Evaluating International Involvement in Modern Conflicts

An evidence-based framework for separating combat, support, interests and influence

Policy brief. The Russia–Ukraine war is used throughout as the illustrative case; the framework is intended to apply to other modern conflicts.

1. Purpose and Method

Involvement in a modern conflict exists at several distinct levels, and conflating them obscures rather than clarifies the picture. This brief separates combat, support, interests and influence, then sets out a method for testing each actor against the same standard.

The framework is subject to the scrutiny it demands of others. To make that possible, every claim in this document belongs to one of four categories:

• Documented fact — what happened, who did what, what agreements say.
• Attributed position — what Russia, Ukraine, NATO, the US and others say their interests or motives are.
• Analytical inference — what those facts may reasonably suggest, without claiming to know anyone’s private motives.
• Framework proposal — the mechanism this brief proposes for handling the problem.

2. Mapping Involvement

Neither side of the war is isolated, and a two-camp picture (“Russia and Ukraine versus everyone else”) is too crude. Four categories give a better map:

Combatants (documented fact). Russia and Ukraine are the principal state parties conducting the war. The full-scale invasion began on 24 February 2022, but the conflict dates to 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and fighting began in Donetsk and Luhansk involving Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces.

Supporting Ukraine (documented fact). The US, UK, EU member states, Canada, Australia and others have supplied weapons, ammunition, intelligence, training, funding and humanitarian assistance. NATO states collectively provide the large majority of Ukraine’s military aid, but NATO as an alliance is not formally a combatant. The UK alone has committed £16 billion in military support and trained more than 63,000 Ukrainian personnel.

Supporting Russia (attributed position — NATO’s assessment). Belarus provides territory and infrastructure for Russian operations; North Korea provides military support including ammunition; Iran provides military technology including drones; China is described as a major enabler of Russia’s defence-industrial capacity through dual-use materials.

Interested external actors. Countries affected through sanctions, energy, food security, refugee flows and spillover incidents, plus investors, international institutions and neighbouring states.

An important distinction: NATO countries support Ukraine, but NATO and Russia are not formally fighting a conventional war against one another.

3. Root Causes and Underlying Questions

The causes operate on several layers, each raising a different question.

3.1 Territory and Sovereignty

Fact: Russia occupies roughly 20% of Ukraine’s internationally recognised territory (Council on Foreign Relations estimate) and has formally attempted to annex Crimea and four regions — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Ukraine and most of the international community do not recognise the annexations.

Question: Who controls which territory, and who decides Ukraine’s borders?

3.2 Ukraine’s Geopolitical Direction

Fact: Since independence Ukraine has developed closer relationships with the EU and NATO. In December 2021 Russia demanded that NATO halt expansion and that Ukraine be barred from joining; the US and NATO rejected the demands.

Attributed positions: Russia’s stated security concerns include NATO expansion, Western military infrastructure near its borders and the broader European security architecture. NATO and Ukraine reject the proposition that these concerns give Russia authority over Ukraine’s sovereign choices.

Framework position: The framework distinguishes between a claimed security interest and a resulting entitlement to territorial or political control.

3.3 The 2014 Rupture

Fact: In 2013–14, mass protests erupted after President Yanukovych backed away from closer integration with the EU; he subsequently fled. Russia seized Crimea and armed conflict broke out in eastern Ukraine. The Minsk agreements aimed at a political settlement, but fighting continued through the Russian military buildup of 2021–22 and into the full-scale invasion. The war did not begin in 2022.

3.4 The Broader European Security Order

Attributed positions: Russia argues the post-Cold-War order threatens its security and disregards its interests. NATO’s position is that Russia cannot use force to determine what its neighbours are permitted to do.

Questions that should not be collapsed into one: Where should NATO’s eastern boundary be? How much influence should Russia have over former Soviet states? Does a sovereign country have unrestricted freedom to choose its alliances? Can a major power establish a sphere of influence? Where does legitimate national security end and another country’s sovereignty begin? What security guarantees would prevent another war?

