Europe and the US to Review Future NATO Relations with Russia Amid War in Ukraine

Next week, NATO defence ministers will draw up a new alliance strategy on Russia and begin reviewing their decade-old policy on relations with Russia in response to the war in Ukraine and broader threats from Moscow, Politico reports.

‘NATO-Russia relations hit rock bottom after Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In response, NATO has called Russia ‘the most significant and direct threat to the Alliance's security,’ while the Kremlin argues that NATO's eastward expansion is a danger to its existence,’ the publication writes.

While official discussions at a lower level have been going on for months, next week's meeting of NATO defence ministers will be the first of several rounds of ministerial discussions on the topic. 

Earlier, during the July NATO summit in Washington, the allies agreed to develop a new NATO-Russia strategy at the next alliance summit, scheduled for June 2025 in The Hague.

Then there is the matter of Hungary and Slovakia, two NATO countries that are breaking with the rest of the alliance by continuing to maintain contacts with Russia and seeing strategic value in the blocs' interaction. 

Despite the change in tone, NATO still upholds the ‘Founding Act’ with Russia, a document signed in 1997, six years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which provides for a common goal of ‘building a stable, peaceful and undivided Europe’. The NATO-Russia Council, established after the Cold War for security partnerships and joint projects, has not met since 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. NATO's relations with Russia have steadily deteriorated over the years, with Russia's attack on Georgia in 2008, followed by its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its fomenting of war in eastern Ukraine's Luhansk and Donetsk regions.