WASHINGTON – Former Pentagon official Laura Cooper says a cease-fire is the necessary first step in Ukraine – both to halt civilian casualties and to set terms for credible talks. Calling the August 18 White House meeting with European leaders and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a good recovery” after Vladimir Putin “got a pass” at the Anchorage summit, Cooper adds: “I think ceasefire a is critical. In the first place, it stops the killing.”
Cooper argues Moscow is not yet ready to negotiate in good faith. “Putin isn’t ready to make peace,” she says. “That’s why you have to push for the a ceasefire first.”
She outlines what Article 5-like security guarantees could look like short of NATO membership for Ukraine. Any ground presence must have a defined mission – more than a mere “tripwire” –and should be paired with air-domain measures such as NATO-style air policing or air-domain awareness. She also urges a maritime component in the Black Sea to protect Ukrainian shipping, noting “there’s room for some creativity and some collaboration across the allies.”
On assistance, Cooper says deliveries continue despite political debate. Long-lead contracts under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative are now producing additional systems, including HIMARS launchers and NASAMS air defenses. “The US assistance pipeline hasn’t totally ground to a halt,” she says, adding that canceling existing orders “without any particular military necessity… would be contrary to the law that governs the security assistance program.”
Cooper urges Washington and European partners to augment the pipeline – potentially drawing on Russian sovereign assets and the U.S.-Ukraine critical-minerals framework – while Europe expands its own production lines. Security assistance shouldn’t pause now, she says, because “now is when they could have the most impact toward that lasting peace.”
The following interview was recorded on August 20, 2025, and has been edited for length and clarity.
Independence Avenue Media Editor in Chief Ia Meurmishvili: Do you think we’re closer to peace in Ukraine after the August 18 meeting at the White House?
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (2017-2025) Laura Cooper: I would say I was very encouraged by the amazing show of support from the European allies for [Ukraine’s] President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy. I was really gratified to see how they were all coming together to show unity. But it really was two steps forward after one step back. And the one step back was back on Friday, the week before the Anchorage summit, where Putin just really got a pass. He wasn’t asked to sign up to the ceasefire that is so critical. He was given tremendous honors. He was treated like a hero, not like a war criminal. So in the context of Monday’s meeting at the White House, it was a good recovery.
Meurmishvili: President Trump responded vocally to accusations that he came out on a losing side of that meeting. Would you say that it was a loss for the United States in Alaska?
Cooper: Well, I think it isn’t wrong to want to use diplomacy to drive forward peace and to reach a solution that stops the killing. So that’s a noble mission and it’s a cause that I appreciate that President [Donald] Trump is taking up the mantle for. At the same time, to go to all of that effort to make sure that the setting was right, to make sure that the [U.S.] president freed up his calendar. And then to really not walk away with anything and to also not walk away with a clear strategy for how to get to a ceasefire, that’s the damage to U.S. national security and to the security of our allies in Europe.
Meurmishvili: Do you think a ceasefire is important in this process of getting to the peace deal?
Cooper: I think a ceasefire is critical. In the first place, it stops the killing. We just had on Monday of this week, an entire family that was slaughtered in Kharkiv, two children, and these kinds of attacks are happening day after day. So a ceasefire would stop that. And that is what President Trump has said he wants to achieve.
But in terms of Putin’s goals, we know that he doesn’t want to cease fire precisely because he is not ready to actually make peace. He wants to keep pushing on the battlefield. He thinks he can win at this point, even though Western military analysts look at how slow his troops’ progress has been. And they say, well, it would take four and a half years for you to actually capture just the territories in Donbas that you’re trying to get for free. But Putin is going to keep pressing and pressing and pressing, and he is not going to negotiate in good faith an actual peace settlement. So unless we can get a ceasefire, we will be facing this prolonged misery and these fierce attacks from Russia.
Meurmishvili: The Kremlin is now suggesting that the bilateral meeting between President Zelenskyy and President Putin can happen if Zelenskyy goes to Moscow. Do you think that can happen?
