Bild: Russia asks for Finland to leave NATO and no NATO bases in the Baltic states to end the war – sources

Moscow is reportedly linking an end to the war in Ukraine to demands that go far beyond Ukrainian territory, such as Finland’s exit from NATO and a ban on NATO bases in the Baltic states. This is reported by Germany’s Bild, which says it knows of an unofficial Russian proposal coming from the circle of Vladimir Putin. The proposals, according to the newspaper, were presented to European representatives during the talks in Abu Dhabi, the trilateral talks that ended on November 11, and aim at a “new European security order”. The report has not been confirmed by any official source.

All of Donbas and demilitarisation of Odesa

The territorial part of the proposal provides that Russia keeps all the Ukrainian territory it already controls and takes the whole of Donbas. Ukraine would have to hand over the parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions it still controls. The ports of Odesa and Mykolaiv would be demilitarised and could not be used as naval bases, while separate arrangements would guarantee freedom of navigation in the Black Sea and the Baltic. Ukraine would remain permanently non-aligned, unable to join NATO, but with the road to the European Union left open.

Finland, the Baltic and Moldova

The proposal extends to countries beyond Ukraine. It asks that there be no NATO military bases in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and that Finland return to the status it had before joining the Alliance. For Moldova it provides a federal republic made up of the main body of the country, Transnistria and Gagauzia. If Moldova joins the EU, Transnistria and Gagauzia would be able to hold referendums on independence.

In exchange, the Russian side offers to withdraw nuclear weapons from Belarus and not to deploy intermediate-range missiles there. Russian officials still maintain that the West promised Moscow that NATO would not expand eastward. Russia’s Foreign Ministry had recently spoken of non-aggression pacts with individual NATO members.

Putin rejected a European force in Ukraine

The report comes after Putin’s meeting with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner at the Kremlin on Thursday, November 12, for which his adviser Yuri Ushakov had given the Russian version. Putin rejected the idea of a European-led peace mission in Ukraine. “From the beginning we said that the presence of any foreign troops on Ukrainian territory is absolutely unacceptable to us”, he told the American delegation, and warned that European troops sent to the country, even after a peace agreement, would become “legitimate military targets”. He also rejected demilitarised or “grey” zones between the two sides. “For us there is only one line of demarcation, the state border”, he said.

The US Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assesses that Moscow has not backed away from the original war aims and is reviving the 2021 ultimatums to limit NATO’s presence in Eastern Europe. Meanwhile the “Coalition of the Willing”, led by Britain and France, began its first large military exercise, KOALICJA 26.2, on Monday, November 9. It runs until November 22 in Poland, France and Turkey with 2,800 service members from 11 countries.