Note: Explaining a party’s stated security concerns is not the same as accepting them as justification for invasion. Equally, documenting Western support for Ukraine does not mean every Western policy choice caused the war.

4. The Host Nation’s Proposal

Framework proposal. Before external interests are evaluated, the country in which the conflict is occurring should be able to define its own minimum requirements. The principle is: define with people, not for them.

The host nation’s proposal should set out its:

• territorial and constitutional position
• security requirements
• economic and reconstruction requirements
• environmental and heritage requirements
• minority and regional protections
• what external assistance it accepts
• what forms of external control it rejects
• what it is prepared to negotiate

Every external actor then responds to that proposal, rather than the host nation responding to competing external agendas.

5. Interest Is Not Authority

Framework proposal. This is the intellectual centre of the framework. A state may have a legitimate interest in another country’s security, trade, resources, infrastructure, historical relationships or regional stability without that interest creating authority over that country.

• Security concern does not automatically equal territorial control.
• Economic investment does not automatically equal ownership.
• Historical connection does not automatically equal sovereignty.
• Military support does not automatically equal political authority.
• Geographic proximity does not automatically create a right of intervention.

Having an interest in something is not the same as having authority over it.

6. Conflicting Interests

The aim at this stage is not to decide which interests are legitimate. List them first; test them afterwards. Interests overlap in some areas and collide in others.

1. Security vs sovereignty. Russia may seek security from perceived NATO expansion; Ukraine seeks freedom to choose its alliances; Western states favour arrangements where states retain freedom of alignment. Can Russia obtain meaningful security assurances without a veto over Ukraine’s sovereign choices?

2. Territorial control vs negotiated access. Russia seeks control of areas it considers vital; Ukraine seeks restoration of territorial sovereignty; others want secure access to trade routes and markets. Does a strategic interest require control of territory, or can it be met through agreements governing access?

3. Economic access vs resource sovereignty. Ukraine wants reconstruction and revenue while controlling its resources; Western investors want returns; Russia may not want Western economic influence consolidated next door; local communities want jobs but also land, water and health. Who benefits from extraction, who controls it, and who carries the long-term costs? The scale is real: the joint World Bank–Ukraine–EU–UN assessment of February 2026 put recovery and reconstruction needs at almost $588 billion over ten years, nearly three times Ukraine’s 2025 GDP.

4. Immediate reconstruction vs long-term sustainability. Investors and governments want speed; populations need jobs; environmental and heritage interests may require slower development. Does rebuilding quickly create problems that become expensive or impossible to reverse?

5. Military assistance vs economic influence. A state carrying substantial costs may acquire political influence simply by doing so. Does paying for something create authority over the recipient?

6. Security guarantees vs neutrality. Ukraine may seek binding external guarantees; Russia may seek limits on alliances and foreign military infrastructure. What arrangement protects Ukraine without creating one another party regards as intolerable?

7. Historical relationship vs modern sovereignty. Russia may view Ukraine through centuries of shared history; Ukraine’s modern statehood rests on post-1991 sovereignty. How can historical continuity be acknowledged without becoming an automatic claim of ownership?

8. European integration vs Russian regional influence. Can Ukraine develop ties with Europe while Russia’s legitimate regional security concerns are addressed, without granting Russia control over Ukraine?

9. American influence vs Russian influence. The US has acquired a formal economic interest in aspects of Ukraine’s resource development; Russia has its own security, territorial and regional interests. Analytical inference: Russia may see growing American economic involvement as growing American strategic influence next door. That is a possibility, not a proven explanation of Russian motives. The useful question is not who is right but: does either party need the level of influence it seeks to achieve its stated objective?

10. Reconstruction vs geopolitical positioning. International institutions are working to mobilise private capital and political-risk insurance. Is reconstruction primarily about rebuilding Ukraine, or another arena in which external powers compete for influence?

11. National interests vs local interests. A national government may approve a mine, pipeline, railway or facility; the people beside it bear most of the consequences. Who gets to say yes?

