What long-term security guarantees will the West give Ukraine?

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deny Russia a victory but avoid a direct war between it and NATO. Ukraine wants more, and applied to join the NATO alliance in September 2022. It will be denied for now.

Instead, as NATO prepares for its summit in Vilnius on July 11th and 12th, Western leaders are aiming to give Ukraine lasting “security guarantees". What might they be and will they make a difference? For Ukraine the best security guarantee is membership of NATO and its promise of mutual defence: Article 5 of the organisation’s founding treaty holds that an attack on one member is an attack on all. But America, in particular, is worried that admitting Ukraine while it is at war would, in effect, mean NATO countries having to fight against Russia.

Anything less than that—declaring that Article 5 does not apply for now, or that it does not cover the frontline—risks nullifying the commitment to mutual defence. Instead Western allies are discussing ways to help Ukraine defend itself, by itself, now and in the future. Their aim is to strengthen the credibility of the West’s promise to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes", and thereby sap Russia’s hope that waging a long war could turn the tables in its disastrous invasion.

Another objective, barely disguised, is to lock in Western assistance to Ukraine should Donald Trump—or a Trumpist Republican—win America’s presidential election next year. An early version of the guarantees was published last year in the “Kyiv Security Compact", a proposal by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former secretary-general of NATO, and Andriy Yermak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. It set out, among other things, a “multi-decade effort of sustained investment in Ukraine’s defence industrial base, scalable