A senior Russian diplomat said on Wednesday, November 11, that Moscow could conclude non-aggression pacts with NATO member states as part of a new security architecture for Europe being discussed as part of the Ukraine peace process, Reuters reported from Moscow. Alexey Drobinin, a senior diplomat at Russia's Foreign Ministry, outlined a series of detailed proposals on the idea to a security conference in Moscow on Wednesday.

Source: Reuters

The first option Drobinin set out was a collective defensive alliance or bilateral mutual assistance agreements like those Russia has with Belarus and North Korea, Reuters reported. The second possibility he cited was political agreements not to help each other's adversaries in the event of aggression, like the pact Moscow has with Iran. The third option he presented was bilateral mutual non-aggression pacts.

"For example, agreements of this kind could be reached, among other things, with individual NATO member states, which would then receive, for instance, additional individual security guarantees from the Russian Federation," Drobinin told the conference, according to Reuters, which cited video of his speech posted online.

Medinsky: security framework was Abu Dhabi's central theme

Vladimir Medinsky, Russia's chief negotiator at the Ukraine peace talks — which resumed this week for the first time since February — said on Wednesday that the idea of a new security framework for Europe had been the central theme of two days of negotiations in Abu Dhabi, but did not provide details of what had been discussed, Reuters reported. The Abu Dhabi round ended with a prisoner swap deal but no breakthrough, with Medinsky reporting understanding on some issues and more rounds ahead.

Drobinin's Moscow proposals land on the same day the Abu Dhabi talks closed. Read the earlier story: Abu Dhabi talks end with prisoner swap deal

The proposals arrive days after Jared Kushner, a leading US negotiator with Russia, announced on November 5 that the United States was working on a broader European security architecture as part of its efforts to resolve the conflict in Ukraine — a proposal Politico described as opaque, and to which EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas responded that Europe already has a security architecture in place, with NATO and the European Union in their respective roles, according to reporting on the announcement.

Some European politicians oppose any discussion of Europe's overall security architecture, saying progress on Ukraine — including a ceasefire — must be agreed first, although US officials have made clear they are open to such discussion, Reuters reported. That split is the immediate obstacle to Drobinin's options: the non-aggression pact idea would give individual NATO states separate guarantees from Moscow, a structure European opponents of the talks are likely to read as an attempt to deal with alliance members one by one rather than with the alliance as a whole — an interpretation Drobinin's own wording, as reported, invites by naming individual member states as the counterparties.

What happens next turns on the Abu Dhabi track. If the security framework really was the central theme of the two days of talks, as Medinsky said, the next rounds will show whether Ukraine and its European backers are willing to negotiate architecture alongside territory and ceasefire questions — or whether, as the European opponents argue, the architecture debate stays frozen until a ceasefire exists. No response from NATO or from any individual member state to Drobinin's Wednesday proposals had been reported in the coverage reviewed.