Cooper: Well, I think the reality is even if the meeting happened tomorrow anywhere in the world, Putin isn’t ready to make peace. So I don’t think that anything would result of the meeting. Putin is a master at the Russian art of using negotiations, stringing out negotiations to be able to achieve what you want, whether it’s on the battlefield or elsewhere. I wouldn’t expect that any such meeting would bear fruit now. That’s why you have to push for the ceasefire first. At the same time, it would be completely unreasonable to expect President Zelenskyy to go to Moscow, to the capital of the war criminals.
Meurmishvili: Some people are suggesting that if he goes, maybe he will not even come back alive from Russia.
Cooper: Well, I think one can expect anything, anything from the Russians at this point.
Meurmishvili: What do you make of this “Article 5-like” security guarantees for Ukraine? Europeans are talking about security guarantees. Ukraine has been asking for security guarantees since as early as even during the Biden administration. Do you have an idea of the framework – how can this work when Ukraine is not a member of NATO?
Cooper: So I think this is a topic that requires a lot of unpacking and a lot of discussion and debate among allies – not with Russia in the room – but among allies to figure out how each of the countries that is supporting Ukraine can come together to offer something that collectively represents security guarantees that will in fact deter future Russian aggression, because that’s the whole point here.
We’ll reach an end to the war at some point. Those security guarantees are the mechanism that will push back against future aggression. I think that when you talk about security guarantees, there’s a fixation right now with the troops on the ground element of it, which is really important.
But I’d like to take a step back and look at what are all the elements that it could include. Because I think there’s room for some creativity and some collaboration across the allies.
So the ground element – there’s a lot of decisions that have to be made. What is their mission? Is this a – I’ve heard – reassurance force? Well, what’s a reassurance force? [Is it] just a tripwire? Or I’ve also heard deterrence force, which sounds a bit more like a UN Chapter Seven peace enforcement mission, which is a completely different end of the spectrum. You have such a long, long line of contact to cover. The numbers that we’re hearing from Europeans that they could come up with would not be able to cover [it]. You’re talking like over a thousand kilometers here, they would not be able to cover the full extent of it. So I think there’s questions about the ground component. And, what its mission? But that leaves a lot of other military aspects. What about the air component? We heard President Trump expressing some openness to the U.S. playing a role in the air domain.
Well, [there are] options there. It could be as simple as air domain awareness, which would tie into the military intelligence sharing that the U.S. has been doing and that the US has exquisite capabilities for[, but] it could also be something like an air policing mission that is something that NATO is very familiar with. So they have to sort out what is that air mission.
And then the thing that I’m not hearing anybody talking about – and I’m not sure why – is the maritime domain. We know that Ukraine is dependent on the Black Sea. Ukraine needs the Black Sea to get its goods to market, to get its grain to market, its other commodities to market.
We know that Russia has a long history of harassing Ukrainian shipping way before the full-scale invasion in 2022. Is there a role for US or other NATO allies to have patrols in the Black Sea? Perhaps you could have the littoral states, including Turkey, which controls access to the Black Sea, coming together with the U.S. for some maritime mission. So there’s lots of different aspects that we need to tease out.
And then the second component of the security guarantee is really the Ukrainian Armed Forces themselves. They need a long-term pledge of support for the equipment that will allow them to not just recover from this grievous war, but also build higher technology capability to deter future Russian aggression.
Because everyone knows that in a new fight, if Russia goes back to war with Ukraine, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are going to be the front lines. So building that capability for the Ukrainian Armed Forces has to be part of the security assurances. And there’s mechanisms. This doesn’t have to be a breaking the bank situation. You have the 300 [billion U.S. dollars] in sovereign assets, Russian sovereign assets, those could be tapped into. You have the minerals deal that the US has made with Ukraine where military assistance counts towards capital investments in that fund. There’s a lot of mechanisms that can be tapped into for the security assistance part of the security assurances.
Then the other piece that nobody seems to be talking about is there’s an economic component. If Russia emerges from this war with a position where they are cooperative in enabling Ukrainian sovereignty, there’s still going to be a question about sanctions relief and there’s going to be a question about future sanctions.
You could have in the security guarantees an economic component in which allies make specific commitments to take actions against Russia’s economy in a way that would have more surefire effects perhaps than we saw at the beginning of this war. So this is a really important topic to delve into further.
Meurmishvili: Listening to you, I get the sense that you don’t think that the peace is not really close at this point, unfortunately.
