Prospects for Ukraine's Membership in NATO - opinion

The Ukrainian leadership has already officially sent an application for the country’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership.

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In his appeal on April 20, President Zelenskyy mentioned: "Neither the majority of Ukrainians, nor the majority of Europeans, nor the majority of residents of the entire NATO space will understand the leaders of the Alliance if a well-deserved political invitation for Ukraine to the Alliance won’t be issued at the summit in Vilnius. Ukraine did everything to ensure that our request is satisfied."

During a joint press conference with President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg spoke quite diplomatically on this topic: "President Zelensky raised the issue of membership and security guarantees. This will be an important element of the agenda at this meeting, and NATO is preparing for it. Ukraine chooses its future in the Euro-Atlantic family, Ukraine's future in NATO, and the Alliance members agree with this."

The next NATO summit will be held in Vilnius in July this year. What should we expect from this forum? Many people in Ukraine believe that Ukraine will already be able to join NATO, or at least can start the process of joining. Unfortunately, these expectations are much too high. Accession to NATO is not instantaneous.

I’ll go over the general process for joining NATO. The first step is a declaration of wishing to join NATO. Then, normally, most countries seeking to join NATO should undergo a series of reforms to meet the Alliance’s equipment and training standards. And that's the second step. This typically occurs within a Membership Action Plan (MAP) framework. This is like the status of "candidate for EU membership," when the candidate country must prepare its military forces and political structures to meet the standards and requirements of NATO.

After fulfilling the requirements of the MAP, the candidate country submits an official application to join NATO. NATO evaluates the application and prepares a report on the candidate country's readiness for accession. Then the candidate country negotiates with NATO member countries on the terms of accession and compliance with NATO standards. If these negotiations are successful, then the NATO members should decide on the accession of the candidate country during the meeting of the NATO Council. After that, all NATO member countries must ratify the accession agreement of the candidate country to NATO through their relevant legislative bodies. When all NATO member countries ratify the agreement, the candidate country becomes a full member of NATO. The membership agreement is finally signed at NATO headquarters.

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Ukraine, together with Georgia, tried to secure NATO membership through a MAP fifteen years ago. But then we were denied this status at the Bucharest NATO Summit in 2008, instead only being made an abstract promise that it could happen someday. Some NATO countries, especially Germany and France, feared that even providing Ukraine and Georgia with the MAP would provoke Russia into aggressive actions. The effect of this weak measure turned out to be precisely the opposite - Russia attacked Georgia in 2008, seized and annexed Crimea and launched a hybrid war against Ukraine in Donbas in 2014, and it launched a direct full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. And this is a lesson for the future, not for us, but for NATO. Putin's concessions do not stop Russia's aggression. Instead, they create favorable opportunities for it.

Now Ukraine wants to join NATO in an accelerated way, using the precedent of Finland and Sweden. These two countries applied to join NATO last May. On June 29 last year, at the NATO summit, Sweden and Finland were officially invited to join NATO without fulfilling the transitional requirements for membership (ie, without a MAP). Finland became a member of NATO on April 4, 2023. Sweden is still waiting for the consent of the parliaments of Turkey and Hungary. I will pay special attention to this circumstance. Even a single NATO member country can block (or significantly slow down) a candidate country's entry into the Alliance.

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Theoretically, we could expect to be officially invited to NATO membership (as Sweden and Finland were invited a year ago) at the Vilnius NATO summit, but let's be realistic - while the current big war between Russia and Ukraine is going on, this won’t happen. Members of the Alliance - from the United States to the Baltic States - are ready to help us with weapons, ammunition, and finances. Still, at the same time, they seek to avoid a direct military confrontation with Russia and not to provoke a global nuclear war.

Another problem is the lack of consensus in NATO regarding Ukraine's membership in the Alliance. After a visit to Kyiv and at the beginning of the eleventh meeting of the international Ramstein meeting, which coordinates the supply of arms and ammunition to Ukraine, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated: "Ukraine's rightful place is in the Euro-Atlantic family. The legal place of Ukraine is in NATO. And subsequently, our support will help make it possible." He also added that all NATO allies agree that Ukraine will eventually become a member of the alliance after the end of the war. Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán reacted to this statement almost instantly on his Twitter with only one word: "What?!" And this is a reaction from a country that will almost certainly block (or at least slow down) our entry into the Alliance.

Today there is allegedly only one clear opponent of Ukraine's accession to NATO within the Alliance  - Hungary. But several countries are still swaying and have traditional fears about Ukraine's membership in the Alliance. In particular, it’s about Germany. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on April 20 (during the NATO Secretary General's stay in Kyiv) that NATO should consider "carefully" any move to include Ukraine in the alliance. "The door has opened a little bit, but now is not the time to solve it. You must decide with a cool head and a hot heart, not the other way around." At the same time, the head of the German Ministry of Defense noted that Ukraine's future lies in the Euro-Atlantic family, and all allies agreed with it (almost word by word what Jens Stoltenberg said the next day).

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What, then, can Ukraine count on during the Vilnius NATO summit? I think our goal at this forum is to publicly and sufficiently concretely formalize our "engagement" with NATO, which implies a clear confirmation by NATO not only of Ukraine's right to membership in the Alliance, but also the readiness to accept Ukraine under an accelerated procedure. It is also necessary to declare specific security guarantees for Ukraine for the period before joining NATO. This is a maximum plan for us.

But in which form and with what wording will Ukraine's "engagement" will NATO be presented is a subject of coordination with our partners. It is necessary to understand that certain compromises must be sought. Don't wait for specific dates. As with the issue of a counteroffensive, so with the issue of NATO membership, the emphasis should be placed not on the date, but on the result. In both cases, the result will likely be achieved not at once, but in stages. And these processes will be interconnected. The more successes Ukraine will have on the battlefield, the more chances there will be to acquire membership in NATO immediately after the end of the war with Russia. But at the same time, there should be targeted diplomatic work with those countries which are hesitating about our membership in NATO, as well as a coordinated neutralization of the "Hungarian obstacle" with our partners.

In conclusion, I would like to note that NATO membership for Ukraine is not an end in itself, not some whim of pro-Western politicians. It is the only effective guarantee against the even more Russian attacks in the future. Not only is NATO trying to avoid a direct military conflict with Russia, but Russia is also afraid of a war with NATO. Russia will lose a conventional war with NATO, and a nuclear war will also be a total disaster for Russia. Therefore, Ukraine's membership in NATO should also be considered as a factor in deterring Russia from repeating aggressive experiments. In this context, it is also a critical component of the new European security architecture.

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