12. Economic efficiency vs heritage. Efficient projects may destroy archaeological sites, historic landscapes, traditional communities, farmland, forests or waterways. Is economic value automatically worth more than the culturally irreplaceable? The framework should not answer this in advance; it should require the competing values to be explicitly identified.

13. National security vs environmental protection. A strategically useful installation may damage an ecosystem. The framework applies a hierarchy: avoid → minimise → redesign → relocate → restore → compensate. Compensation should not automatically turn irreversible damage into an acceptable purchase.

14. Short-term political survival vs long-term national interest. Governments operate on political timescales; land and ecosystems on decades or centuries. Can a government make a decision whose consequences will be carried by people who had no voice in it?

15. Investor risk vs public liability. Investors may ask governments to guarantee their risk. Who owns the upside, and who carries the downside if the project fails?

16. Sanctions vs economic interdependence. Sanctions impose costs on Russia, but Europe and Russia have been closely interconnected, particularly in energy. When does economic pressure advance security objectives, and when does it create costs or dependencies that undermine them? This is why the framework examines second-order effects, not only whether a policy sounds justified.

17. Global interests vs national interests. Food exports, Black Sea access, energy infrastructure and reconstruction affect actors outside Ukraine, creating legitimate external interests — but interest is not authority.

Interests that cannot be reconciled

Some interests genuinely collide. One party demanding permanent territorial control and another demanding restoration of that territory are not two modular preferences that can both be accommodated. The framework therefore needs a second stage.

The Conflict-of-Interest Test

For every identified interest, ask of every actor:The Conflict-of-Interest Test is actually one of the strongest parts of the framework, and it can be expanded to ask questions that follow a proper due-diligence sequence.

The UN Charter already provides a useful baseline around sovereign equality, territorial integrity, peaceful settlement, and negotiation, mediation, arbitration and other peaceful mechanisms.

The Conflict-of-Interest Test

For every identified interest, ask of every actor, regardless of power, wealth, military capability or political alignment:

1. What is actually being sought?

Strip away the political language.

Is the actor asking for:

• territory?
• security guarantees?
• military restrictions?
• access to resources?
• investment opportunities?
• trade access?
• infrastructure access?
• political influence?
• diplomatic recognition?
• cultural protections?
• sanctions relief?
• military bases?
• control over a particular corridor?
• compensation?
• reconstruction contracts?

The first task is to establish the actual requested outcome, rather than relying on broad statements such as security, stability, protection or national interest.

2. Why is it being sought?

What problem is the actor saying this would solve?

And is that explanation:

• historical?
• economic?
• military?
• political?
• cultural?
• humanitarian?
• environmental?
• commercial?
• strategic?

The stated reason should be recorded separately from the requested outcome.

Need and demand are not automatically the same thing.

3. What evidence supports the stated need?

What evidence demonstrates that the problem actually exists?

And what evidence demonstrates that the proposed solution would address it?

This prevents a claim such as we need this territory for security from automatically becoming an accepted premise.

The questions become:

What security problem exists?

What evidence demonstrates it?

Why is territorial control necessary to solve it?

What alternative mechanisms have been considered?

4. What is the minimum mechanism required?

This may be one of the most important questions in the entire framework.

If an actor wants something, ask:

What is the minimum amount of access, control or authority actually required to achieve the stated objective?

For example:

Security requirement

Does it require occupation?

Or could it be addressed through:

• arms limitations
• demilitarised zones
• inspection regimes
• notification mechanisms
• defensive guarantees
• military transparency
• monitoring
• communications channels
• reciprocal restrictions?

Resource requirement

Does it require ownership?

Or could it be:

• a concession
• royalty arrangement
• joint venture
• fixed-term licence
• purchase agreement
• infrastructure partnership?

This is where your interest is not authority principle becomes operational.

5. What control does the proposed mechanism actually create?

A proposal may appear limited but create substantial indirect control.

So ask:

• Who owns the asset?
• Who operates it?
• Who controls access?
• Who controls the money?
• Who controls the data?
• Who controls the infrastructure?
• Who can terminate the arrangement?
• Who can change the terms?
• Who controls security around it?
• Who controls what happens when the agreement ends?

