March 2025

The United States announced sanctions on the Russian entity operating the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant amid renewed warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about the safety and security of nuclear facilities in Ukraine.

In a Jan. 15 statement, the Treasury Department said it was sanctioning Russia’s Federal State Unitary Enterprise Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which Moscow established to run the complex after Russia’s illegal attack and occupation of the facility.

The operating organization was included in a list of sanctions targets that Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said is aimed at undermining Russia’s abilities to “circumvent our sanctions and get access to the goods they need to build weapons” for use against Ukraine.

In January, the IAEA team stationed at the Zaporizhzhia site reported explosions near the perimeter. The IAEA delayed rotating new staff into the facility in February due to military activity in the area. IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi said it is “completely unacceptable” to disrupt the rotation of agency staff, “who are carrying out vital work” to prevent a nuclear accident.

He also expressed concern about a Feb. 14 strike that punctured the roof of the structure designed to prevent radioactive releases at the Chernobyl nuclear complex and sparked a fire. Despite the damage, the IAEA said there was “no change in radiation levels at the site.”

Grossi said the attack on the Chernobyl facility is “especially concerning” given the increased military activity around the Zaporizhzhia complex. “Attacking a nuclear facility is an absolute no-go” and should never happen, he said.—KELSEY DAVENPORT

March 2025

Among his final acts, U.S. President Joe Biden loosened controls on missile technology exports for “certain [U.S.] partners with strong export control systems.” The new policy guidance directing implementation of Category I military missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, and space-launched vehicles (SLVs) under the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) was contained in a national security memorandum issued Jan. 3.

It said that Biden sought a “renewed U.S. commitment to nonproliferation … strengthening allied defense capabilities, bolstering the U.S. defense industrial base, streamlining defense trade, and deterring adversaries.”

The memorandum loosened the policy set in 1993 by allowing additional exports of U.S. MTCR-class missiles to more countries; to MTCR member states for their own military missile programs; and to MTCR and non-MTCR SLV programs.

The change also undermines ballistic missile and SLV interchangeability, according to Vann Van Diepen, a former acting assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation.

In a Jan. 21 blog post for the Arms Control Association, he wrote that in the past “basic rules” for ballistic missiles and SLVs were the same and this interchangeability created the “bedrock of western opposition to SLV programs in Iran, North Korea, and other proliferant states.” With the new guidelines, the United States can now export to certain SLV programs in countries that are not MTCR members while banning exports to the countries’ Category I “military missile” programs.

Van Diepen wrote that the new guidance “make[s] it harder for the United States to prevent other countries from taking the same ‘national discretion’ approach and making missile-related exports to present and future U.S. adversaries who are their friends, especially in the guise of ‘SLV-related’ technology.”

The 2016 Trump administration reinterpreted MTCR implementation to expedite unmanned aerial vehicle sales to other countries and allow more rapid export of large drones to more potential buyers (see ACT, September 2020). It is unknown what the new Trump administration will do with the Biden guidelines.—LIBBY FLATOFF

March 2025
By Loïc Simonet

There are many factors that could contribute to the end of Russia’s war on Ukraine in 2025: the military escalation by the combatant parties, the weariness of their populations, the strategic stalemate, and President Donald Trump’s promise to resolve the conflict within “24 hours” of taking office.

At their first meeting on February 18 in Saudi Arabia, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov agreed to each appoint high-level teams to work on ending the conflict in Ukraine in a way that is enduring, sustainable, and acceptable to all sides.¹ Although Ukraine now has everything to fear from a hasty deal between the two powers, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared that he would “do everything to end this war next year through diplomatic means”² and would be ready to start negotiations under certain conditions.³ Fifty-two percent of Ukrainians would like to see their country negotiate an end to the hostilities as soon as possible.⁴

Kyiv’s current priority is to conclude the war on favorable terms and gain maximum leverage over Russia. Over the longer term, a sustainable conflict resolution and a stabilized post-conflict environment will need to include specific arms control measures. The defunct Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty sets out definitions, provisions, procedures, and categories for armament limitation that could one day inspire a comprehensive ceasefire in Ukraine, including monitoring and verification provisions.

