Ukraine Can Unite the Global North
The country will serve as a buffer, bridge, or perpetual battleground between Russia and the West.
President Donald Trump seeks to end the Russia–Ukraine War, which entered its fourth year this week. The stakes of diplomacy are high. Any agreement that resolves the conflict will also shape the future of the entire Global North, stretching from North America through Europe to Russia.
Leaders of both the United States and Russia seem aware that negotiations to end the war carry this wider significance. When the two countries’ top diplomats met last week in Riyadh, they discussed Ukraine but focused primarily on restoring “the entire complex of Russian–American relations,” as Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov put it.
Meanwhile, European leaders understand that settling the war will entail establishing a security architecture for their continent. French President Emmanuel Macron, in a joint White House press conference with Trump, said this week that achieving a durable peace for Ukraine would bolster security across Europe. “For us Europeans, this is an existential issue,” Macron said, insisting that any peace agreement must include robust security guarantees for Ukraine to prevent future Russian aggression.
The issue of security guarantees is difficult but unavoidable, since Kiev, before signing a peace deal, understandably demands assurances that war will not recur. How world leaders handle the issue will determine the relationship between Russia and the West for years if not generations to come. There are three broad possibilities: 1) Ukraine becomes a neutral state and buffer zone separating Russia and the West. 2) It becomes a bridge linking them. 3) It remains a continual source of Russian–Western tensions and potential conflict.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has advocated a fourth option: a fully Westernized Ukraine. Under this scenario, Kiev would join NATO to mount a show of force against Moscow. This prospect is both unlikely and undesirable. Several NATO nations, including the U.S., oppose bringing Ukraine into the alliance as part of a peace deal, and Russia would prolong the war to prevent that outcome.
Kiev, however, could get a diluted version of the “neutral buffer state” scenario in which Ukraine remains formally non-aligned but European nations station forces on its territory. There are significant problems with this scheme: 1) European peacekeepers, to deter Russia, would require American logistical and weapons support, which Trump may not want to provide. 2) Moscow would regard troops from NATO countries not as peacekeepers but as threats to its own security. 3) If deterrence failed and war broke out, Russia–NATO conflict could follow.
Because of these problems, many analysts favor a purer version of the “neutral buffer state” option. In Foreign Affairs, Emma Ashford of the Stimson Center recently made the case for “armed neutrality,” in which Western nations would help rebuild the Ukrainian military so that going forward it could deter Russia without relying on outside help. This approach, Ashford says, would address a root cause of the invasion: the Kremlin’s concerns that the West was pulling Ukraine into its orbit.
Armed neutrality would allow Ukraine to become a true buffer state once again, easing Russian–Western tensions. While such an arrangement would benefit the Global North broadly, no country would gain more than Ukraine. Historically, European nations committed to neutrality—including Finland, Austria, and Switzerland—have tended to prosper, as Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute has pointed out.
Some analysts have offered a proposal more ambitious than turning the country into a buffer state between Russia and the West: turning it into a bridge between them. In 2014, the legendary statesman Henry Kissinger outlined a version of this idea in the Washington Post. Ukraine, Kissinger emphasized, is internally divided between its Western-facing and Russian-identified factions, and both Moscow and the West should help mend that division rather than push for one faction to dominate the other.
The “bridge” option differs from the “buffer” one in that neutrality wouldn’t merely forestall conflict in Ukraine, but also serve as a platform for Russian–Western integration. Kissinger’s article treated such integration as not only desirable but achievable, and perhaps at that time it was. But following Russia’s 2022 invasion and the dramatic downturn in relations between Moscow and Western capitals, meaningful integration is unlikely so long as Russian President Vladimir Putin is in power.
Still, Trump is right to reestablish diplomatic ties with Russia, a leading nuclear superpower. He should, however, avoid alienating European leaders, who are growing worried that Washington is aligning with Moscow against them. If that worry persists, they might try to obstruct U.S. diplomacy, for example, by urging Kiev not to sign a peace agreement they deem unfavorable.
The White House can and should convince European leaders that U.S.–Russia diplomacy won’t come at their nations’ expense. Kaja Kallas, the EU foreign policy chief, has publicly undermined Trump’s diplomatic efforts, saying that they amount to appeasement, but this week she said that Europe and America can work out their differences. Also this week, Macron, in a notable rhetorical shift, defended Trump’s efforts to reengage Russia, even as he maintained that Putin shouldn’t be trusted.
Macron was once among Europe’s most Putin-friendly leaders, and the degeneration of relations between the two presidents epitomizes broader geopolitical trends. These days Macron depicts Russia as an implacable nemesis, but during a 2018 meeting with Putin in St. Petersburg, he quoted Charles de Gaulle’s statement that Europe stretches “from the Atlantic to the Urals.” Putin did Macron one better, affirming that it spans from “Lisbon to Vladivostok,” a city in Russia’s far east. The following year they met in Paris, and Macron not only repeated Putin’s stronger formulation but declared that “Russia is a very deeply European country.”
Putin may, at one point, have had an even grander vision—a Global North stretching from Los Angeles to Vladivostok. During talks with then-Vice President Biden in 2011, Putin mentioned that he was negotiating a visa-free regime with Europe and proposed doing the same with the United States. “Good idea,” Biden replied. In the early 2000s, Putin even suggested that Russia join NATO, and last year he claimed that outgoing President Bill Clinton had initially been receptive to the idea.
The gulf in sentiments between then and now is a testament to how severely Russian-Western relations have worsened the last few years. But it also points to the plausibility of integration after tensions abate and Putin exits the world stage. A harmonious Global North is possible, and world leaders should negotiate an end to the Ukraine war with that ultimate aim in mind.
In the short term, the U.S.-led West should work with Russia to turn Ukraine into a buffer state capable of defending itself. In the medium term, Russia and the West should use the extra breathing space to repair broken ties. If such diplomacy succeeds, historians may one day marvel at how Ukraine—a nation that comprises within itself both sides of Europe’s civilizational split—became a bridge connecting the once bitterly divided Global North.
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