BRUSSELS — NATO countries are demanding a say over what role the military alliance will play in any future peace agreement with Ukraine after being largely sidelined in talks so far. 

While a deal remains a moving target, some allies insist they have red lines they want to be consulted on first, according to four NATO diplomats. Those concern Kyiv’s accession to the alliance, the placement of troops and arms on allied soil, and respect for international law.

“At the end of the day, it will be NATO deciding for NATO’s issues,” Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen said in an interview with POLITICO. Now “we are working out the red lines together with our partners and allies.”

The renewed push comes after European countries were blindsided by a peace plan brokered by the U.S. and Russia late last month that was widely seen as favoring Moscow. Since then the Europeans have floated their own counter-proposal — but a deal remains elusive.

NATO foreign ministers will meet in Brussels on Wednesday, offering the first real opportunity for countries to debate the contours of the peace plan within the alliance. The summit comes one day after U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff met with Russian President Vladimir Putin for crunch talks in Moscow.

“It’s really important that the U.S. is leading these efforts,” NATO chief Mark Rutte said Tuesday. But “anything about NATO mentioned in the deal to end the war, obviously that will be dealt with separately with NATO,” he told reporters in Brussels.

While there is currently “no consensus” among alliance allies for Ukraine to join NATO, Rutte said, the organization’s 1949 founding treaty, which theoretically maintains an open-door policy for new countries, “still stands.”

An earlier draft of the plan placed stringent conditions on the alliance, ordering it to stop accepting new members, pledge not to station troops in Ukraine, and enshrine in its statutes a provision barring Kyiv from ever joining.

Rutte said the peace deal had “moved on” from those initial proposals. Valtonen, too, insisted that “many of the issues” with the first plan concerning Europe and NATO had been “carved out” of later iterations.

But the European counter-proposal also came with several conditions for the alliance: a non-aggression pact between NATO and Russia, a vow not to place allied troops in Ukraine permanently, and a pledge to station NATO fighter jets in Poland. 

Until now, “NATO has been on the sidelines,” said Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank. That diminished role is partly due to geopolitics, he said: Its “involvement would provoke a broader issue with Russia that the organization hasn’t wanted to do thus far.”

Putin invoked those fears again on Tuesday with fresh saber-rattling. “We are not going to fight with Europe, I have already said this a hundred times,” he said ahead of the talks with Witkoff. “But if Europe wants to fight with us, we are ready to do so right now.”

Mind the gap

Behind closed doors, some allies feel Washington could have consulted them more on the peace process.

On Monday, U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker formally briefed his fellow envoys on the talks for the first time, according to two NATO diplomats who were granted anonymity to speak freely on the sensitive matter. The belated briefing came almost two weeks after the initial draft proposal was leaked.

Adding fuel to those concerns, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will not attend Wednesday’s meeting, with his deputy Christopher Landau participating instead.

Rubio’s “absence will send the wrong signal just as America should be coordinating even closer with European allies,” said Oana Lungescu, a former NATO spokesperson, noting that the last time a U.S. secretary of state skipped a NATO ministerial was in 1999.

Publicly, NATO countries are shrugging off the apparent snub. “I’m not looking too much at the signals” of Washington’s top envoy skipping the meeting, Valtonen said. “My colleague Rubio is … extremely busy.”

Privately, some allies would have preferred that Rubio prioritize talks with Russia over meeting with the alliance if he had to choose, two NATO diplomats said, given that he is already seen as more attentive to European concerns on a peace deal.

In the meantime, countries must also decide what role the alliance will play after an agreement is signed, including whether to revive the NATO-Russia Council, its long-dormant forum for talks with Moscow.

“The real elephant in the room is, if we then engage as NATO with the Russians on matters that are of mutual interest, how do we do it?” one senior NATO diplomat asked. “Is the NATO-Russia Council still viable, or do we need to use the U.S. as the intermediary?”