Post–Cold War Origins

Signed in Paris November 19, 1990, the CFE Treaty was history’s largest and most complex conventional arms control agreement. It aimed to eliminate disparities between the conventional military potential of the Warsaw Pact and NATO and their capabilities to launch large-scale offensive operations in Europe or regional surprise attacks. The treaty also established numerical ceilings for collective holdings of five categories of armaments (battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, artillery systems, combat aircraft, and attack helicopters) within four different zones stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains.

A separate stability zone with equal subceilings for the European flank in Northern Europe, the eastern Balkans, and the Caucasus region, including Turkey, was created to prevent new subregional force accumulations as well as the possibility of an encircling maneuver. Compliance was assured through a comprehensive set of intrusive verification measures emphasizing on-site inspections.

After 20 years of implementation, the treaty has contributed to the elimination of more than 72,000 pieces of military equipment, enabled more than 5,500 on-site inspections and facilitated the detailed exchange of data. Its value was not only in its effect on force levels, but also on preventative diplomacy, transparency, and exchange of information. Overall, the treaty helped overcome the Cold War division of Europe and provided overall military stability between major powers. It facilitated reduced threat perceptions and increased trust between former adversaries through legally binding mutual reassurances that both sides would exercise military restraint and abandon zero-sum games. In sum, it enabled political détente.

Although the product and symbol of a “new era of democracy, peace and unity in Europe”⁵ at a rare moment in history, the treaty could not survive the gradual decline and collapse of the post–Cold War order. It started to lose relevance when NATO launched accession negotiations with the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia in 1996. Eventually, attempts to enhance the treaty’s viability and effectiveness by taking into account the changing European security environment and the legitimate security interests of participating states in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) failed.

The process of concluding a CFE Adaptation Agreement, which was signed by all 30 CFE states-parties on the margins of the OSCE summit in Istanbul November 19, 1999, stalled when the George W. Bush administration demanded that Russia withdraw its troops from Moldova and Georgia before the United States and its NATO allies would ratify it. NATO’s further enlargement in 2004 rendered the CFE rationale—maintaining a numerical balance of forces and geographical distance between two groups of states-parties—obsolete. On December 12, 2007, invoking a serious risk to its national security, Moscow suspended its obligations regarding the CFE Treaty.

Russia’s 2008 war in Georgia, its recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, and the stationing of Russian forces in those disputed territories without Georgia’s consent further complicated attempts to revive conventional arms control. On November 22, 2011, the U.S. Department of State announced that the United States “would cease carrying out certain [CFE] obligations with regard to Russia”⁶; NATO allies followed suit. On March 11, 2015, Russia suspended its participation in the joint consultative group, which oversaw the treaty’s implementation, although its allies Armenia, Belarus and Kazakhstan remained in the pact.

The War in Ukraine and CFE

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and NATO support for Kyiv in that war provided the pretext for Moscow’s complete withdrawal from the treaty. In May 2023, the Russian Duma voted unanimously to terminate the landmark pact, as requested by President Vladimir Putin. Six months later, at midnight November 7, the legal waiting period for withdrawal was over. As the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement, “Thus, the international legal document, the operation of which was suspended by our country in 2007, has become history for Russia once and for all.”⁷ In turn, NATO allies decided to suspend operation of the treaty for as long as necessary. The collapse of a legally binding arms control regime that was once labelled a “cornerstone of European security” went almost unnoticed amid the wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip.

Today, the CFE Treaty seems beyond repair. Yet, among many reasons for opposing Russia’s determination to consign it to the history books for good, one at least deserves serious attention: the treaty mechanisms and spirit may well inspire the peace deal that one day will end the conflict in Eastern Europe.

