Russia’s war against Ukraine has always extended beyond the question of territorial control. For Vladimir Putin, the conflict is part of a much larger confrontation with the Western security order established after the Cold War. Moscow’s latest demands — including the withdrawal of NATO military infrastructure from Eastern Europe and restrictions on the alliance’s future expansion — reveal an ambition to fundamentally redraw Europe’s security architecture.
The demands are not new. In December 2021, as Russian forces massed along Ukraine’s borders, the Kremlin issued an ultimatum calling for NATO to withdraw its military presence from countries that joined the alliance after 1997. The proposal would effectively push Western military defences back towards Germany, leaving much of Central and Eastern Europe outside NATO’s protective military infrastructure.
Five years later, according to reporting by El País, Moscow is pursuing essentially the same objective in negotiations involving Russia, Ukraine and the United States in Abu Dhabi.
The Kremlin also wants written guarantees preventing further NATO enlargement and demands a decisive role in security arrangements involving countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia. According to the German newspaper Bild, Russian negotiators have raised proposals involving the withdrawal of NATO forces from the Baltic states and Finland’s departure from the alliance. In exchange, Moscow has reportedly offered to remove the nuclear weapons it deployed in Belarus in 2023.
Such proposals go considerably beyond negotiations over Ukraine. They would effectively allow Russia to determine the security choices of sovereign European states, many of which joined NATO precisely because of their historical experiences under Soviet domination and their concerns about renewed Russian expansionism.
Moscow routinely describes NATO enlargement as Western expansion, but the historical record presents a different picture. No written agreement prohibited the alliance from accepting new members. The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act explicitly recognised the possibility of future enlargement. Fourteen Central and Eastern European countries subsequently joined the alliance, while Finland and Sweden applied after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Putin’s argument has consistently rested on the claim that NATO poses an existential military threat to Russia. In December 2021, he warned that missiles deployed in Ukraine could reach Moscow within seven to ten minutes, with hypersonic weapons reducing the flight time to five minutes.
At the time, Ukraine’s military capabilities were considerably more limited than they are today. Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu had even claimed that the Taliban were better armed than Ukraine following the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. The situation has since changed dramatically, with Ukrainian-made drones and missiles increasingly striking targets inside Russian territory in response to Moscow’s sustained bombardment.
But the Kremlin’s demands are not confined to military installations or missile deployment. Putin’s conception of international relations increasingly resembles a hierarchy in which powerful states determine the political and security arrangements of their weaker neighbours.
Ukraine represents the clearest example. Beyond seeking to consolidate Russian occupation of Ukrainian territory, Putin has demanded the removal of the government in Kyiv, describing the objective as ‘denazification’, alongside the country’s demilitarisation. Moscow has also rejected the possibility of European peacekeeping forces being deployed in Ukraine.
Even proposals for international security guarantees contain a fundamental problem. Russia wants the authority to veto external assistance to Ukraine, effectively allowing Moscow to determine whether another country can receive protection against Russian aggression. It also opposes arrangements that could enable NATO members to intervene militarily if Ukraine is attacked again.
The pattern is not entirely new. Russia committed at the 1999 Istanbul summit of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe to withdraw its forces from territories under its de facto control in Moldova and Georgia. Those withdrawals never materialised. Russian military deployments in both countries have continued to provide Moscow with political and strategic leverage.
The roots of this ambition reach back to the Soviet Union. NATO was established in 1949 as a collective defence alliance at a time when the Soviet Union was consolidating its control over Eastern Europe through communist governments installed under Moscow’s influence.
In 1954, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov proposed an alternative European collective security arrangement that would leave the United States outside the central decision-making structure. The proposal would also have weakened NATO’s cohesion and raised questions about the continued presence of American military bases in Europe.
The Western powers rejected the initiative. Two years later, Soviet tanks entered Hungary to suppress an uprising against communist rule, exposing the contradiction between Moscow’s language of collective security and its determination to maintain political control over Eastern Europe.
There is a striking parallel between that episode and Putin’s contemporary demands. The Soviet Union also proposed joining NATO, partly to undermine the alliance from within and challenge the American military presence in Europe. Putin has similarly claimed that he raised the possibility of Russian membership with US President Bill Clinton during a meeting in 2000, although Washington did not pursue the proposal.
The question of German neutrality provides another historical connection. Moscow demanded Germany’s demilitarisation and neutrality during the 1950s, just as it now seeks a permanently neutral and militarily weakened Ukraine. Western governments rejected the Soviet demands, and West Germany joined NATO in 1955 before establishing its armed forces the following year.
That decision helped consolidate the Western security architecture that eventually facilitated European integration and decades of relative peace among Western European states.
As El País‘s analysis makes clear, the current confrontation is therefore about far more than the future of Ukraine. At stake is whether European countries retain the sovereign right to determine their own security arrangements or whether Moscow can restore a strategic sphere of influence in which neighbouring states must obtain the Kremlin’s approval before seeking protection.
Putin’s demands effectively seek to transform NATO from an alliance of sovereign members into a security organisation whose geographical reach and decisions are subject to Russian consent. That is not simply a proposal for peace in Ukraine. It is a demand to reverse the political and strategic settlement that followed the end of the Cold War.
