The Only Security Guarantee Ukraine Can Trust

More Drones and Missiles Are All That Can Stop Russia

Ever since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House, officials across Europe have scrambled to craft a peace deal that could work for Ukraine. They know by now that, at the moment, Russian President Vladimir Putin is not interested in stopping his offensives, and they fear that shifting American priorities may leave Ukraine without a critical source of support. As a result, they are racing to find a way to provide Kyiv with security guarantees that could deter Russia and allow for an armistice.

In conversations about security guarantees, officials have tended to focus on a handful of measures: placing a small number of European troops in Ukraine to shore up the country’s defense (so-called reassurance forces), levying additional sanctions against Russia, and providing Ukraine with more weapons, including conventional ones. They have also mused about committing themselves, on paper, to Ukraine’s defense. Two of these actions—more weapons and sanctions—could take place before any cease-fire. The rest would go into effect only after the fighting ends.

These proposals have certain virtues. But by themselves, they are not enough to guarantee Ukraine’s security. Since the start of Russia’s invasion in 2022, Putin has been transparent about his objective—the destruction of Ukraine as an independent nation—and has subjected many people to almost unimaginable suffering in order to achieve it. He will not be deterred by words, a smattering of NATO troops , or by agony (including if it affects Russians). In fact, he will not stop the war unless Russian troops literally cannot advance any further.

Right now, some U.S. and European analysts are pessimistic that Ukraine can completely halt Russia’s aggression, and understandably so. NATO countries, after all, have been arming Kyiv for years, and Moscow keeps making incremental gains. But Ukraine need not destroy every element of the Russian military to achieve strategic neutralization—stripping away the enemy of its ability to achieve its objectives. And the conflict has recently changed in ways that have made it easier to freeze. Today, the war is being fought less with traditional military equipment and more with newer, cheaper technologies that Ukraine helped pioneer. In fact, Ukraine has already done a great deal of what’s needed to deter Russia for good. But Europe must stop focusing on which traditional capabilities it should provide to Ukraine or on establishing written security guarantees. Instead, the continent should get serious about investing more in Ukraine’s war effort by flooding the country with more advanced technologies. It needs to invest heavily in the country’s sophisticated defense industry. It must cooperate more directly with Kyiv on matters of military manufacturing and on air defenses. Such measures will indeed be daunting, but not any more than NATO’s original effort to help Ukraine. And ultimately, Europe has little choice. They are the only way to bring peace.

WORDS FAIL

Throughout the past century, powerful states have sought to provide security guarantees to weaker partners. Those guarantees, however, have only conferred a real benefit when they created tangible shields. During the Cold War, NATO effectively deterred the Soviet Union because the United States situated substantial forces and firepower on the continent, including some nuclear weapons. In Asia, the mutual defense treaty between South Korea and the United States works to deter a North Korean invasion because tens of thousands of American troops remain on the peninsula, where they jointly plan and train with their South Korean partners. In the 1930s, by contrast, the British and the French backed their pledge to defend Poland with nothing but rhetoric; as a result, Nazi Germany felt free to invade the country. Likewise, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which a consortium of states (including Russia) promised to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty if it gave up its nuclear weapons, did nothing to stop Russia from invading its neighbor multiple times because it offered no military resources to Kyiv.

After Russia launched its first invasion of Ukraine, sending troops into Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk in 2014, the United States and Europe did begin supplying Kyiv with defensive and, eventually, offensive assistance. But it was only in late 2021, after it became clear that Russia aimed to invade the entire country, that NATO states got somewhat serious about arming Ukraine. That support, however, proved effective: rather than quickly conquering Ukraine, as much of the world expected, Russia quickly became bogged down.