This catches situations where formal ownership remains with one party while practical control migrates somewhere else.

6. Can the objective be achieved without territorial control?

This deserves its own question because it is so central to your framework.

If someone says:

We need security.

Ask:

What security arrangement satisfies that requirement without controlling another country’s territory?

If someone says:

We need access to resources.

Ask:

What commercial arrangement provides that access without transferring sovereignty or destroying the resource base?

If someone says:

We need influence.

Ask:

What legitimate diplomatic or economic relationship provides that influence without controlling another country’s political decisions?

This doesn’t mean territorial arrangements are automatically illegitimate.

It means necessity has to be demonstrated rather than assumed.

7. Who benefits?

Identify the beneficiaries at each level:

• national government
• regional government
• local communities
• workers
• investors
• foreign governments
• corporations
• military institutions
• infrastructure operators
• future generations

Then ask:

Is the distribution of benefits proportional to the contribution and risk?

8. Who bears the cost?

This is the other half of the previous question.

Costs can include:

• financial costs
• military costs
• civilian casualties
• displacement
• environmental damage
• loss of agricultural land
• cultural loss
• infrastructure damage
• debt
• future maintenance
• pollution
• resource depletion
• political dependency

A proposal cannot properly be assessed by examining its benefits while treating its costs as somebody else’s problem.

9. Who bears the irreversible cost?

I’d actually separate this from ordinary cost.

Some costs can be reversed.

Others cannot.

For example:

• a damaged road can be rebuilt
• money can be repaid
• equipment can be replaced

But:

• a destroyed archaeological site
• an extinct species
• contaminated groundwater
• permanently displaced communities
• destroyed cultural heritage

may not be recoverable.

So ask:

What happens if the project fails, and which consequences cannot be undone?

That should carry particular weight in the decision process.

10. What does the actor contribute?

Every proposal should state what the proposing actor actually brings.

That could be:

• capital
• technology
• security
• infrastructure
• expertise
• market access
• reconstruction capacity
• humanitarian assistance
• environmental restoration
• risk absorption

This prevents an actor from presenting its desired benefit while leaving its contribution vague.

11. What risks does the actor introduce?

Not simply what risks does the project have.

What risks does this particular actor introduce?

For example:

• dependency
• corruption
• monopolisation
• military escalation
• environmental damage
• political interference
• financial exposure
• technological dependency
• strategic vulnerability

This allows the same project to be assessed differently depending upon how it is structured.

12. What is the actor willing to leave alone?

This is one of your strongest questions.

Every proposal should have a negative space.

Not just:

What do you want?

but:

What are you explicitly agreeing not to take, control, influence or exploit?

That makes restraint part of the proposal.

For example:

We seek resource access, but not ownership of the territory.

We seek security guarantees, but not political control.

We seek investment returns, but not permanent control of infrastructure.

We seek cultural protections, but not sovereignty over another population.

That makes intentions much easier to test.

13. What does the actor accept it cannot have?

This goes one step further.

A serious negotiation cannot consist entirely of demands.

Every participant should identify its non-entitlements.

In other words:

What legitimate interest do you accept does not give you the right to do?

That’s potentially one of the most powerful questions in the entire document.

14. What reciprocal obligation does the proposal create?

If one actor receives a benefit, what does it owe in return?

For example:

Access → investment.

Security guarantee → reciprocal restraint.

Resource concession → environmental restoration.

Infrastructure access → maintenance obligation.

Reconstruction funding → transparent procurement.

Military assistance → defined limitations on its use, where appropriate.

This turns the proposal from transaction into reciprocal obligation.

15. Who gives consent?

Not merely:

Did a government sign it?

Ask:

• Was the government constitutionally authorised?
• Were affected regions consulted?
• Were affected communities consulted?
• Was the information necessary for informed consent available?
• Were alternatives presented?
• Could consent realistically be withheld?
• Was there coercion or overwhelming dependency?
• Can consent subsequently be withdrawn?
• What happens if the population changes its position?

