Ukraine is pessimistic about the NATO summit: they will not accept

Kyiv is increasingly pessimistic about making a significant step forward in joining NATO, while the leaders of the Western military alliance are gathering on Tuesday in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, writes The Guardian.

At the two-day summit, Kiev is expected to be offered a last-minute package of “additional security guarantees” – an assurance from countries such as the US, UK, France and Germany that military assistance and training will continue in the long term.

The U.S. and Germany, in particular, appear unwilling to support Ukraine’s entry into the 31-nation alliance as Kiev’s conflict with Russia continues, leaving people close to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky not hope to get a concrete path to membership.

Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, acknowledged on Saturday that “what’s missing” is a decision to speed up the country’s path to NATO membership with “clarity about inviting Ukraine to join.” The Vilnius summit, he suggested, would be a “unique moment” to move this process forward.

US President Joe Biden told CNN on Sunday that Ukraine is “not yet ready” for membership in the alliance. “NATO is a process that takes some time to meet all the requirements – from democratization to a whole range of other issues,” he said, adding that the organization needed to “chart a rational path” for entry.

The American president suggested that the United States could provide military assistance similar to that which they have long provided to Israel.

Kyiv believes that NATO membership, which brings with it the defensive prospect of a Western nuclear umbrella, is the only realistic long-term guarantee of its security.

In the background is the Bucharest summit in 2008, when the then enthusiastic US was dissuaded from offering Ukraine and Georgia a path to NATO membership, known as the “Membership Action Plan” (MAP). Instead, these two countries were simply told that they could become members at some unspecified time in the future.

Politically, there is also a strong recognition that Kyiv should be allowed to become a member at some point; there will be “a confirmation that Ukraine will become a member of NATO,” Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Friday. But even such a simple commitment gives Moscow an incentive to continue the fight,

Alternative language suggesting that Ukraine could join the bloc when the security situation permits could help, Western experts say, but NATO members understand the obligations that this entails, meaning that there remains a “difficult balance to strike.” “.

NATO is based on Article 5 of its founding charter, which states that each member agrees “that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” This article requires member states to join in the defense of the country under attack.

But the White House has other calculations ahead of the 2024 presidential election, The Guardian notes: there is concern in the American public about the desire to get involved in conflict in Europe.

This means that the Vilnius summit will put more emphasis on other promises to Ukraine, The Guardian predicts. At the heart of this may be new guarantees emphasizing long-term arms supplies and other forms of support, including economic support, from a self-selected group of NATO members, including the US, UK, France and Germany.

Last-minute discussions of the package are likely to form part of Biden’s visit to London on Monday, where he will meet with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak before they travel separately to a meeting in Vilnius starting Tuesday afternoon.

The theory is leading Ukraine down the path of the so-called “porcupine strategy,” where the country becomes heavily militarized and, like Israel, hard to beat. On Friday, French officials called it “essential security guarantees” meant to show that key Western countries will support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” to enable Kyiv to weather a protracted conflict.

But one former official warned of “repeating the great Bucharest fiction” and thus prolonging the conflict. John Foreman, the British military attaché in Moscow until last year, said he believes the US president has “misinterpreted Russia’s intentions and is overestimating the risk of widening the conflict.”