By Robert Wiblin   |    Watch on Youtube   |   Listen on Spotify   |    Read transcript

Episode summary

Many people believe a ceasefire in Ukraine will leave Europe safer. But today’s guest lays out how a deal could potentially generate insidious new risks — leaving us in a situation that’s equally dangerous, just in different ways.

That’s the counterintuitive argument from Samuel Charap, Distinguished Chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy at RAND. He’s not worried about a Russian blitzkrieg on Estonia. He forecasts instead a fragile peace that breaks down and drags in European neighbours; instability in Belarus prompting Russian intervention; hybrid sabotage operations that escalate through tit-for-tat responses.

Samuel’s case isn’t that peace is bad, but that the Ukraine conflict has remilitarised Europe, made Russia more resentful, and collapsed diplomatic relations between the two. That’s a postwar environment primed for the kind of miscalculation that starts unintended wars.

What he prescribes isn’t a full peace treaty; it’s a negotiated settlement that stops the killing and begins a longer negotiation that gives neither side exactly what it wants, but just enough to deter renewed aggression. Both sides stop dying and the flames of war fizzle — hopefully.

None of this is clean or satisfying: Russia invaded, committed war crimes, and is being offered a path back to partial normalcy. But Samuel argues that the alternatives — indefinite war or unstructured ceasefire — are much worse for Ukraine, Europe, and global stability.

This episode was recorded on February 27, 2026.

Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Music: CORBIT
Transcripts and web: Nick Stockton, Elizabeth Cox, and Katy Moore

Highlights

Could peace in Ukraine lead to Europe's next war?

Rob Wiblin: Your most recent piece, “Europe’s next war: The rising risk of a NATO–Russia conflict,” argues that the risk of a direct NATO–Russia confrontation could actually be higher after a ceasefire in Ukraine — which I think to many people will seem kind of counterintuitive. It’s somewhat counterintuitive to me.

So let’s start with a big-picture question: How seriously should we take the risk, the probability of a direct military confrontation between NATO and Russia?

Samuel Charap: Well, I think in looking at the security environment after the war, so after the hot phase of fighting between Russia and Ukraine is over, we can see a lot of the trends that have emerged during the war — that is, the remilitarisation of Europe; the further militarisation of Russia; a deep sense of resentment and in fact even stronger feelings towards the West after so many Russians have died, as Russians see it, at the hands of a Western proxy; the fears that are quite pervasive in Europe about Russian aggression; and the lack of communication and the sort of breakdown in the entire infrastructure of interaction that used to exist both on a societal and on a state-to-state level between Russia and NATO and its member states — it’s an environment that’s ripe for the kind of miscalculation, misunderstanding, miscommunication that can lead to conflict.

And what we’re saying in the piece is essentially that there’s got to be some thinking put in now to how to stabilise the postwar environment and avoid the worst-case outcome. We caution against maybe focusing too much on the opportunistic aggression scenarios which you hear a lot about — like Russia up and deciding that it, say, wants to take Lithuania or accomplish a sort of fait accompli in a Russian-speaking area in Estonia, say — rather than more sort of breakdown in the security environment that, you know, one thing leads to another and you end up in a war, but not necessarily because one side had initial aggressive intent or intended for that outcome to occur.

Rob Wiblin: What do you think are the most likely accidental escalation scenarios?

Samuel Charap: Well, we could easily imagine, for example, the ceasefire in Ukraine, when there is one — and I’m sure there eventually will be one — breaking down, because often ceasefires do break down. And when that kind of thing happens, I think a future Russia–Ukraine war could drag in European neighbours, and not only European neighbours, much more so than now when there’s sort of unwritten rules of the game that direct involvement is off the table. But I think a lot of European leaders have basically said, “If this were to happen again, we’re going to be much more deeply involved.”

So that’s one scenario. Another is, for example, instability in Belarus. Belarus is essentially Russia’s most important ally. It provides Russia with this sort of strategic depth between itself and NATO. And if Moscow were to see itself as losing Belarus, it would not hesitate to act. And we’ve seen the potential for instability in Belarus, given that it has a highly authoritarian political system. …

What we say in the piece is that the risks won’t dramatically decrease with the ceasefire, that they won’t disappear; not that they’re necessarily going to be greater after a ceasefire than they were before.