Cooper: Well, I think we have to work through these issues with the allies. I think we have some military planners getting together today, actually, to start to think through these things. We have to work through issues with the Ukrainians to make sure that we’re all on the same page in terms of what security guarantees look like. And we have to put pressure on Russia. Having solid security guarantees is one form of pressure, but it’s not immediate enough to actually get Russia to be ready to truly go to the negotiating table. So I think we need to follow through on the sanctions that President Trump threatened. He started with secondary sanctions on India. China’s still out there and they are still pouring money into the Russian economy with their energy imports.
And then I think we have to have that pressure on the battlefield. We can’t stop security assistance flows to Ukraine now is when they could have the most impact toward that lasting peace.
Meurmishvili: Is there an equipment or type of assistance that the U.S. can provide to Ukraine that will be a game changer on the balance?
Cooper: I think throughout this whole war, we’ve been looking for game changers and I wouldn’t say that there is one weapon or one weapon system that can do that. A part of the problem is quantity, not just quality. You need a lot of just about anything to really have a game changing impact and there’s a limit to what you can get out of U.S. and allied inventory, just based on what defense industry can produce.
But that doesn’t mean that assistance right now isn’t really important and again critical to bringing Russia to the negotiating table.
From the pipeline of U.S. assistance from the last administration, we certainly know that there was a large drawdown package that will only last so long. So I wouldn’t expect that the Ukrainian Armed Forces will benefit from these routine deliveries like they have in the past of basic ammunition, basic air defense interceptors, those sorts of things. But you also have Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. And that’s the one that takes a long time because you have to go out to industry and you have to get industry to actually produce things. But in a sense, it’s good news now because there’s things are that were put on contract two years ago that are just now producing.
So there’s more HIMARS coming their way. There’s more NASAMs, air defense systems coming their way. So the U.S. assistance pipeline hasn’t totally ground to a halt. I think it would be very beneficial to the negotiations for the administration to look at how to augment that pipeline. Again, it doesn’t have to all be purely from the U.S. budget. There’s opportunities to use the critical minerals deal, there’s opportunities to use Russian sovereign assets, but I think they should look at how to augment that very limited pipeline right now and the pipeline that the Europeans have in order to push negotiations across the finish line.
Meurmishvili: Is there a way for anyone to stop that – particularly President Trump –if he says, “everything failed; the U.S. is out.” Can those orders that were placed two years ago be stopped at this point?
Cooper: Well, I think you get into legal territory here because if the orders were just stopped out of the blue without any particular military necessity on the part of the United States, that would be contrary to the law that governs the security assistance program. It’s a different scenario if there’s an emergency situation for US forces where they would perhaps need something. That’s a different scenario. But otherwise that assistance would keep flowing.
Meurmishvili: What do you think about this idea of Europeans paying for some of the assistance that Ukraine is getting? Is that a sustainable path to continue?
Cooper: Well, I think for the Europeans, this is particularly challenging because they are looking to fire up their own defense industrial base and they’re actually doing a great job of it. [Especially] if you look at German industry, it’s amazing what they are producing today in terms of volume and in terms of quality versus just a few years ago. So they have to focus on their own defense industry. But at the same time, now they’re sending funding to U.S. defense industry.
I think that in the near term, in the next couple of years even, this probably is something that is sustainable. But I would imagine that the Europeans would want to be looking at substitute capabilities because subsidizing US defense industry might not be something that they want to do in the long haul.
Meurmishvili: I’d love to continue the Ukraine conversation, but I also want to take advantage of your time and talk about other countries as well. Armenia and Azerbaijan signed the peace deal at the White House. What do you think that means? Do you think that deal has brought peace to the Caucasus after it was signed?
Cooper: I would say I’m pretty optimistic about that deal. It has been a long time coming. I think both Armenia and Azerbaijan recognize that through this deal, they actually reinforce their own sovereignty. Because this is a deal where they’re building their ties in a way that can enable cross regional trade with the West. So it actually can connect the Caucasus with the West in a way that previously was only possible through very limited routes in Georgia.
So it reinforces that bridge to the West. It also essentially kicks Russia out because Russia played absolutely no role in making this happen and in fact was a huge obstacle to peace. We know that both Armenia and Azerbaijan want to stand on their own two feet. They don’t want to face malign Russian influence or occupation. This is the first step.
