Don’t Finlandize Ukraine

Here’s something that many people do not know about Ukraine: it was politically founded as a neutral state on paper. In its 1991 Declaration of Independence, lawmakers intended to build a neutral state between Russia and the Western world and thus divide Europe into two different spheres. Provisions of neutrality and non-alignment were even written into the Ukrainian constitution in 1996. Also, as part of the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, Ukraine gave up its Soviet-inherited nuclear weapons in exchange for guarantees of sovereignty from Russia and security assurances from the United States and the other signatories. 

However, Russia violated that agreement in 2014 when it annexed Crimea and started the Donbas War. Consequently, Ukraine dropped its neutrality. Since then, Kyiv has spent years trying to find a new security partnership with NATO and the West or credible guarantees from Moscow that it would finally respect Ukrainian sovereignty. 

What happened to Ukraine forces an uncomfortable question on those who oppose Ukrainian NATO accession or other security guarantees, arguing that it would provoke Russia, who would view it as “NATO expansion”. It also exposes arguments promoted by commentators like Lena Andersson, who has argued that Ukraine should compromise with an uncompromising Russian government by accepting forced neutrality as the price for stopping the killing: what good did neutrality actually do for Ukraine?

The fact is Ukraine’s neutrality did not guarantee peace. If anything, it made Ukraine vulnerable and divided, fighting daily to keep its independence and being occupied by a regime that is no stranger to extrajudicial killings, torture and other violations of human rights against their “brotherly nation” and its inhabitants. 

Since President Trump’s second inauguration, there have been multiple discussions and meetings about a ceasefire and making peace between the warring parties. Powerful actors within the Trump administration, as well as the man himself, have flirted with the idea that Ukraine could be turned into a neutral buffer state, a “Finlandized” Ukraine kept out of NATO and stripped of meaningful security guarantees, as well as ceding territories to Putin to satisfy his imperial ambitions. Ukraine would serve as a neutral divider between the West and Russia.

However, instead of building a sustainable peace with Ukraine in a unified Europe, forcing Ukraine to be neutral would strip it of its sovereignty and leave it dependent on the promises of an aggressor whose track record of keeping promises is abysmal. In other words, this would be like leaving someone in the middle of a forest on a freezing night without protection, leaving them alone in the dark among a hungry pack of wolves. 

This is a horrible idea. Just ask Finland. After the Continuation War, Finland kept its independence by making grave concessions, which meant accepting constraints forced by Moscow. The Treaty of Friendship that followed conditioned Finland’s neutrality on “mutual understandings” with the Soviets. Finland could keep some resemblance of independence as long as it avoided alliances deemed unacceptable to Moscow. No NATO, no EEC. Finland did not even become a UN member until 1955, two years after Stalin’s death.

In practice, that meant political caution, self-censorship and military choices shaped by the need to avoid provocation to the point that Finland bought Soviet military equipment. Therefore, Finnish “neutrality” was conditioned on a partnership that could only work while the USSR was deemed a trustworthy  international partner. In that sense, Finland’s neutrality was more valuable to Moscow than to Helsinki. It signalled Moscow’s trustworthiness.

So, when Finland joined NATO in 2023 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it did irreparable damage to Russia’s ability to point to anything that could prove its trustworthiness to the rest of the world. Finland’s experience shows us that forced neutrality serves the interests of the aggressor rather than the neutral state. It normalized Russia’s dominance and made Finland’s independence conditional on Russian goodwill. Given Russia’s recent actions against Ukraine, there is little reason to trust Moscow to honour such an arrangement.  

Another example is the Munich Agreement and the fate of Czechoslovakia. The neutering of  the last remaining democratic state in the 1930s Central Europe did not happen just because the Nazis wanted to conquer the Sudetenland. Czechoslovakia was also forced to lose security guarantees from France. Consequently, the Little Entente, which also included Romania and Yugoslavia, collapsed. And after all that, they still got invaded by Hitler.

The Nazis were fully aware that neutrality could be used as a weapon, a weapon they continued to use in the beginning of the Second World War. The Soviets also used this weapon. Austria, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and  Finland were all neutral countries. Yet, their neutrality did absolutely nothing to protect them from Nazi or Soviet aggression. We also know today that Nazi Germany planned to invade  Sweden and would have executed the plan if it weren’t for Hitler’s failures on the Eastern Front. Had that happened, would Lena Andersson have advised Sweden to “accept its geographic destiny” and call for peace as well? 

This shows that the consequence of imposing neutrality on a country can increase the risk of  that country getting attacked by the neighbour that demanded it. And if you get attacked, you will stand alone. Sure, many countries in the West have given weapons, intelligence and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, but no ground troops.

Ukrainians are the ones fighting; they are – and must – fight this war alone by themselves, just as the Finns did during the Winter War. Asking the victims of aggression to accept a diminished and dependent sovereignty in exchange for a truce is morally dubious: it asks the abused to live under the terms of their abuser. 

Arguments for neutrality often lean on short-term thinking. “Quick peace is better than prolonged carnage”. Okay, but a settlement that militarily guts Ukraine and politically constrains its independence contains the seeds of renewed conflict. Appeasement shows us that stability bought cheaply can produce far greater risks in the future. If the West offers neutrality as a face-saving off-ramp for Russia, it risks signalling to other revisionist powers that coercion pays off. What happens then to the international system based on respect for sovereignty and human rights? It would crumble. 

So, what is the alternative? If durable peace is the aim, then security must be credible. For Ukraine that means having the right to choose alliances, defence cooperation and guarantees that are not contingent on an aggressor’s discretion. It also means taking pathways to Euro Atlantic integration if Kyiv decides so. A durable peace can never be the same as forcing Ukraine to be “neutral ground” and divide Europe as if it is just some poker chip that great  powers can gamble with.

The debate over whether Ukraine should join NATO, get other security guarantees or be forced to be neutral in order to appease Russia is not just semantics. It asks whether peace should rest on consent and credible defence or on concessions bought from aggressors who have already shown they break promises. History warns us that neutrality imposed upon others rarely protects the vulnerable. Repeating those mistakes would be a price too high for anyone who cares about a just and lasting peace in Ukraine, as well as in Europe.