This is particularly important when a country is at war or experiencing extreme economic dependence.

16. Who verifies the claims?

The actor making the claim should not be the sole authority determining whether its claim is true.

Ask:

Who independently verifies the evidence?

And then:

Who verifies the verifier?

That fits directly into your peer-review and ombudsman concept.

17. What happens when the agreement is breached?

A framework isn’t much use if everyone agrees with it until somebody breaks it.

Every proposal should therefore specify:

• what constitutes a breach
• how breaches are detected
• who investigates
• how evidence is preserved
• who determines whether a breach occurred
• what remedies exist
• what penalties exist
• whether penalties are proportionate
• whether enforcement applies equally to powerful and weak actors

The UN framework itself recognises multiple peaceful mechanisms for dispute settlement, including negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration and judicial settlement. ([United Nations Office of Legal Affairs][2])

18. Can the arrangement be captured?

This is the corruption question.

Ask:

Could one participant gradually acquire enough influence to control the mechanism that is supposed to regulate it?

For example:

Investor funds regulator.

Military power influences monitor.

Corporation controls infrastructure and therefore controls access.

One country becomes the dominant financier of the oversight mechanism.

That’s where your reviewers must themselves be reviewable principle becomes important.

19. Can the arrangement be reversed?

Another really important one.

If something goes wrong:

Can the arrangement be stopped?

Can ownership be returned?

Can infrastructure be transferred?

Can environmental damage be repaired?

Can a concession expire?

Can sanctions be removed?

Can military deployments be withdrawn?

Can a community withdraw consent?

A proposal that is easy to enter but almost impossible to exit creates a very different power relationship from one with a genuine exit mechanism.

20. What happens after the project ends?

This is where your sustainability thinking becomes much more powerful.

Every proposal should have an end-of-life plan:

Build → operate → maintain → monitor → restore → transfer or close.

Ask:

Who owns it at the end?

Who maintains it?

Who pays for remediation?

Who restores the land?

Who retains the knowledge and technology?

What happens to the workers?

What happens to the surrounding community?

What happens if the resource runs out?

That stops the model becoming:

Extract → profit → leave.

21. What happens to future generations?

Finally:

Does this agreement leave the next generation with at least as much capacity to determine its own future as the current generation has?

That means looking at:

• debt
• environmental condition
• resource reserves
• infrastructure
• sovereignty
• institutional independence
• cultural heritage
• education
• technological capability

That is your continuity principle.

Then the final test

After all of those questions, you can ask:

22. Is the stated objective achievable without the proposed level of control?

If yes, why is the additional control being requested?

If no, what evidence demonstrates that the additional control is genuinely necessary?

And then:

23. If two interests remain incompatible, what is the least destructive available solution?

Not:

Who wins?

Not:

Who has the biggest army?

Not:

Who has the most money?

But:

What arrangement satisfies the greatest number of legitimate requirements while creating the least irreversible harm and preserving the greatest future freedom of action?

If two interests remain incompatible, the final question is: what is the least destructive way of resolving the incompatibility?

7. The Safeguarding Risk: When Protection Becomes Pretext

Analytical inference. Protective, humanitarian or security-based frameworks can create opportunities for external actors to acquire disproportionate political, infrastructural or economic influence. The possibility should be treated as a governance risk requiring explicit safeguards, not assumed away by the language of protection.

The question is not whether an arrangement uses the language of protection. The question is whether its underlying mechanisms prevent exploitation. If a framework cannot do that in practice, the answer is redesign, not nicer wording.

Five tests:

1. Consent — genuine, informed and revocable, not implied or assumed.
2. Independent verification — by parties who do not stand to benefit from access.
3. Local agency with real veto power — the host population or its legitimate representatives can say no and have it hold.
4. Real consequences for violations — enforcement that applies to powerful actors, not only weaker ones.
5. Benefit distribution — who receives the economic benefit, who bears the environmental cost, and who carries the long-term liability? Who gets the money, jobs and infrastructure; who gets the pollution; who pays when the mine closes; who restores the land? A project is not sustainable merely because a community signed a document.