That said, it’s just the first step. There’s a lot of work that has to be done to actually get this transit area up and running. There’s a U.S. company that will oversee this, but there are physical infrastructure issues, and then there’s also a lot of procedural and political issues that will still need to be worked through.
It’ll be really, really important for the Trump administration to keep nurturing this success and keep engaging. There’s lots of things that can be done in terms of engagement with both countries to keep this deal alive until it is truly solid because the Armenian parliament still needs to ratify it, which could take a couple of years.
Meurmishvili: Armenia would also need to make some constitutional changes before even ratifying the peace deal. Armenia seems to be in a more vulnerable situation. Do you think the US is giving enough support to Armenia? We should also mention that Armenia signed a strategic partnership agreement with the United States during the last administration. Where do you see that relationship now?
Cooper: So think there’s a lot more that can and should be done in terms of the U.S. investing in Armenia’s security. I don’t think it should be to the exclusion of also deepening the partnership with Azerbaijan because to the extent that the U.S. is engaged in all three countries of the region, I think it actually bolsters each country’s security.
But for Armenia specifically, my concern is that the people of Armenia aren’t going to see the benefits of this agreement for quite some time. And so it’s important to show that there are benefits and that there is a significant increase in the US relationship with Armenia and really the Western relationship with Armenia. It has really strong ties with many Western European countries as well.
That can take a lot of forms. I would have said economic assistance would have been one. This administration has chosen to dismantle most of the economic assistance architecture. Certainly military to military cooperation is another terrific one. That’s something that the U.S. European command has already worked on. They’ve agendaed up exercises with Armenia and they can continue.
They can bring in the Kansas National Guard, which is the state partner for Armenia, maybe in tandem with bringing in the Oklahoma National Guard over in Azerbaijan. So there’s a lot of concrete, tangible things that we can do to show the people of Armenia and the people of Azerbaijan, we’re there for you.
Meurmishvili: State of Georgia National Guard has a military partnership with the country of Georgia. And I would like to ask you a couple of questions about Georgia. During the Biden administration due to some domestic processes in Georgia, administration paused military exercises with Georgia. This year we saw that an exercises resumed. What do you think about that – was it the right decision to pause it and is it the right decision to renew it? How do you see U.S.-Georgia military partnership from your vantage point?
Cooper: I think it was absolutely the right decision to have the military exercise. We are in a really dark place right now with Georgia, with the turning back from all sorts of reforms that were intended to strengthen Georgia and build Georgia’s ties to the West, build its EU path. The current government has turned its back on that. Instead, in many ways, [Georgian Government] embraced Russia in a way that I find unimaginable from the early days of my working with Georgia, that there would be such a strong sense of cooperation with Russia today in Georgia.
So I think that in this dark, dark situation, the thing we have to avoid is showing the Georgian people that we’ve turned our back on them. We know how the Georgian defense forces are important in the hearts of Georgians. We know they’re the heart and soul of the Georgian nation. So continuing to cooperate with them, to provide them with the training that they can use to legitimately defend Georgian interests, I think this is exactly what we need to continue to do even as we press the government to turn back to the West and to pursue reforms.
Meurmishvili: The U.S. was and is supporting Georgia’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, non-recognition policy towards the Russia occupied territories of Georgia. Do you think that’s important? Why is the U.S. doing that? And is it important for the Georgians to continue receiving this support?
Cooper: I think it’s incredibly important for us to stand up for the sovereignty of Georgia. I think it’s important for the people of Georgia who are in a very difficult situation now. They need to know that the United States still stands up for their sovereignty. And it’s incredibly important as a message to Russia. Russia can’t think that it can get away with taking other countries’ territory and calling it independent or calling it part of Russia. If we give in on this question of Georgian sovereignty, it certainly affects how Russia would think about our stance on other countries, Ukraine, but there’s Moldova out there. This is not just an isolated case. So it’s important for us to continue to stand up for sovereignty.
Meurmishvili: Is there anything else you would like to say in 30 seconds before you have to go?
Cooper: Well, I’m just, I’m excited about Independence Avenue Media. This is a great new outlet and I wish you the best of luck with it.