In fact, in some domains, Ukraine has managed to functionally defeat its enemy. Consider the battle over the Black Sea. From the outset of its full-scale invasion, Russia sought to strangle Ukraine’s economy by cutting off its maritime access. Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet blockaded Ukrainian ports, occupied Snake Island, and threatened Odessa, the country’s main coastal city. Allied attempts to negotiate a partial end to this blockade failed. But by the fall of 2023, the Ukrainian military succeeded in breaking it with naval drones, precision missiles, and air-launched bombs—a substantial portion of which came from the United States. (Ukrainian-made weapons, of course, were also essential to this victory.) Although these strikes only destroyed part of Russia’s fleet, Kyiv made it impossible for Putin’s ships to sail near Ukraine’s main ports, and Moscow was left with no choice but to move most of its fleet to the east.

Ukraine has had success in the air, as well. Russia began its 2022 war confident it could establish air dominance within days, allowing it to quickly march on Kyiv. Instead, Ukraine’s innovative defenses have made it impossible for Russia to achieve superiority. In an air denial operation undertaken in the first days of the invasion, now known as Ghost of Kyiv, Ukraine used its limited air capabilities to intercept many Russian fighter jets and effectively push these planes out of its airspace. During its more complex 2025 “Spiderweb” operations, Ukraine has used innovative uncrewed systems to destroy a substantial portion of Russia’s strategic aviation fleet, or the aircraft Russia uses to launch numerous cruise missiles at all areas of Ukraine. Kyiv has not been able to make its skies safe enough for commercial air-traffic transit, and it experiences constant missile and long-range drone attacks. But it has been able to force Russian manned aircraft to operate tens of kilometers from the frontlines, launching glide bombs rather than conducting close air support operations to help ground forces.

Fully liberating Ukraine would take more than just such measures, at least for now, and it would require considerable additional capabilities. But strategic neutralization is attainable without waging a multidecade war of attrition. To obviate Russia’s threat, Ukraine does not need to kill off every Russian soldier. Instead, it can paralyze the military by targeting essential functions such as logistics, coordination, mobility, and firepower. In this way, it can follow a template pioneered by Israel, which neutralized Egypt’s far larger air force in 1967 not by destroying every aircraft but by taking out many of them and eliminating its runways and command systems. As a result, Israel preserved its existence without annihilating vast opposition forces.

BIGGER AND BETTER

Ukraine is closer to paralyzing Russia than most people think. Russia’s jets do still strike Ukrainian targets, albeit from a great distance, and Russian ground forces continue to seize small chunks of territory. But with drones, remote mines, precision artillery, and constant surveillance, Ukraine has transformed large stretches of the front into persistent kill zones: areas where forces find it nearly impossible to maneuver without being detected and then immediately hit. Only by throwing thousands upon thousands of troops at Ukrainian targets can Russia advance through a few of these regions. If Ukraine can widen these kill zones—by surveilling more territory and striking behind Russia’s current forward lines—and deny Russia the ability to mass men and materiel in its rear, Russian formations will be unable to generate any momentum. Future offensives by Russia would then become strategically futile, and thus not worth attempting.

To succeed, however, Ukraine will need more drones and high-tech weapons. And helping Kyiv get these systems will necessitate that NATO change its presumptions and priorities. When the war broke out, it made sense for the United States and Europe to pump Ukraine full of traditional weapons systems. But as the operational environment has evolved, many legacy systems have become largely obsolete. For instance, some sophisticated assault weapons, such as tanks, are now disabled almost as soon as they enter the kill zone by simpler, cheaper uncrewed aerial vehicles. They therefore do little to help either party.

Ukraine’s allies must refocus their attention on helping Ukraine innovate and integrate new technologies at the scale needed to stop Russia. These allies have what they need. Europe alone has financial resources, scientific capabilities, and an industrial base that Russia cannot match. If the continent uses these capacities alongside Ukraine, it could help the Ukrainian military develop and produce many advanced and affordable precise, long-range systems—including missiles and uncrewed aerial vehicles—as well as communications gear, positioning and targeting equipment, air defenses, and electronic warfare systems.