I think you hear a lot of that rhetoric: that essentially if there’s a ceasefire in Ukraine, then Russia is going to be coming for us, NATO, next. That I don’t buy.

I also would say that there are lots of risks attendant with this war that we’ve sort of become accustomed to, but every once in a while we see an incident and we’re reminded that at any moment this could spiral out of control.

Could peace in Ukraine lead to Europe's next war?

Rob Wiblin: Your most recent piece, “Europe’s next war: The rising risk of a NATO–Russia conflict,” argues that the risk of a direct NATO–Russia confrontation could actually be higher after a ceasefire in Ukraine — which I think to many people will seem kind of counterintuitive. It’s somewhat counterintuitive to me.

So let’s start with a big-picture question: How seriously should we take the risk, the probability of a direct military confrontation between NATO and Russia?

Samuel Charap: Well, I think in looking at the security environment after the war, so after the hot phase of fighting between Russia and Ukraine is over, we can see a lot of the trends that have emerged during the war — that is, the remilitarisation of Europe; the further militarisation of Russia; a deep sense of resentment and in fact even stronger feelings towards the West after so many Russians have died, as Russians see it, at the hands of a Western proxy; the fears that are quite pervasive in Europe about Russian aggression; and the lack of communication and the sort of breakdown in the entire infrastructure of interaction that used to exist both on a societal and on a state-to-state level between Russia and NATO and its member states — it’s an environment that’s ripe for the kind of miscalculation, misunderstanding, miscommunication that can lead to conflict.

And what we’re saying in the piece is essentially that there’s got to be some thinking put in now to how to stabilise the postwar environment and avoid the worst-case outcome. We caution against maybe focusing too much on the opportunistic aggression scenarios which you hear a lot about — like Russia up and deciding that it, say, wants to take Lithuania or accomplish a sort of fait accompli in a Russian-speaking area in Estonia, say — rather than more sort of breakdown in the security environment that, you know, one thing leads to another and you end up in a war, but not necessarily because one side had initial aggressive intent or intended for that outcome to occur.

Rob Wiblin: What do you think are the most likely accidental escalation scenarios?

Samuel Charap: Well, we could easily imagine, for example, the ceasefire in Ukraine, when there is one — and I’m sure there eventually will be one — breaking down, because often ceasefires do break down. And when that kind of thing happens, I think a future Russia–Ukraine war could drag in European neighbours, and not only European neighbours, much more so than now when there’s sort of unwritten rules of the game that direct involvement is off the table. But I think a lot of European leaders have basically said, “If this were to happen again, we’re going to be much more deeply involved.”

So that’s one scenario. Another is, for example, instability in Belarus. Belarus is essentially Russia’s most important ally. It provides Russia with this sort of strategic depth between itself and NATO. And if Moscow were to see itself as losing Belarus, it would not hesitate to act. And we’ve seen the potential for instability in Belarus, given that it has a highly authoritarian political system. …

What we say in the piece is that the risks won’t dramatically decrease with the ceasefire, that they won’t disappear; not that they’re necessarily going to be greater after a ceasefire than they were before.

I think you hear a lot of that rhetoric: that essentially if there’s a ceasefire in Ukraine, then Russia is going to be coming for us, NATO, next. That I don’t buy.

I also would say that there are lots of risks attendant with this war that we’ve sort of become accustomed to, but every once in a while we see an incident and we’re reminded that at any moment this could spiral out of control.

Is a security guarantee for Ukraine possible?

Rob Wiblin: Some, including Ukraine I guess, would like a security guarantee of the form that NATO will come to its defence with its own troops and things if Russia invades again. Of course, that’s an extremely precarious commitment to make. Obviously it’s potentially not very credible to Russia, because are we actually committed to doing that? Would we be willing to accept the cost of war with Russia? And because of that, it’s very risky, because they will potentially call our bluff, and then maybe in the 3:00am phone call, we will join and we’ll end up with World War III as a result.

Do you think there is any room for this kind of security guarantee, or do we just have to give up on that approach?

Samuel Charap: I think perhaps most importantly, the Ukrainians themselves have taken a step back. While sort of saying that, “ideally, of course, we would want to be members of NATO,” they haven’t really objected to this being taken off the table. You know, politically how that is formulated is quite challenging, because of the way it’s been inserted into the Ukrainian constitution. But nonetheless when I was last in Kyiv in December of last year, I was consistently hearing the view that “no one is going to fight for us” — which is a logical conclusion to come to after four years of no one fighting for them. I think that has essentially been taken off the table.

