President Biden’s planned trip to the NATO summit in Europe next week for face-to-face talks with leaders about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a great idea. But to reach meaningful results, this extraordinary meeting should include an extra guest: Vladimir Putin.
Leaders of the 30 countries that make up the Western Alliance — including Germany, France, Great Britain, Canada and Turkey — are scheduled to attend the March 24 summit, to be held at NATO headquarters in Brussels. It may be one of the most important U.S.-European summits in recent history.
But why not invite Putin, the Russian autocrat who launched the unjustified invasion of Ukraine, and turn the summit into an effort to reach a cease-fire? Why not send him an RSVP card, put him center stage and offer him a face-saving out of a war that is not going according to his plans and is ruining his country’s economy?
Oscar Arias, the Nobel Peace laureate and former Costa Rica president, who brokered an end to Central America’s bloody wars in the 1980s, is convinced that only a summit that includes Putin can achieve a cease-fire and a negotiated solution in Ukraine.
Arias told me in an interview that, based on his experience as a mediator in the Central American wars, the current mediation talks among senior Ukrainian and Russian officials at the Belorussian border are “a waste of time.” Even the meetings of the Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers are worthless, he added.
“What I’m seeing at the mediation talks at the Belorussian border is that a few men get together, sit down and then have to interrupt the talks every other day because they need permission from above to continue,” Arias told me. “That’s not serious. They’ll never get anywhere that way.”
Arias added that not even the foreign ministers of Russia and Ukraine can reach a deal to stop the war. “The only ones who don’t have to ask permission from anyone and have the authority to commit themselves to a cease-fire are the heads of state,” he said.
When I asked him how he would envision a top-level summit of the United States, the 27-country European Union, Britain and Russia, Arias pointed to a formula he said that U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used.
Arias says that, while trying to reach a peace deal in Central America, he had read that Roosevelt used to solve disputes within his cabinet by ordering his ministers to lock themselves in a room and not leave until they had reached an agreement. Arias used that method with Central American heads of state during the region’s wars — and it worked, he told me.
“I don’t think it would be crazy to do the same thing now in Ukraine,” Arias said, adding that Ukraine should be invited to the table despite it not being a NATO member. “There should be a meeting of the heads of state of Ukraine, Russia, the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom.”
I fully agree. If we don’t want him to further escalate the conflict in Ukraine, Putin needs to be given an off-ramp to stop the slaughter he has brought about. It’s hard to think of a better way of doing it than inviting him to the Brussels summit, and allowing him to become — at least for a day — the world’s most important person.
At the summit, Putin would hear directly from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Ukraine will not seek NATO membership anytime soon, something that Zelenskyy himself has already suggested in recent days. And Putin and Zelenskyy could be persuaded to postpone the dispute over the Russia-occupied territories of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk for several years, in exchange for a Russian pullout of the rest of Ukraine and a Russian promise to stay out of Ukraine.
Putin could then go back to Moscow claiming to be a victor, telling his people that he achieved his main purpose — thwarting Ukraine’s alleged plans to join NATO. It would be a small price to pay to placate Putin’s ego, reach a cease-fire in Ukraine and, most important, avoid escalating a military conflict that has the world on edge.
There’s still time to do it, President Biden. You have done a great job rebuilding the Atlantic alliance that had been so damaged by your predecessor. Now put another seat at the table — and invite Putin.
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