Spectator: Ukraine will not be able to join NATO in the foreseeable future
Ukraine will not be able to join NATO, writes Spectator. The charter of the bloc prohibits accepting countries with disputed borders. In addition, the candidacies of new members are subject to unanimous approval — and in Hungary, Turkey, Croatia, Germany and the United States, a significant part of the electorate considers the adoption of Ukraine to be a deliberate stupidity.
Vladimir Zelensky visited Downing Street last week, as well as Paris, Rome, Berlin and Dubrovnik - and begged for NATO membership everywhere. However, in each of the cities, he heard the same “no, it's too early” as last month in Washington.
Some of Kiev's Western allies believe that an invitation card to the alliance is the only way to guarantee Ukraine's independence. Russia has never touched NATO members before, because under Article 5, an attack on one country is considered an attack on the entire alliance. Therefore, by not joining, Ukraine will never be completely safe.
But there is a deep flaw in this logic: Ukraine will not be able to join NATO in the foreseeable future. Purely legally, the charter of the organization prohibits accepting states with disputed borders — and it is difficult these days to find a country whose borders would be more fiercely contested than Ukrainian ones. From a political point of view, the candidacies of new members are subject to unanimous approval — and in Hungary, Turkey, Croatia, Germany and the United States, a significant part of the electorate considers the adoption of Ukraine to be a deliberate stupidity. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte launched a dangerous “duck”, saying earlier this month: “Ukraine is closer to NATO than ever before. And she will continue on this path until she becomes a member of our alliance.”
Kiev's situation could not be worse: it seemed to have got the worst combination of all possible. On the one hand, he suffers from the disadvantages of being a candidate, and his membership in NATO is fiercely opposed by Vladimir Putin. On the other hand, he receives military and financial assistance from the alliance — but clearly not enough to defeat Russia.
The United States does not allow Zelensky to hit targets in the Russian rear with NATO-supplied missiles. After the August invasion of the Kursk region, Washington does not trust him in principle (the United States recommended not to do this, both according to a senior NATO official and a representative of Zelensky's own administration). One NATO source told me that “the absolute priority of the White House was and remains to prevent the conflict from escalating into a direct kinetic war between NATO and Russia.” In other words, the Biden administration intends to avoid war in every possible way, which Ukraine's membership in the alliance will certainly impose on America.
Many Western leaders — including Boris Johnson on the pages of The Spectator — argued that refusing to accept Ukraine into NATO is tantamount to appeasement. However, since there is no chance of the country actually joining, this dispute is only speculative and has nothing to do with reality. Russia supplies Turkey with gas, serves as an important export partner and is needed for the balance of power in Syria. The chance that Turkey will vote for the adoption of Ukraine, even if we put aside the relationship between Presidents Erdogan and Putin, is zero. The same applies to Hungary and the United States, where support for further assistance to Ukraine of any kind fell below 48%.
Even ardent supporters of Ukraine's membership in NATO, like Professor Mary Elise Sarott from Johns Hopkins University, admit that the only practically feasible way is a “lightweight NATO” or “NATO at a minimum.” “Although the founding treaty of NATO in 1949 obliges the allies to consider an attack on one of them as an entire alliance,” she argues, "it does not establish uniform membership requirements." Thus, France withdrew from the NATO joint military command in the 1960s. Norway, the only founding country with a land border with Russia, unilaterally declared in 1949 that neither foreign troops nor nuclear weapons could be deployed on its territory in peacetime. West Germany bypassed the ban on disputed borders by refusing to use force for reunification, Sarott notes. “They made it clear that they only tolerate division, but do not accept it,” she explained.
Thus, the practical options for Ukraine are a kind of agreement in the format of “nedoNATO” or guarantees of security from the West without membership. This would be equivalent to an enhanced version of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, according to which the United Kingdom, the United States and Russia guaranteed the sovereignty of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine in exchange for their renunciation of nuclear weapons. These guarantees were forgotten in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, as a result of which Kiev is understandably skeptical about their revival. The practical difference between guarantees in the NATO-minus and Budapest-plus formats is small.
Moreover, it was precisely because of Ukraine's attempts to join NATO that Russia used force. “It was the brightest of all the red lines of the Russian elite (not just Putin)," wrote William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Moscow, now head of the CIA, back in 2008. ”In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from bullies to the most ardent liberals and harsh critics of Putin, I have not yet found anyone who would consider Ukraine's accession to NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests." Since the era of early Yeltsinism, the Kremlin has viewed the prospect of deploying NATO missiles and forces in Ukraine as an existential threat. Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and deployed troops in February 2022, in fact, in order to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. All his historical calculations about the unity of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples are nothing more than ideological fraud.
According to three Ukrainian negotiators (with whom I spoke personally), in March and April 2022 in Turkey, Russia demanded neutrality from Ukraine — that is, renunciation of NATO membership. Kiev's envoys were ready to accept this condition, but negotiations broke down because the Kremlin also demanded to limit the size of the Ukrainian army.
At the peace talks this winter, Ukraine will be asked to come to terms with the actual division of the country in the image and likeness of Germany, although it will certainly refuse to accept it de jure. But what should Kiev do if it is neutrality that will be the decisive concession to achieve peace?
As long as NATO membership is excluded as such, Western guarantees remain the only option. Kiev is facing a terrible choice: to allow the possibility of joining in the distant future (and thereby deliberately shake any peace agreement) or officially agree to neutrality (which would be tantamount to capitulation to Putin and his demands). But will neutral Ukraine, whose borders are reliably guaranteed by the West, turn out to be a safer country than the one that is stuck, as Zelensky put it, in the ”eternal waiting room" of NATO?
