian perspective entirely mistaken.
If it comes to it, engaging with what the Russians began demanding in 2021 should not mean capitulation. It should mean distinguishing between the clauses that violate Western sovereignty and fundamental security interests and those that merely violate Western pride and the (perhaps slightly outdated) perception of its own power. Realism must always operate with an accurate calculation of actualised – not latent or potential – power. Such an engagement should also mean using the parts of Russia’s maximalism that can be reshaped into stabilising instruments, while discarding the parts that never should have been part of a process of negotiation in the first place. Above all, opening this discussion would mean understanding that Russia’s aim was never the text of these 2021 drafts, but the conversation the text was supposed to force. In 2021, the West refused the conversation out of hand. With 2026 and the 5th year of the war approaching, and with US policy evolving, it may need to take another look.
Is Putin a good strategist?