Russia’s war in Ukraine, the first major, full-scale conflict in Europe since World War II, has been conventional by nature. Since Moscow launched what it euphemistically called a “special military operation,” the war has been a land-heavy, World War II–type offensive operation and not a 21st-century conflict.⁸ Pictures of shattered Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers destroyed by anti-tank missiles have become a routine sight on the battlefield. Despite Putin’s heightening nuclear rhetoric calling into question longstanding global norms against the use and testing of nuclear weapons, the war in Ukraine so far has not gone beyond the limits of a classic war as theorized by Carl von Clausewitz. Although potential harbingers of a dangerous cycle of escalation, Ukraine’s recent strike with U.S.-supplied longer-range missiles into Russian territory and Russia’s use of its new intermediate-range hypersonic Oreshnik missile have not undermined the conventional nature of the conflict.

This is why efforts to support a Russian-Ukrainian ceasefire will have to include specific conventional arms control measures. The many one-off, short-term ceasefires negotiated between the Ukrainian armed forces and the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine between 2014 and 2022 set a precedent by banning the use of certain types of armaments and the deployment of heavy weapons in and around specified areas.⁹ A geographically localized, conventional arms control regime complemented by confidence-building measures could make a significant contribution to de-escalating hostilities, and to rebuilding confidence and stability. It also could facilitate ‘windows of silence’, an OSCE term referring to temporary ceasefires for rescuing civilians and repairing critical infrastructure. Such a pause might allow for negotiation; support the disengagement of forces and withdrawal of troops and heavy weapons with transparency and verification measures; and address the risk of weapons diversion to unauthorized end users, thus increasing the chances of a successful ceasefire.

A “mini-CFE” could be fit for this purpose.¹⁰ It could act as a complement to other traditional components of a ceasefire—the armistice commission, possible peacekeeping troops and international observers operating on the ground—and strengthen their stabilizing effect.

The CFE Treaty already has inspired one arrangement of this kind. Article IV of the Dayton Peace Accords on Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was concluded in 1996 and provided the framework for negotiations on a subregional arms control agreement in the Balkans, used a process based on the CFE Treaty to ensure transparent withdrawal of the warring armies and subsequent equipment reductions. A “sub-regional expression of the CFE,” the Dayton agreement established numerical ceilings in the same five categories of heavy conventional armaments, resulting in the destruction of 6,580 heavy weapons.¹¹ In addition, the Dayton agreement provided for specific reduction methods, an extensive exchange of information and intrusive inspections. Although the political provisions of the Dayton Peace Accords, which created a state comprised of two multiethnic entities, have been criticized, their subregional arms control mechanism has been successfully implemented.¹²

The definitions, provisions, procedures, and categories for armaments limitation set forth in the CFE Treaty, its 1999 adaptation, and Article IV of the Dayton agreement could offer useful terms of reference for post-war negotiations in Ukraine regarding restrictions on military deployments in designated geographical areas; restrictions on location and withdrawal of heavy weapons; and numerical limits on holdings of agreed categories of armament, and their reduction. The CFE/Article IV categories would need to be updated to include a new generation of weapons that has emerged beyond the scope of those earlier agreements, namely unmanned aerial vehicles, which have had considerable impact on the war in Ukraine.

A prospective Russian-Ukrainian agreement also would have to set guidelines for the notification of certain planned military activities, including international military assistance and training programs; and the exchange of information and data, including on arms diversion which is a growing problem in wartime Ukraine.

Compliance with certain steps of the ceasefire—such as the withdrawal of heavy weapons, disarmament, destruction, and decommissioning of weapons—would need a verification mechanism. Although in recent years verification possibilities have been improved substantially, the far-reaching verification regime common to the CFE Treaty and Article IV could provide the combatants with a pattern that they could adapt.

