On Ukraine’s NATO Membership

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Putin has speculated all along that the west is divided and therefore weak, that there will be no stomach for a war, and that he can prevent Ukraine from joining both the European Union (EU) and NATO. So far, he has been proven to be wrong. Ukraine has already begun accession negotiations with the EU, and NATO leaders this summer once again reaffirmed that Ukraine will (eventually) be joining NATO. However, each step taken by western leaders to support Ukraine has often been slow and entailed difficult negotiations. To date, NATO has not yet extended Ukraine an invitation to join. Given the current state of the war in Ukraine, it is time to speed up decisions. Failure to do so could cost not only Ukraine, but all of Europe and the broad western alliance greatly.

Putin is doing all that he can, not only to conquer Ukraine, but also to slow down decisions to support Ukraine in the west. He uses massive disinformation campaigns and often rattles his nuclear sabre to create doubt in leaders’ minds. He is essentially fighting against a hard external border – this is what expansionist empires do. Soft borders mean the possibility of expansion and control. Hard and well-defended borders take these possibilities away. He is fighting to keep Ukraine as a “soft” border area where he can hold sway. For years leading up to the war, he had cultivated relationships with a number of European countries to try and break any attempt to stand up to his rise in power. Energy dependence was but one method that was used. The legacy of his efforts are still felt today.

I remember well how on the evening of 24 February 2022 I was with the other European heads of state and government at a planned Council meeting in Brussels. That was the day that Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine began. Upon arriving at the meeting, the mood was already sombre. Ukraine’s president Zelensky joined the gathering via his first video link (of many to follow) to the Council to plead for weapons and ammunition. I remember Zelensky telling us that he did not know if he would still be alive the next day. At the end of the call, the room was deadly silent. All 27 European leaders were contemplating what was happening in Ukraine, and the broader implications that entailed. Most were certain that Kyiv would fall within a matter of days.

Regarding collective action to counter Russia, initially there was none. Support that evening even for a simple initiative to directly sanction Russia’s President Putin and Foreign minister Lavrov for this blatant international violation of a sovereign state’s borders could not be found. On that date, the EU was paralysed. Paralysed, because the unthinkable (for many) was happening. The long-standing accepted approach to dealing with Russia as a “partner” had suddenly fallen apart. Most could not believe what they were witnessing: that Russia could in fact directly attack Ukraine. All of the “goodwill” and earnest direct personal phone calls to Putin by various European leaders ended up having no effect at all. A massive rethink was needed. A rethink that is still costing countless Ukrainian lives.

In the Baltic States and Poland, we had been warning our European and NATO friends and Allies for a number of years about the ever growing threat that Russia represented as Putin’s rule gradually became more and more authoritarian. As Prime minister of Latvia, I oversaw shipments of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine that luckily arrived before Russia’s outright attack in February of 2022. Many Allies initially hesitated to provide weapons to Ukraine, while we in the Baltics and Poland did not. We knew from our history that to counter Russia, good words and intentions are practically meaningless; you have to be strong and prepared to fight. It is the fact that the Ukrainians resisted and fought back in spite of incredible odds that the country still exists today.

During the fall of 2021, shared US intelligence clearly showed to all NATO Allies that Russia was rapidly building up offensive strike capacity on Ukraine’s borders. All leaders had the same information. What differed was the interpretation of what Russia would actually do with its buildup. Most believed that such a military force would never be used, that it was only a form of intimidation. In the interim, not only the Baltics and Poland, but now a broad coalition of democratic countries have been supplying Ukraine, many with weapons and ammunition, others with cash and all sorts of humanitarian aid, and of course, many with all of the above. The United States and Germany have been the two largest individual donors.

Regarding Ukraine’s EU membership bid, not all has gone very smoothly. In March of 2022, at the informal European Council gathering in Versailles less than a month following Russia’s outright invasion, there was still a majority in the EU who opposed Ukraine joining the union. By June of that year, the tide had been turned through persistent argumentation and events on the ground in Ukraine, and Council gave candidacy status to Ukraine. In December of 2023 Council formally opened accession negotiations, which finally began in June of this year.

Similarly, for years within NATO there has been active debate about what to do with Ukraine. Back in 2008 at the NATO summit in Bucharest (which Putin attended as a guest), leaders decided in spite of Putin’s objection that Ukraine will (eventually) become a member. No action followed this formal decision, which some key members openly opposed. Following Russia’s outright invasion of Ukraine, the alliance stressed its support of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and decided on strengthening its own eastern flank at the NATO summit in Madrid in June of 2022. The following year at the NATO summit in Vilnius in July of 2023, the original Bucharest decision that Ukraine will (eventually) become a NATO member was reaffirmed with the additional caveat that an invitation to join will be extended “when Allies agree and conditions are met”. At the same summit, a NATO-Ukraine council was established to actually help Ukraine prepare for membership.

