The gathering in Paris today represents a critical juncture in the West's effort to construct a security framework for Ukraine that can survive both Russian aggression and its own internal contradictions. Over 27 leaders, alongside senior Trump administration negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, will attempt to finalize security guarantees for Kyiv ahead of potential ceasefire negotiations with Moscow. The summit's ambition is clear: forge a unified Ukrainian-European-American position substantial enough to take to the Kremlin. Yet the very structure of this effort—a coalition of the willing rather than an institutional alliance—exposes the fundamental credibility problem at its core.
What Ukraine needs is certainty: an ironclad commitment that another Russian invasion will trigger automatic military response. What it is likely to receive is something far more ambiguous—a patchwork of bilateral agreements, training missions, and defense cooperation frameworks that stop well short of the Article 5 guarantees that define NATO membership. The distance between these two realities will determine whether any ceasefire holds or merely becomes an interlude before the next phase of conflict.
The semantics of security guarantees
The term "security guarantees" has become the diplomatic euphemism of choice in European capitals, but its vagueness is precisely the point. A genuine security guarantee, in the tradition of NATO's collective defense clause, creates an automatic obligation: an attack on one is an attack on all, with pre-positioned forces, integrated command structures, and treaty obligations ratified by national legislatures. The proposals emerging from Paris lack these institutional foundations entirely.
Instead, the "Coalition of the Willing"—now numbering over 30 nations—is discussing multinational forces, defense industrial cooperation, and training programs. France and Britain are leading efforts to coordinate these bilateral commitments into something resembling a coherent framework. Yet without a binding treaty mechanism, each nation retains full sovereignty over its response to future Russian aggression. Brussels becomes the battleground for Ukraine's peace terms, with competing visions of what solidarity actually requires when tested by military force.
The historical parallel is instructive. The Budapest Memorandum of 1994 promised Ukraine security assurances in exchange for surrendering its nuclear arsenal. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, those assurances proved worthless—diplomatic protests without enforcement mechanisms. The current effort risks repeating this pattern at a grander scale, substituting the appearance of commitment for its substance.
Members are reading: Why Trump's negotiators are designing guarantees meant to expire with the current political moment.
European capability versus European will
The coalition's expansion to over 30 members is impressive on paper but masks significant disparities in capability and commitment. France and Britain possess nuclear deterrents and power projection capabilities. Germany is slowly rebuilding military capacity after decades of strategic atrophy. Turkey is using its participation to assert itself as a Black Sea power broker with its own interests in regional architecture. The gap between these strategic weights creates coordination problems that no amount of summit diplomacy can resolve.
Berlin talks test whether Washington's deal-making can meet Europe's sovereignty guardrails, revealing the tension between American preferences for rapid dealmaking and European insistence on institutional process. Yet Europe's own track record on collective security outside NATO structures remains unproven. The EU's Common Security and Defence Policy has never been tested at the scale that defending Ukraine against Russian military power would require.
The test of credibility
President Zelenskyy's presence in Paris reflects his understanding that Ukraine is negotiating from dependence. His stated preparation for both continued war and diplomacy represents the rational hedging strategy of a leader who cannot afford to trust Western promises without testing them. The question he must answer: are these security guarantees sufficient to justify territorial concessions in ceasefire negotiations, or do they represent another empty assurance that will collapse under pressure?
The answer will be written not in the communiqués from Paris but in the institutional mechanisms that follow. Do these commitments include automatic triggers? Pre-positioned forces? Ratified treaties? Or do they remain dependent on the political will of coalition members at the moment of crisis? The gap between diplomatic language and strategic reality has never been more consequential. Ukraine's survival depends on closing it.
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