A Facilitator We Can All Agree On
A potential threat left unaddressed becomes an actual threat through the simple fact of non-engagement.
It's also the oldest principle in arms-control history. The Helsinki Final Act of 1975 was negotiated while the USSR was actively oppressing Eastern Europe. The Hotline existed because deterrence required someone to answer the phone. Lately, Finnish President Alexander Stubb's statement, "We are neighboring countries to Russia...the outcome of this war will have a direct impact on our security," casts it as a matter of geography — and therefore pressing — because geography alone is non-negotiable.
Finland shares a 1,340 km border. Norway shares 198 km plus the entire Arctic maritime frontier. Neither can afford the luxury of dignified silence. Into the middle leaps Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen with warning about hybrid warfare, documented cable cuts, drone incursions over Copenhagen and Oslo airports, GPS jamming over the Baltics, etc. It is alarmist, if not an actual alarm. The implicit fear is that if the opposite sides come together, the conflict will reach critical mass.
A more nuanced assessment is that deterrent posture is what makes the phone call safe. Stubb can ring Putin because Finland is in NATO. Had he done it in 2021, the call would have been read as capitulation by a weak state. It's read as normalization now because the costs of coercion have been raised. Remove the "threat" framing and you remove the reason Moscow answers at all. Threats should be met, not fled, and meeting them includes building the capability that forces the other side to the table, not just calling 911 after the fire breaks out.
Those aren't contradictory; they're sequential. Denmark's objection wasn't "don't talk to Putin." It was "don't talk to him unilaterally." That's a procedural complaint about mandate, not a rejection of dialogue. The E5 communiqué calling Russia "the most acute and long-term threat" and the call itself are compatible positions: hold the line, test the exits. Coalitions are built from disagreement managed in public. The media provide the narrative engineering.
A selective quotation is characterization. Stubb's "frank and substantive" comment, and Støre's near-identical phrasing infer choreography ("as though the two leaders had copied their carefully chosen words"). What it omits is the other half of both readouts — that they spoke "as leaders of their respective countries and did not speak on behalf of Europe as a whole."
"Or was it a coordinated performance?" —is being clever: it gives NATO the appearance of unity, and the NATO conspiracy story simultaneously, without committing to either. If the coordination theory is true, the West is duplicitous. If it's false, the West is fractious. Either way Moscow benefits from the ambiguity —which is precisely why the question is asked rather than answered.
What's missing in the latest flap is that Trump has tilted toward Putin in recent days — casting doubt on Zelensky, agreeing to buy Russian diesel, lifting sanctions, restricting Starlink and early-warning access for Kyiv; and, added to that, the call was pre-briefed: it was prepared in consultation with Ukraine and the US after the Oslo meeting of Zelensky, the Nordic leaders and Steve Witkoff.
- Tusk was briefed beforehand
- Costa was briefed
- Kristersson was looped in shortly before
That last omission is the seam. The third-party moderator proposal is the hard problem. Neither NATO, nor Russia, nor anyone allied to either could participate, since it's a party to the dispute. The obstacle is definitional, not logistical. Every third-party disqualifies on inspection:
- Türkiye: NATO member, hosts Bayraktar sales to Ukraine, controls the Montreux regime;
- China: Strategic partner to Russia, veto-wielder, no credibility in Kyiv;
- India or Brazil: Nonaligned in form, but both bought discounted Russian crude throughout the war;
- Saudi Arabia or UAE: Already hosting the Abu Dhabi round, but OPEC coordination with Moscow disqualifies strict neutrality;
- Switzerland: Custodian of Western interests in Russia, genuine candidate, but small-state leverage limits authority;
- African Union: Credible as convenor, but lacks any coercive instrument;
- Holy See: Morally authoritative, but structurally incapable of guaranteeing terms;
Ukraine cannot be a moderator. It is a principal party. The paradox is that excluding it undermines credibility; including it destroys neutrality. There is no state that is simultaneously neutral, capable of enforcement, and acceptable to Moscow. That's not an oversight in the search space. It's the structural condition of the conflict.
But there's a workaround, and it's the one already in motion. You don't need a neutral state. You need a neutral venue plus a guarantor whose interest is in the deal closing rather than in the outcome favoring one side. That's why Abu Dhabi matters — not because the UAE is impartial, but because it is transactional, and transactions can be balanced.
Suggested Next Step:
Not a summit. Summits are where unfinished work goes to fail publicly. The concrete increment is smaller and more durable: Institutionalize the Nordic channel as a standing liaison, explicitly mandated rather than improvised. The call's real defect wasn't that it happened; it was that it happened without a mandate — which let Frederiksen attack it on procedural grounds, and let the Kremlin exploit the appearance of Western division. Fix the procedure and the same conversation becomes coalition policy instead of national self-interest.
Put Concretely:
Mandate retroactively. Have the European Council or the coalition of the willing formally designate Finland and Norway as contacts-of-record for the Russian delegation, with reporting obligations to Brussels. This converts an unauthorized act into delegated authority — the mechanism NATO has used for decades with its own Moscow liaison office.
Attach a Ukrainian seat. Sybiha's response was telling: "every decision which supports peace efforts is timely," and the ask for a "new role for Europe in our peace efforts." Ukraine must sit in the room, not be represented by Scandinavians. It is, and should be the center of any action.
The Oleshky template is already a limited, territorially expanded ceasefire guaranteeing humanitarian convoy passage, credited to Melania Trump's mediation. Small, verifiable, geographically-bounded ceasefires are the only confidence building measure that has worked. Replicate the formula with narrow-scope, third-party monitors, with defined duration, and mutual verification.
Three or four of these build the machinery a comprehensive agreement requires.
Looking beyond:
Fix the calendar. Abu Dhabi is provisionally set for November 4. Nothing should preempt it. The Nordic channel feeds it; it doesn't compete with it.
The uncomfortable part is over persistent doubts (unspoken) about a “coordinated” settlement. It is wrong in its mechanics but not entirely wrong in its diagnosis. Europe is exploring an exit strategy, and it is doing so because the USA has become unreliable — diesel purchases, sanctions relief, the Lukoil and Nord Stream conversations, restrictions on Starlink and early-warning systems. Stubb and Støre didn't call Putin out of sudden affection. They called because the American mediator may be negotiating against one of the parties.
That's not cynicism detected. It's alliance management under conditions of doubtful patronage — the same logic that drove de Gaulle out of NATO's command structure in 1966 and Brandt eastward in 1969. Neither was betrayal. Both were hedging.
Which returns to the point about diplomatic ambiguity. Diplomatic language avoids finality by design. That vagueness isn't a flaw to be corrected. It's the shock-absorbing component. Frederiksen can say "very skeptical" and Tusk can say "I was briefed" and Zelensky can say "grateful" and the Kremlin can issue maximalist demands about Russian interests being met "unconditionally" — and the call still happens, and Abu Dhabi is still scheduled.
Exactness would require everyone to commit, and commitment is precisely what no party can currently afford.