“Security Order”: Why is the USA accepting Russia’s demands?

Interview New “security order” for Europe Why is the USA accepting Russia’s demands? As of: November 11, 2026 • 7:56 p.m

Russia sees talks about a "security order" for Europe primarily as a means of expanding its influence across the continent, says political expert Jana Puglierin. Now the USA has agreed to this logic.

tagesschau.de: In the context of the new Ukraine negotiations, the USA has also brought discussions about the European security architecture into play. Why is this question suddenly on the agenda?

Jana Puglierin: This is a topic that Russia has always spoken about when discussing the root causes of the war in Ukraine. So far, the Europeans, but also the USA, have refused to do so and, above all, have concentrated on working towards a ceasefire. Now it seems that there is a change in thinking in the USA. When Trump now talks about a “Big Beautiful Deal” that also includes all of Europe, that is threatening to European ears. Putin and Trump could get together and organize European security in a kind of new Yalta.

tagesschau.de: With Yalta you allude to the negotiations in Crimea towards the end of the Second World War, when the Soviet dictator Stalin, US President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill talked about the post-war order.

Puglierin: ... and divided Europe into different spheres of influence. This is exactly what many Europeans now fear.

Jana Puglierin is a Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. Most recently she published "Who will defend Europe? The new dangers of war and what we have to do to protect ourselves". "A new attempt to demonstrate a foreign policy success" tagesschau.de: How do you explain why the USA is suddenly taking up this idea?

Puglierin: The way I explain it is that after the midterm elections in the USA, Trump is particularly concentrating on the field of foreign policy. He wants quick results for his voters. He was already concerned about Ukraine and the idea of ​​brokering peace there before he became president. And I think this is now a new attempt to demonstrate a foreign policy success, to demonstrate activism and to distract from the fact that Trump has just been badly punished at home.

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tagesschau.de: Then let’s take a closer look at what Russia wants in this context. What does Russia imagine by a new order? The Kremlin has tried to put the issue on the agenda again and again since the beginning of the 2000s and most recently shortly before the full-scale attack on Ukraine.

Puglierin: It is important to understand that this complaint about the European security order goes back further. With the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Putin showed that under his leadership Russia no longer feels bound by the rules that it, as the successor state to the Soviet Union, agreed to in various formats with the Europeans and the Americans. Today Russia acts as if all these principles were decided over Russia's head, as if its weakness was exploited. Russia has also repeatedly argued that the West does not follow the rules and has broken them in Libya and Iraq.

What Russia's maximum demands are can be clearly seen in the draft contracts that the Russian delegation submitted to the USA and NATO in December 2021. Russia was talking about, and I say this in quotation marks, “security guarantees”. Russia argued at the time that it felt threatened and wanted some fundamental changes. This is NATO's contractual waiver to accept additional members. It is also about the withdrawal of NATO troops and military infrastructure to the level of May 1997, i.e. before NATO's eastward expansion. Basically, it is about reversing NATO's eastward expansion without formally throwing these countries out of NATO. The aim is to set up the eastern NATO member states as a buffer zone and create various security zones within Europe.

If you want to put it in a nutshell, it's about rewriting the end of the Cold War, about a Europe of different zones of influence and about Russia's self-image as a great power.

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tagesschau.de: The feeling of threat that Russia expressed at the time - was or is that understandable or is it a constructed feeling, behind which there are primarily hegemonic demands?

Puglierin: If you take a closer look at the situation in 2021, the Russian narrative was about the threat from Ukraine and Ukraine's supposedly impending NATO membership. In 2021, Ukraine was still as far away from NATO membership as it was in 2008. There wasn't even a so-called Membership Action Plan and there was no threat to Russian territory. Nobody has threatened Russia territorially, neither Ukraine nor NATO. Even Russian analysts saw it that way at the time.

At that time, almost no analyst in Moscow had this major full-scale invasion on their radar. From the Russian perspective, a threat was that Russia's claim to hegemony was threatened. The USA had once again intensified its cooperation with Ukraine under then President Joe Biden. At the time, it was basically about Ukraine threatening to slip out of Russian control, which the Kremlin wanted to ensure through the "People's Republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk and the Minsk Process.

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tagesschau.de: If we now talk about a reorganization of the European security architecture under this auspices, and you have already put the word security in quotation marks, what would that mean for the European NATO states and in particular the states of the former Warsaw Pact or the former Soviet republics?

Puglierin: Putin said clearly last year when he met Trump in Alaska: A long-term and lasting solution in Ukraine requires a balanced security balance in Europe. And this security balance is exactly what came through in the 2021 draft contracts. It's about giving Russia its, again in quotation marks, "rightful" place in Europe. This means that if the West accepted this Russian understanding, it would have to recognize that Russia has the right, beyond its own borders, to have a significant say in the behavior of its neighbors and also the security arrangements of its neighbors.

For the Europeans, this is not about any abstract values ​​and norms, but rather specifically about things that were agreed upon and that have guaranteed European security over the past 80 years - for example, the inviolability of borders, the non-moving of borders through military force, territorial integrity, self-determination, freedom of alliance.

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tagesschau.de: Jared Kushner also spoke in Abu Dhabi about territorial integrity, border security and crisis mechanisms.

Puglierin: The devil is in the details here. You can see Russians today saying, we just have different interpretations of state sovereignty, territorial integrity or non-intervention in state affairs.

I view this extremely critically. We as Europeans must know that Russia has a revisionist claim that is not limited to Ukraine, but that Russia wants to transform much more than just Ukraine's borders and Ukraine's political control. This will not go away, even if we succeed in freezing the war in Ukraine.

For Russia, Ukraine is not an end in itself, but also a key to a changed European security order. The Europeans have to deal with this. It is not in our interest for only the Russians and the Americans to talk about this. That's why we have to make it very clear where our red lines are and at the same time realize that this conflict with Russia is permanent. It won't go away quickly.

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tagesschau.de: If the Europeans draw their red lines and possibly oppose results that the USA achieved together with Russia - what do they have to prepare for from the USA?

Puglierin: Since Donald Trump came into office, it has become clear that he sees the war in Ukraine as an obstacle, something he wants to eliminate in order to bring about a rapprochement with Russia. It's also about energy transactions, which the Americans are very interested in and where Russia repeatedly signals that they have something to offer. However, so far the Europeans have repeatedly managed to negotiate with the Trump administration. It's not just that we are a maneuvering force, we are the strongest supporter in Ukraine. We also have leverage over the USA.

The interview was conducted by Eckart Aretz, tagesschau.de. The conversation was adapted and shortened for the written version.

This topic in the program: The First | daily news | 11/11/2026 | 8:00 p.m. tagesschau.de | Interview with Jana Puglierin about US announcements about talks on the European security architecture with Russia | 11/11/2026 | 7:54 p.m