The continent has already taken meaningful steps in this direction. The European Union has launched several programs designed to channel money into Ukrainian defense-industrial factories. Kyiv has also forged bilateral deals with a variety of countries to scale up its drone and ammunition production. But these partnerships must be expanded dramatically. Europe must, of course, spend more on Ukraine and increase its own production of material. But it must also focus on speeding up design, testing, and scaling.

There are other ways Europe can assist Kyiv. Perhaps the most important is a European Sky Shield for Ukraine: an initiative proposed by a group of international and Ukrainian military experts. In it, a collection of European states would establish a no-fly zone, first over western Ukrainian territory and later over central Ukraine. Participating states would mobilize roughly 120 combat aircraft, which would fly from European bases and shoot down missiles and drones over the covered territory. In addition to safeguarding Ukraine’s infrastructure and economy—by, for example, shielding Ukrainian nuclear plants and export corridors—it would free Ukraine’s own air force to concentrate on the eastern front. The model, which is based on the air policing missions Europe has conducted over the Baltics for 20 years, carries some escalation risks. But Russia is unlikely to interfere, since direct, air-to-air combat would not work to its advantage.

NATO states will also have to continue supplying Kyiv with some traditional weapons. Ukraine will need more F-16 fighter jets to defend its skies. It still requires long-range missiles, like the U.S. Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) and British and French Storm Shadow and SCALP missiles, to hit the many Russian logistics hubs, command centers, stockpiles, and troop formations located beyond the battlefield. Ukraine’s allies should also earmark certain stockpiles of ammunition, drones, and spare parts housed in eastern Europe for Ukraine, so that they are never again vulnerable to political delays in Washington or European capitals. And the United States must continue providing Kyiv with military intelligence, which has been indispensable to tracking Russian troop movements and missile strikes. Such high-end enablers will remain cornerstones of any meaningful security guarantees.

But tanks or other legacy equipment would be of little use on their own. Giving Ukraine another paper commitment to its security, even one modeled on NATO’s Article 5, as some European states have discussed, would do nothing. And without tangible support that’s tailored to today’s Ukrainian battlefield, even European reassurance forces would be of dubious value. Unless NATO countries decide to station large numbers of combat-ready troops or send over instructors, these deployments would have the main effect of being expensive and politically risky within their home countries. The troops are unlikely to stop, or be spared from, Russia’s military.

HOLD THE LINE

After more than 11 years of war, the lesson from Ukraine is clear: the security guarantees that matter are the ones that practically shape the battlefield. If the goal is to make Russian aggression futile, then the United States and Europe must channel resources into capabilities that deny, disrupt, and paralyze the Russian military. Nothing less will succeed.

Giving Ukraine what it needs does not only help Kyiv. If Putin’s military is not stopped somewhere in Ukraine, it may march on a NATO member. Putin has made no secret of his desire to reverse the collapse of the Soviet Union and establish Russian dominance over Europe’s east. Over the last several weeks, he has floated drones and fighter jets over NATO’s boundary in a clear test of the alliance’s integrity. At a minimum, more of these provocations are likely to happen unless NATO helps Ukraine neutralize Russia’s military.

The EU seems aware of this. In European Defence—Readiness 2030, a report published in early 2025, the European Commission explicitly framed Ukraine’s survival as central to Europe’s own security. It called for a “steel porcupine” strategy—or fortifying Ukraine so that future Russian offensives fail by design—and investing in Ukraine’s defense industry as part of creating a shared European capacity. But the EU and NATO must do more to help Ukraine firmly prevail over Russia’s technologies and deny Moscow any further battlefield victories. Its members need to plow more resources and in-kind technology contributions into Ukraine’s defense industry. They must help Kyiv quickly develop and massively scale up new systems. Then, and only then, will Europe be able to breathe.

 

*ANDRIY ZAGORODNYUK is Chair of the Centre for Defence Strategies and a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council and Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. From 2019 to 2020, he served as Ukraine’s Defense Minister.

 

Source: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/only-security-guarantee-ukraine-can-trust