8. Case Study: The US–Ukraine Minerals Agreement

Documented fact. Earlier US proposals reportedly sought partial or total ownership of broad swaths of Ukraine’s resources and infrastructure; one reported version involved a 50% claim on mineral resources, which Ukraine rejected. The agreement signed on 30 April 2025 was materially different:

• Ukraine retains ownership of its natural resources and infrastructure and decides what is extracted and where.
• A Reconstruction Investment Fund is jointly managed as an equal partnership.
• The politically significant figure is 50%, but it is not 50% ownership of Ukrainian minerals. It concerns specified future government revenues from new resource projects; existing major producers are exempt.
• Income is reportedly to be reinvested in Ukraine for the first ten years, though key operating details were left to a later technical agreement.
• The agreement contains no explicit US security guarantees, a key Kyiv priority.

The economic significance of 50% depends on the underlying royalty, licensing, investment, risk and revenue structure. Fifty percent of what? is the question that must be answered before the figure means anything.

Attributed positions. Some analysts regarded the final arrangement as substantially more favourable to Ukraine than earlier drafts, noting affirmed sovereignty over resources, shared decision-making, and the argument that a US economic stake gives Washington a durable interest in Ukraine’s stability. Others continued to raise concerns about bargaining power, economic dependence, the pressure under which the earlier demands were made, and the absence of security guarantees.

Tested against Section 7:

The agreement does not show the US doing what the safeguarding critique warns of, but the terms that would settle the question are those not yet public.

The strategic triangle (analytical inference). Ukraine needs sovereignty, security and reconstruction; the US seeks security, strategic influence and economic participation; Russia has security, territorial, historical and regional interests it does not want excluded from a settlement. Reporting in 2025 reportedly described concern in Moscow that the agreement could give Washington greater leverage. That is a plausible strategic reading, not an established motive. A material stake in an outcome is not ownership of it, and understanding Russia’s stated concerns is not accepting them as justification for territorial control.

9. Principle of Reciprocal Scrutiny

Framework proposal. No actor is exempt from the framework because it is powerful, historically important, economically valuable, militarily capable, or aligned with the institution administering the framework. The same questions must be asked of Washington, Moscow, Brussels, London, Kyiv and every other participant: same dignity, same scrutiny, same environmental and sovereignty requirements.

Holding space for a major power means making room to see its history and position fairly. It does not mean waiving accountability. Harms are named, people protected and accountability insisted upon, whoever is responsible.

An open question follows: what would Russia put on the table if offered economic access without territorial control?

10. Governing Principle

The nations hosting a conflict remain at the heart of it, but hosting a conflict does not entitle any nation, or its outside backers, to set the terms without scrutiny. Any durable framework requires guardrails that do not bend because a powerful actor objects:

• Regional actors retain a legitimate stake and voice.
• International law provides the baseline standard of conduct and territorial legitimacy.
• Independent monitors verify claims and conduct on the ground, and verify that protective language is not concealing exploitation.

Without such guardrails, outcomes default to might makes right — a standard that is not acceptable as a basis for resolving disputes between states, however often it is the one applied in practice.

11. Conclusion

The conflict contains several overlapping dimensions:

1. A territorial war between Russia and Ukraine.
2. A dispute over Ukrainian sovereignty and security alignment.
3. A wider dispute involving the European security architecture and competing Russian and Western security interests.

The same layered structure — combat, support, interests, influence, and the risk of protective language being used as cover — applies to other modern conflicts.

The Core Question

The purpose of this framework is not to determine which external power deserves Ukraine.

It is to ask what Ukraine, its people, its land and its future require, and then determine how the legitimate interests of other states can be accommodated without converting interest into ownership, security into domination, investment into dependency, or protection into exploitation.

Different conflicts require different solutions. Different histories require different understandings. Different interests will inevitably collide.

But the standard of human dignity should not change according to which power is making the proposal.