Over the longer term, a CFE-inspired regime could facilitate the reunification with Ukraine of the four oblasts annexed by Russia. In this regard, West Germany is now considered a possible status model for Ukraine,¹³ supported by a growing part of the Ukrainian population.¹⁴ This model would ensure NATO membership for Kyiv-controlled parts of Ukraine—an option that remains a ‘no go’ for Moscow—and leave the 20 percent of Ukrainian territory under Russian control subject to future negotiation. In that context, it should be recalled that the CFE Treaty, by eliminating the potential for surprise attacks and assuring geostrategic restraint between the two Cold War blocs¹⁵, made the German reunification more acceptable to Russia.

The CFE Treaty is not the only post–Cold War relic that could be reinvigorated to frame the implementation of a ceasefire in Ukraine. The Open Skies Treaty, from which the United States withdrew in 2020, also could be used to support monitoring and observation of troop movements. Reinvigorating the mechanisms of the CFE and Open Skies treaties for the purpose of a ceasefire could serve as a starting point for rebuilding a much-needed arms control regime adapted to the existing geopolitical environment and able to succeed over the eroded post–Cold War mechanisms. As two experts outlined, the “specific arms control arrangements negotiated for Russia and Ukraine in the context of a durable armistice of that conflict might serve as a starting point for imagining a broader arms control regime fit for current purposes.”¹⁶ Arms control, including a CFE Treaty–inspired mechanism, would then be the condition for a successful ceasefire arrangement and for lasting peace-and-security in Europe.

The OSCE also could help advance a ceasefire in Ukraine and broader European stability. Although it had its own legal existence, the CFE Treaty was negotiated under the auspices of the Vienna-based organization and the upheavals that have shaken the treaty have mirrored those of the OSCE. After a decade of turmoil in Ukraine, the institution stands at an existential crossroad, undermined by divisions and fighting for its own political survival. However, as with the CFE Treaty, the OSCE still can be helpful. With the experience of and lessons learned from its Special Monitoring Mission, a cutting-edge peace operation in Ukraine in 2014–2022, the OSCE could monitor a ceasefire and its arms control component.

The rapidly changing war in Ukraine presents the CFE Treaty and its sister institution with new opportunities for advancing European stability.

ENDNOTES

1. U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Russia, “Secretary Rubio’s Meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov,” February, 18, 2025.

2. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, interview with the Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine, November 16, 2024, published online by The Kyiv Independent, November 16, 2024.

3. Zelenskyy, interview with Sky News, November 30, 2024.

4. Benedict Vigers, “Half of Ukrainians Want Quick, Negotiated End to War,” Gallup, November 19, 2024.

5. Charter of Paris for a New Europe, 1990.

6. Victoria Nuland, “Implementation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces In Europe,” U.S. Department of State, November 22, 2011.

7. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, “Foreign Ministry statement on the completion of the procedure for the Russian Federation’s withdrawal from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty),” November 7, 2023.

8. Craisor-Constantin Ionita, “Conventional and Hybrid Actions in the Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” Security & Defence Quarterly, 2023, Vol. 44, No. 4, p. 14.

9.  See for instance Press Statement of Special Representative Grau after the regular Meeting of Trilateral Contact Group on July 22, 2020.

10.  Robert Legvold, “Putin Invades Ukraine: Early Considerations for Arms Control and International Order,” Hoover Institution, December 19, 2022.

11.  Carlo Trezza, “Reviving the Florence disarmament agreement,” NATO Defence College Foundation, December 29, 2023.

12.  XIV Review Conference on implementation of Dayton Article IV Agreement, Vienna, November 7, 2024.

13.  Anchal Vohra, “Ukraine Could Be the Next West Germany,” Foreign Policy, July 10, 2023.

14.  Martin Fornusek, “70% of Ukrainians support ‘West German’ model for NATO accession, survey shows,” The Kyiv Independent, December 10, 2024.

15.  Article 3 of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany (September 12, 1990) refers to the CFE Treaty and to the commitment of the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany to reduce the strength of the armed forces of the united Germany.