Now, there is this question about it, and there’s a lot of planning going on, including in the UK as well as France — and in fact, the French president and the UK Prime Minister publicly committed to deploying this force to Ukraine after a ceasefire. You know, here I’m quite sceptical. I think that the credibility question really does come into play. And then we’ll face a question — or the alliance will, essentially, if these forces come under attack — of either retreating and essentially losing a lot of credibility that way, or of launching a Russia–NATO war, neither of which is a particularly good outcome. The idea that Russia would be completely deterred by the presence of a small number of UK and French forces inside Ukraine, I think is low probability. I think it is higher probability that the promise of such a presence will deter Russia from accepting a ceasefire.

EU membership is still on the table

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I was a little bit surprised to find out that the idea of Ukraine joining the EU is on the table as much as it is. It seems like things are trending towards Ukraine agreeing to be neutral and not joining NATO, but it might be acceptable for it to join the European Union. Does that look plausible for Russia to swallow that?

Samuel Charap: Russia has accepted that since 2022. That was actually part of the Istanbul Communiqué in March of 2022, the deal that almost was in the early weeks of the war.

Rob Wiblin: I guess I have the perception that Russia really didn’t want Ukraine to be pulled into the Western sphere of influence. And it feels like joining the EU was really quite getting pulled into it.

Samuel Charap: I think you’re absolutely right, and I think it’s an underappreciated concession in a way. And a concession not necessarily to Ukraine, but to reality: to the reality that Russia is not going to be able to stop that process.

But yes, going back to 2013, of course, Russia undertook some pretty extreme measures, this is before the annexation of Crimea, put a lot of economic pressure and provided a lot of economic incentives for then-president Yanukovych to not sign an association agreement with the EU.

So basically, I think this is another element of the strategic catastrophe from a Russian perspective: that they’ve essentially politically and economically ceded the point that Ukraine, the government-controlled Ukraine, will be beyond Russia’s sphere of influence, so to speak.

Now, EU membership is a long and winding road. The US side seems to think that the EU could commit to doing that in 2027, which is just not going to happen. It’s a very bureaucratic process. But it can move relatively quickly, and I think Ukraine and the EU are both committed to making that happen.

Putin isn't Hitler: How to negotiate with autocrats

Samuel Charap: I think that there’s this sort of Hitler analogy that does distort a lot of our views of nasty autocracies, right? Most autocracies historically have not thought the kind of world domination that Nazi Germany did. And particularly the sort of Munich analogy of any agreement just being a sort of pause before the inevitable aggression, and seeing that as more about the nature of the attempt to find agreement than about the nature of the adversary in question — in this case, Nazi Germany and its plans for continental and global domination — I think that does distort things.

But more broadly, your question relates to one of reputation. And I do think that what we know from political science studies of this is that essentially states look to other states’ behaviour in the particular case, not from somewhere else across the world. So just to be quite concrete: from what we know about how reputation has functioned in the past, China’s view of whether the US would respond to an attempt to take Taiwan is likely to be more shaped by US activities in Asia and the Asia-Pacific than it is by the US response to Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Now, that’s not an argument for not responding to Russian aggression in Ukraine. I do think that we need to attach costs to norm violation — that if we take the norm of territorial integrity seriously, if we take the norm of non-aggression seriously, we need to impose costs to states that violate it. I think that’s a clear-cut case.

But you know, since the advent of nuclear weapons, and given that Russia has more than any other country, there’s not going to be an outcome in confronting Russia that looks like Nazi Germany’s capitulation. And ultimately, we found ways of having stability, particularly in Europe, with even the Soviet Union.

And it’s that history I would look to, where we don’t think of agreements as transforming a relationship to become fundamentally friendly or something, but about how to achieve stability through negotiation — viewing negotiation as a tool of statecraft, along with coercive elements, rather than some alternative to using coercive elements, I think is an important way to think about how to deal with the problematic, just to put it mildly, countries that exist in the world today that are ultimately unlikely to disappear like the Soviet Union did.