At the latest NATO summit in Washington in July of this year, Allies stated that Ukraine’s path to NATO was “irreversible”, but to date no invitation to join has been extended. This does not mean that NATO has not been expanding its member base. Finland joined in 2023, and Sweden joined this year. It means that regarding Ukraine, there is still hesitation to accept them as a member. Not the least of various concerns is the fact that Ukraine is fighting a war against an invading Russia. NATO Article 5 (which states that an attack on one member would be viewed as an attack on all) would imply that all of NATO would immediately be at war with Russia if Ukraine were to join during the war.

We thus face a conundrum: NATO Allies have stated that Ukraine will be a member of NATO, but the ongoing war means that the “conditions” of joining are not right. When looked at from Putin’s point of view, this is reason alone to continue the war. After all, ending the war would probably mean that the “conditions” would be right and Ukraine would become a NATO member. Thus, to keep this from happening, Russia must continue the war. A vicious circle. The question is, how to break out of it? What would make the “conditions” right for Ukraine to finally join NATO?

The obvious answer is to help Ukraine win the war and expel the Russians, then accept them into NATO. Although this is essentially the scenario that is currently being played out, we see that the pace of decisions on supplying weapons since the start of the all-out war has been and still is far too slow to be truly effective. Ukraine is receiving enough aid to survive, but not enough aid quickly enough to have been able to turn the tide decisively against Russia on the battlefield. The reasons for this go back to the ambiguity that some western capitals have felt about fully aiding Ukraine and resisting Russia, combined with the fact that in NATO, especially in Europe, underinvestment in the military and military industry over the past 20 to 30 years has resulted in a dearth of supplies. Partners simply do not have that much in their storerooms to give to Ukraine, and industry has not yet ramped up enough production capacity. Russia has used this time to learn from its initial mistakes, rapidly ramp up its defence industry and acquire additional arms from Iran and North Korea, solve the problem of providing enough human cannon fodder, and dig in well in the territory it already occupies. China has also been helping it to avoid sanctions by allowing shipments of components critical to
Russia’s defence industry. Russia is still on the march.

As a result of this, we are now witnessing a gradual deterioration of the military situation in Donetsk and Luhansk, where Russia has been making slow but steady territorial gains, albeit at a tremendous cost of equipment and lives. With every passing day that decisions are delayed to open up supplies and allow Ukraine to strike at will on military targets within Russia with western-supplied weapons, the possibility for Ukraine to regain all of the territory currently occupied by Russia by force becomes more and more difficult. If nothing changes, at some point we will cross the tipping point where it will be too late, and Ukraine could well lose the war with all of the devastating consequences for Ukraine and Europe that would entail. We cannot let Ukraine lose the war, but at the same time, we are having great difficulties in taking the timely decisions to provide them with the needed weapons for them to do their job. This is absolutely to Putin’s advantage. From his point of view, the longer the war is dragged out, the more difficult and hence less likely it is that Ukraine could fully retake all of its territory. Of course,
this also means continuing to delay any decision for Ukraine to join NATO.

More and more commentators are speaking of the war ending with Ukraine somehow being divided into an independent and occupied Ukraine. The analogy being used is the division of Germany following the Second World war, whereby the western part (The Federal Republic of Germany) became a NATO member in 1955, while the eastern part (The German Democratic Republic) remained under Russian sway until reunification in 1990. Although this may be a forced option of last resort, I do not think that this should be the goal, barring a “surprise” acceptance of (independent and unoccupied) Ukraine with full Article 5 protection as a means to stop Russia in its tracks without engaging them in a broader war. Given the unlikely nature of such a decision, the goal should remain to provide Ukraine with enough arms and permission to use them so that they could win on the battlefield and liberate their entire country. Speaking of dividing Ukraine now as the war is going on only plays into Putin’s playbook, since that entails accepting the fact that Russia would somehow be allowed to keep the territories that it currently occupies. Putin’s primary goal must be to occupy all of Ukraine. His “fallback” would be to take as much as he can get now, draw a line (as was done in Donbas in 2015) to delineate the occupied territories, and then rearm, regroup and bide his time until he could strike again where and when he chooses, while keeping up all manner of threats to dissuade NATO Allies from extending an invitation for Ukraine to join.

The hard truth is that the threat of Russia to European and indeed world peace is not going away, regardless of the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Russia is on a war footing, and will most likely remain so for many years to come. The only thing stopping Russia from venturing beyond Ukraine is the fact that that is where NATO lies. NATO’s deterrence is in fact working very well. At issue is whether the dividing line between Russia and NATO countries will be at the Polish border, or at the Ukrainian border. It is inconceivable today that Ukraine could exist as an unaligned sovereign country. If they will not join NATO, then sooner or later they will be taken over by an expanding Russia.

The nature of crises is that decision makers never have all of the information they actually need and outcomes of decisions cannot be known beforehand. The Covid-19 pandemic is such a recent crisis the entire world went through. The dynamics of crises do not allow for clarity of choice by definition. And that is what we have, an ongoing and ever developing crisis in Ukraine that has many unknowns. One thing, however, remains quite certain. We in the west can either overcome obstacles and help create the conditions for Ukraine to be able to join NATO, or else face the consequences of an aggressive Russia moving closer to Poland’s doorstep.