U.S. National Security Advisor/Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Andrii Yermak, the head of acting president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office, discussed security guarantees for Ukraine during a meeting of advisors, Ukrainska Pravda reported yesterday. National security advisors from the U.K., France, Germany, Italy and Finland, as well as representatives of NATO and the European Commission also joined.
Thus, while Kiev is moving to set up working groups with the U.S. and Europe on “security guarantees,” it has not responded to Russia’s proposals to set up three working groups, on military issues, humanitarian issues, and one on political issues, put forward at the last Istanbul meeting between the two sides.
A source said that the Ukraine security guarantees discussed with Rubio are currently being worked out between by two subgroups: political-legal and purely military. The political group from Ukraine is led by Yermak. Military matters are being discussed by National Security and Defense Council Secretary Rustem Umerov, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksandr Syrsky and other representatives of Ukraine’s defense forces. The military guarantees include the supply of weapons, financial support for the defense forces, intelligence sharing, training provision and joint training missions. “I think the military component is nearing completion,” the source claimed.
Yermak’s advisor Oleksandr Bevz said the draft project for security guarantees for Ukraine is planned to be finalized by the end of next week. It will be a framework version with a set of components. The next stage will be signing agreements, but their formalization and ratification will take more time.
He said that negotiators working on the political part of the guarantees are developing a sort of version of Article 5 of the NATO Treaty on collective defense. The meetings discuss a clear mechanism of action: what happens if Russia resumes its aggression or launches a new war against Ukraine. “In Ukraine’s vision, this should be a system of bilateral binding agreements ratified by the parliaments of the relevant countries,” he said. “That means not just duplicating Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, but spelling out an algorithm with specific time frames and dimensions: financial, military, intelligence and so on.”
