Bloomberg: Italian PM's Brilliant Plan Will Catch Putin Off Guard

Meloni's idea is worth testing.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgi Meloni's proposal to provide Ukraine with postwar security by offering to cover it with NATO's Article 5 security umbrella, but not membership itself, is both desperate and brilliant.

It commits the U.S. and Europe to the risk of direct military engagement with Russia, the nuclear superpower they have been trying to avoid since Vladimir Putin sent troops to Georgia in 2008, writes Bloomberg Opinion columnist Marc Champion.

But Meloni's idea also has something of a genius about it. She has thought it through as clearly as France and Britain have with their difficult proposal to station troops on the ground in Ukraine, the columnist adds.

The tricky thing about Meloni’s proposal is that it would ultimately destroy Putin’s argument about his invasion of a sovereign neighboring country — an argument that many in the West, including Trump, have accepted without question.

“That argument is that Putin was supposedly acting to neutralize the threat posed by NATO’s eastward expansion. Of course, the attack on Ukraine was largely a response to NATO’s open door policy, although the alliance has not expanded toward Russia since 2004; subsequent expansions have been to the Balkans, and Finland and Sweden joined after the war began. The main question Meloni’s proposal will test is how Putin saw that threat,” Champion writes.

The columnist also adds that Putin is likely to reject Meloni’s proposal. If his goal were peace and security on Russia’s borders, rather than the expansion of Russia as a great power by force if necessary, he would surely agree.

Meloni’s idea is worth testing. If Putin refuses, it would help to clearly contextualize his invasion of Ukraine and demands such as Kyiv’s disarmament and NATO’s withdrawal from former Soviet bloc countries, Champion writes.

Champion also argues that there is a deep and cynical gap between the new US administration’s stated goal — to save lives and end a losing war — and its actions, which include ceding most of Russia’s key demands, excluding Ukraine from negotiations, and forcing Zelensky to permanently hand over control of his country’s mineral wealth and infrastructure to the US.

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