16.  Samuel Charap and Jeremy Shapiro, “Elements of an Eventual Russia-Ukraine Armistice and the Prospect for Regional Stability in Europe,” Stimson Center, December 14, 2023.

March 2025 
By Thomas Countryman

The global architecture of arms control and nonproliferation is faltering. The risk of nuclear conflict is impossible to measure objectively but is certainly higher than at any time since 1962. All five nuclear-weapon states recognized under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT)—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—are studiously ignoring their legal obligation under Article VI of the treaty to negotiate in good faith on reducing and eliminating their nuclear arsenals, although each is articulate in explaining why this situation is not their fault.

Non-nuclear-weapon states, which encompass most of the rest of the world, view the lack of disarmament progress with alarm. The loss of faith in the nuclear-weapon states drove the most important step in disarmament in the last 10 years, entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Continued inaction on Article VI and the foreseeable transition from modernizing nuclear arsenals to an all-out arms race will turn alarm into despair, sapping the vitality of the NPT, which is the cornerstone of global efforts to prevent nuclear conflict.

A Promising Beginning

Fifteen years ago, the five NPT-designated nuclear-weapon states began a process that was intended to reassure the world that Article VI was being taken seriously: the P5 process of consultations among the senior nuclear policy officials, at the level of undersecretary or deputy minister, of the five states.¹ Launched amid the optimism generated by U.S. President Barack Obama’s Prague speech on arms control and the success of the 2010 NPT Review Conference, the process was intended to demonstrate that nuclear issues were a top priority of all five governments, requiring constant discussion and coordination, and not subject to the vicissitudes of global politics. Although some non-nuclear-weapon states complained that the P5 process was a “cartel,” and that the consultations served to maintain a permanent nuclear monopoly, most non-nuclear-weapon states welcomed the effort.

Since 2010, the P5 consultation process has broadly, if inconsistently, served three goals, all of which are shared by the five nations: to increase mutual understanding of each other’s nuclear doctrines and postures; reassure other NPT states-parties of the NPT’s continued vitality, as reflected in P5 joint statements on the importance of the nuclear test moratorium and on achieving NPT universality; and lay the groundwork for the good-faith negotiations that Article VI obliges the five nations to pursue.

The last meeting of P5 principals, as officials at the undersecretary and deputy foreign minister level are known, in December 2021 resulted in a historic statement by the five nations, namely that a “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” This statement, announced in January 2022 and first articulated by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan at their summit in Reykjavik in 1986, was broadly welcomed by the rest of the world, although during its negotiation, each of the P5 states insisted on adding text that diluted the powerful simplicity of the original Reagan-Gorbachev sentence.

Disrupted Contacts

Since Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, senior-level contacts among the P5 nations have all but stopped, on a bilateral basis and also within the P5 process that was intended to be compartmentalized from the broader political context. In the last three years, the P5 nations have been limited to less frequent meetings of officials two bureaucratic levels lower and they focused on only two important topics: nuclear posture and risk reduction. These meetings have been the only meaningful contact between Russian nuclear officials and their Western counterparts. Some participants say discussion at this level is often more substantive than at the senior level.

Despite the breakdown in contacts, the current moment offers an opportunity that the 2025-2026 chairman of the P5 process, the United Kingdom, must seize.² Maximizing such an opening will require ambition and decisiveness, traits not commonly associated with multilateral diplomacy or the P5 process, but of which the UK is more than capable.

The UK could inject new value into the process program that would increase the frequency of P5 meetings, expand the topics for discussion, raise the level of participation, and build on past success.

Ambition will be required because the P5, as with nearly all multilateral processes, operates on the basis of consensus. Extended disagreement over timing, venue, agenda, and participation level have long provided the excuse for avoiding more intensive engagement. A more ambitious process would be supportive of, and consistent with, U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent statements favoring a renewed denuclearization effort.

