The International Affairs Journal - Archive of Issue No. 11 (2025)

Burn All the Way to the English Channel? On Effective Security Guarantees in the Context of the Historical Confrontation Between Russia and the West

Dmitry Demurin
Deputy Director, Second Department of the CIS Countries, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation

Anton Postigov
Head of Division, Second Department of the CIS Countries, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation

Timofey Kholin
Intern, Second Department of the CIS Countries, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation

On November 18, 2021, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, in his address to the expanded meeting of the Board of the Russian Foreign Ministry, pointed out that Western countries were ignoring Russia's security concerns, continuing NATO's eastward expansion, and "escalating the situation by supplying Kiev with modern lethal weapons and conducting provocative military exercises in the Black Sea—and not only in the Black Sea, but in other regions close to our borders." In this regard, he set the task to "push for serious long-term guarantees that ensure Russia’s security."

Two weeks later, at the meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council in Stockholm, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Viktorovich Lavrov warned his foreign counterparts that "turning our neighboring countries into a staging ground for confrontation with Russia and deploying NATO forces in close proximity to areas of strategic importance to our security are categorically unacceptable." He urged them to "transform the right words into long-term, legally binding security guarantees," emphasizing that this was "an imperative condition for preventing a slide into a confrontational scenario."

The draft Treaty between the Russian Federation and the United States on Security Guarantees and the draft Agreement on Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation and the Member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, carefully crafted by Russian experts, were handed over to the U.S. side on December 15, 2021. As is well known, our Western counterparts then declined to engage in a serious dialogue on the matter. Shortly thereafter, we were compelled to launch the Special Military Operation for Denazification and Demilitarization (SVODD) in response to yet another aggression by the Kiev regime against the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Lugansk People’s Republic (LNR), provoked by those same Western counterparts, and in fulfillment of our obligations to protect the people of Donbass in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter.

Read the full article here.