As talk of security guarantees picks up, a major component of any attempt to ensure that Ukraine is secure after the fighting stops rests on strengthening its military and improving its security environment.
Specifically, the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners should work with Kyiv to design and pursue a multilayered Ukrainian security architecture that emphasizes seven principles: (1) NATO-Ukraine interoperability, (2) long-term training and sustainment, (3) industrial fusion through the Danish model, (4) innovation integration, (5) preservation of sovereign deterrence, (6) the rollback of Russian forward deployments, and (7) Ukraine’s internal military modernization.
Together, these strategies can ensure a long-term balance of power wherein Ukraine can defend itself, Europe’s eastern flank is stable, and any future Russian aggression would face real and guaranteed costs.
1. Keep Ukraine interoperable with NATO.
Ukraine is unlikely to gain Article 5–style mutual defense from NATO. But the alliance is more than the sum of its troop formations. Its core competency is its ability to combine allied militaries under a single superstructure. The alliance operates under a shared grammar of concepts of operations, command and control, intelligence, doctrine, and training—all forged through routine joint exercises.
As a NATO partner, Ukraine should begin learning to operate within the allied warfighting structure, regardless of its Article 5 status. NATO should continue to invite Ukraine to participate in exercises whenever possible to ensure Ukraine remains aligned with NATO doctrines and concepts of operations as well as the Euro-Atlantic geopolitical axis.
2. Make NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine (NSATU) permanent.
NSATU, a NATO command based in Germany, has become the core operational element ensuring Ukraine’s national defense. Its long-term presence is vital to bolster Ukraine’s future security.
Hundreds of NSATU personnel help tie together the entire NATO-Ukraine security ecosystem—without making any member nation a belligerent against Russia. It serves three main functions:
- Harmonizing various military assistance programs, such as the European Union Military Assistance Mission (EUMAM), Operation Interflex, Operation UNIFIER, and the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine (JMTG-U).
- Crafting Ukraine’s long-term force-development roadmap.
- Training Ukrainian troops. More than 192,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been trained through NSATU.
In effect, NSATU all but guarantees that Ukraine will never fight alone. The program should endure beyond the war.
3. Expand the Danish model across the alliance to build a dispersed, resilient Ukraine-Europe defense industrial base.
The Danish model is a highly innovative framework wherein Denmark works directly with Ukraine’s defense industry to finance and coproduce weapons, in some cases on Danish soil. The framework expedites deliveries, reduces costs, and, in the case of Danish-based production, insulates facilities against Russian strikes. It is the first Western mechanism that treats the Ukrainian defense industry as a business partner and supplier rather than a charity case.
The program has achieved impressive results with Bohdana howitzers. And the model is disciplined: Ukraine identifies needs, and Danish experts vet potential partner firms, with all funds flowing through Copenhagen. In 2024 alone, the Danish model generated about $631 million worth of weapons for Ukraine, financed by Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and interest payments from frozen Russian assets.
By 2025, Denmark and Norway have set the aims for $183 million worth of weapons. This framework should be the template for other willing NATO allies.
4. Integrate Ukraine’s drone warfare complex into NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA).
Ukraine’s drone ecosystem—powered by the Ministry of Digital Transformation, the Ministry of Defense, and initiatives such as Brave-1—is among the most dynamic in the world.
NATO’s DIANA program, with more than 200 accelerator hubs and test sites, is the ideal platform to fuse Ukrainian innovation with NATO procurement. DIANA provides non-dilutive grants, dual-use innovation pathways, military end-user mentoring, and access to over $1 billion of venture capital through the NATO Innovation Fund.
Bringing Ukraine into DIANA would turbocharge Kyiv’s drone and electronic warfare industries and embed Ukrainian technology into NATO’s next-generation warfighting architecture. This would allow the alliance to benefit from Ukraine’s comparative advantages and help Ukraine scale its impressive innovation ecosystem.
5. Preserve Ukraine’s long-range deterrent and airpower autonomy.
A credible security guarantee requires allowing Ukraine to maintain its own deterrent tools:
- Ukrainian-operated Rafales, Gripens, and any future combat aircraft need to be based on Ukrainian soil, not dispersed abroad due to political constraints. This is a military imperative for combat air patrol and quick reaction alert sorties, along with other missions.
- Ukraine should continue to hone its long-range strike capabilities. Russia’s campaign against Ukrainian cities has left no moral or strategic basis for limiting Kyiv’s response options.
- Ukraine needs a Finland-style reserve force that would be large and regularly trained but mobilized only in the event of Russian aggression. These reserves should not count toward force size caps, as they are not active combat formations but existential insurance.
- Ukraine should not be forced back to the Ottawa Convention. The Ukrainian military should be free to mine the national territory along its borders.
- The Ukrainian Navy should face no limitations in the Black Sea. This would ensure Ukraine retains sovereign deterrence even if political winds shift in Western capitals.
6. Fully remove Russian forces from Belarus unless Ukraine can host permanent allied forces.
A future security agreement should impose two geographic conditions on Moscow:
- Russia must roll back its nuclear forward deployments and strike-capable assets in Belarus to pre-2022 levels.
- Wagner elements and other Kremlin-linked mercenaries must leave Belarus forever.
In return, Ukraine would not host permanent Western troop bases. If Russia refuses, NATO should reserve the right to station forces in Ukraine.
Maintaining this agreement will require monitoring. So Ukraine will require routine access to allied space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; airborne early warning and control; and long-endurance surveillance drones to monitor any ceasefire or peace regime.
7. Ukraine needs to abandon Soviet-vintage command structures and ingrain NATO principles.
Ukraine also has work to do. The Armed Forces of Ukraine should intensify de-Sovietization across doctrine, command, procurement, ranks, high command, and tables of organization and equipment. Military and political figures like General Kyrylo Budanov and First Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov represent the future: young, adaptive, tech-driven leaders who understand algorithmic warfare and modern intelligence fusion.
Kyiv also needs to hardwire anticorruption safeguards into defense contracting to maintain the confidence of foreign partners that fund Ukraine and share sensitive technologies. A twenty-first-century Ukrainian military cannot operate on twentieth-century Soviet frameworks.