Reviving the P5 Process

As the new chair, the UK should lay out for its partners a schedule of nine or 10 meetings per year, to be held either in the UK or at a mutually agreeable site. The UK would need to insist firmly that disagreements over the best site not be allowed to interfere with the regularity of meetings. If there is a complaint that this schedule is too intense, then it should be noted that none of the disarmament officials in the five ministries are overworked in the current period.

The UK also could lead additional dialogues among arms control officials outside of national capitals. Without labeling them as official P5 meetings, or publicizing them, the UK ambassadors in Geneva and Vienna could host monthly lunches or coffees for counterparts, as was done before 2022.

No discussion topics should be forbidden, which is to say no one should have a veto over the agenda. The UK could prepare a list of specific topics with the aim of covering one in each of the regular meetings. Importantly, the list should include the topics that the UK is most eager to discuss, such as threats to use nuclear weapons, and also those it has been more reluctant to discuss, such as the potential for multilateral negotiations among the five states. (See box below for examples.) Having one topic as the primary subject does not imply that participants could not explore other topics on a consensual basis or continue discussion from a previous month.

To encourage the most open discussion possible, the primary goal of each meeting should not be to agree on a joint statement or communique. Although such joint statements are welcomed by other states, they tend to detract time and attention from the P5 effort to fully explain and understand each other’s positions. Each participant’s focus should be on substance, rather than on preparing post-meeting press statements.  Although the greatest possible transparency about nuclear postures and policies is in principle desirable, excessive media focus on any single meeting is not conducive to a frank exchange of views.

In each P5 capital, concerns about certain policy issues such as Ukraine, NATO, and Taiwan have increased resistance among governments to conducting business as usual, whether bilaterally or in a multilateral process such as the P5. The UK should seek to break through this impasse in the last few months of its 12-month term by inviting officials at the level of undersecretary and vice foreign minister—the level that attended previous meetings before the P5 process broke down—for the final session.

In the last three years, political leaders in London, Moscow, Paris, and Washington have resisted this kind of senior-level contact on a wide range of issues, insisting on “no business as usual” while the Russian war in Ukraine rages. To overcome this resistance, the UK would need to take a clear stance on the urgency of addressing the risk of nuclear conflict. Failure to assign this priority would be understood correctly by non-nuclear-weapon states as demonstrating lack of serious interest in arms control.

Consensus is as important in this process as in any other multilateral diplomatic process, but consensus should not mean simply allowing any one of the five states to avoid senior-level discussion of nuclear issues. UK insistence on elevating the discussion level ultimately would bring the others to participate at senior levels.

A Possible Outcome

Although the current focus of the P5 process should be on understanding one another’s positions, rather than on negotiating joint statements, there are some important topics on which P5 members share consensus, or near consensus, and could add value with their public reinforcement. These topics include building upon their 2022 statement that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The P5 states also should expand upon and embrace a 2022 declaration by Group of 20 leaders on the inadmissibility of nuclear threats.

In addition, the P5 should reaffirm a statement based upon the 1973 U.S.-Soviet Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War, which is still in effect. It pledges that they will “refrain from the threat or use of force against the other Party, against the allies of the other Party and against other countries, in circumstances which may endanger international peace and security” and commits them to consult during crises.

Other constructive moves would be a reaffirmation of P5 support for the de facto moratorium on nuclear testing and for entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and for the principle of prenotification of ballistic missile launches. They also should prepare a joint statement for the 2026 NPT Review Conference, as they did in 2015, and plan for how to achieve a consensus outcome at that conference.

The bottom line is that the international arms control architecture is broken. The P5 process is the handiest tool with which the major world powers can begin to repair it.

ENDNOTES

1. The author prefers the term “N5” to distinguish the status of the five nuclear-weapon states under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty from their status as permanent members of the UN Security Council; however, this article uses the name “P5 process” in keeping with its official name.

2. The author shared many of these ideas with Chinese officials at the outset of China’s 2024-2025 chairmanship.