By Dr. Philip Dandolov

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine there have been multiple negotiation rounds as well as proposed peace plans seeking to lay the groundwork for ending the war. While finding a lasting resolution is turning out to be elusive, if we are to take into consideration the events that have unfolded over the course of the last two years, what should almost certainly be ruled out with regard to the spectrum of desirable outcomes is the adoption of a neutral status by Ukraine.

Ukraine is not exactly a stranger when it comes to the notion of neutrality. In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, the country expressed an intention in its declaration of state sovereignty of 1 July 1990 to become a permanently neutral state that would shun participation in military blocs and show a commitment to denuclearization. This largely nonaligned status resulted in a vacillating foreign policy, which nonetheless appeared to be conducive to the pursuit of amicable relations with both the European Union (EU) and Russia, before being ultimately abandoned in December 2014 in the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the start of the Donbas war. In February 2019, with the overwhelming approval of the Verkhovna Rada (the Parliament of Ukraine), the Ukrainian constitution was amended, setting the country on a course toward full membership in the EU and NATO. Nonetheless, in late March 2022 Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was still prepared to discuss the possibility of Ukraine taking a neutral position as part of a potential peace deal with Russia to halt the invasion.

Yet there are quite a few practical and moral reasons as to why the train of neutrality should now be considered to have long left the station.

Neutrality, which remains a somewhat imprecise concept and was famously characterized in 1956 by former American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as an “obsolete conception,” may be regarded as a state of mind or a normative self-conceptualization of the political elite and the citizens, rather than a status that a country is bound to by balance of power considerations. Arguably, the more nuanced understanding of neutrality is even more relevant in the case of consolidated democracies. Public support for Finland joining NATO (the country officially became a member on 4 April 2023) rose from approximately 33% of Finns in 2018 to........

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