That, I think, also colours our view of how confrontation with autocracies end. The geopolitical miracle of 1989–1991, where an empire largely peacefully — although it’s sort of overrated because there was some violence — imploded, and basically not only imploded, but also said, “Our model was wrong, and we accept yours,” that’s unlikely to happen. Or at least betting on that is not a wise foreign policy move.

So I think we need to accept these countries for what they are, not sugarcoat it, but also see that in the past, even with countries that are objectionable both in their domestic political regimes and their foreign policy behaviour, we have been able to find agreements that serve our interests while not giving up on any of the elements of shaping the environment using military and other means.

Why Russia still takes NATO seriously

Samual Charap: Hugh [White], in his interview with you, made the case that the lack of Western and particularly US military response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is somehow demonstrative of a broader lack of US commitment to NATO. And I would just disagree with that. I think the distinction between NATO and non-NATO Europe, particularly under the Biden administration, but even going forward under Trump, where we have just heard the undersecretary of war make the case for returning NATO to its sort of factory settings — in other words, focusing on territorial defence and deterrence — I don’t think that the US is going to cede the alliance commitments it’s made in Europe, and I don’t think it should. …

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. In that interview, Hugh White also said that he suspected that Europe would end up ceding to Russia everything that it couldn’t convince them that it would be willing to fight a nuclear war to defend. Is that exaggerated in your view? Or does NATO/the EU need to convince Russia that there are lines beyond which it really would be risking its own existence?

Samuel Charap: I am convinced that Article 5 is an effective deterrent, that Russia believes in it, and believes that it would be at war with the United States if it were to attack a NATO ally. And I think Russia sees that war as one that it could not win conventionally, and that would have therefore the potential for nuclear escalation. This is not a scenario that Russia sees as beneficial, nor do I think it sees a particularly urgent reason to do it.

So ultimately, extended deterrence — which essentially means that the US is not only deterring an attack on itself, but it is extending that deterrent commitment to its allies in Europe and in Asia — rests on something of a bluff, or something of a commitment that we don’t know what will happen if called, an uncertainty. And that risk that leaves something to chance is precisely the kind of fear that deterrence is meant to create.

After all, deterrence comes from the word “terror.” It’s the idea of affecting adversaries’ psychology so that they are afraid of undertaking aggression. And I think there are ways that we can effectively continue to convince Russia that the consequences of attacking an ally would just outweigh any possible benefits, and therefore that they would be deterred from it.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Hugh was pessimistic about the chances that the US would intervene to defend the Baltic states. But I guess there’s another aspect to this, which is the risk/reward for Russia. And they might decide not to attack any of those countries, even if they thought there was only a 5% chance that the US or France would come to their aid — because what they stand to gain is so much less than what they stand to lose, potentially.

Samuel Charap: Exactly.

Rob Wiblin: So I guess maybe you could modify and say that Europe will end up ceding to Russia everything that it can’t convince Russia that there’s some meaningful probability that they would be risking nuclear war over. They don’t necessarily have to convince them that it’s a certainty.

Samuel Charap: Yeah. I mean, the same problem existed in the Cold War. I’m not sure why this is necessarily so novel. I mean, there was always the question of, “Would we trade Boston for Berlin?”

Rob Wiblin: Hugh’s explanation, he says that basically the US spent enough money and put enough equipment in Europe to convince Russia that it actually was serious. And I guess he would say that presidents also convinced the US public that it was in their interest to draw this line and be willing to bear those costs. And it’s just that that conversation hasn’t happened today, and it’s maybe not credible that the US would view it as worth the cost anymore.

Samuel Charap: I mean, he makes an important point about the pervasive fear of communism, essentially, in the Cold War, being something that drove people to consider making unpalatable decisions for that reason. So it’s not completely off base, and obviously there’s a lot of political will questions here, and accounting for different US presidents and their different proclivities — which is sort of, in a way, contingent.

But it’s right to raise the question. And if I were living in Estonia, I would be concerned that the US public is not as taken with the Russian threat as they are. But I do think the US still keeps skin in the game. It has 80,000 forces stationed in Europe. It has nuclear weapons reportedly stationed in Europe. And it maintains, including forces that are conventional forces, but nonetheless in the Baltic states themselves. So you would have what they call a tripwire, which is what existed in West Berlin. In other words, a force that’s not going to defeat an invading Russian army, but will make it harder for the US president to ignore a bunch of US soldiers being killed in the process. Or British or French or German.