NATO Has No Good News for Ukraine

Ever since 2008, when NATO officially welcomed Ukraine’s aspirations for membership at its summit in Bucharest, that country has been in the alliance’s waiting room. Now, after a full-scale Russian invasion, it is being asked to wait longer, without a timeline of when it might finally be included in the alliance that offers Kyiv perhaps the only chance at dodging future Russian attacks on its sovereignty.

Foreign Policy has learned that Ukraine will not be invited to join NATO at the alliance’s yearly summit next month in Vilnius, Lithuania. Allies are instead putting together a package that includes less-than-full membership and security assurances that that are far from what Ukraine believes it needs to ward off future Russian attacks.

The defense ministers of NATO countries gathered in Brussels this week to discuss how to beef up support for Ukraine, which is currently engaged in a counteroffensive against Russian forces. The summit this week is in preparation for the one in Vilnius, where NATO leaders will announce their longer-term commitments to the embattled country.

NATO members big and small are united in their effort to support Ukraine now and in the future, but they are wary of committing full NATO protections in the midst of a war. They fear that if Ukraine is included in the alliance, they would have to actively participate in the war alongside Ukrainian troops under Article 5 which deems an attack on one as an attack on all members and binds every member state to pick up arms in defense of another.

The buzz in Brussels is that the reluctance to include Ukraine in the fold is mainly due to fears of Russian President Vladimir Putin escalating and using Ukraine’s NATO accession as a justification for what could possibly escalate to a nuclear attack. There is a discernible sense that big NATO countries are still choosing to tread cautiously and don’t want to lend credence to Putin’s narrative.

“There is a lot of uncertainty, and some countries don’t want to be locked in,” Ambassador Juri Luik, Estonia’s permanent representative to NATO, told FP.

“We simply don’t know how the war will end,” another diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told FP.

There appears to be broad consensus among NATO members, even including some Baltic states, on holding back the invite for full membership. But there is criticism of bigger states for being reluctant to promise even a road map for Ukraine on how and when it could join the group after the war has ended. FP has learned that Ukraine will not even be offered a timeline.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for fast-tracked NATO accession in September 2022, after Russia conducted a sham referendum and annexed four Ukrainian territories. He has threatened that he may sit out the Vilnius summit if Ukraine isn’t given a “signal” that inclusion is imminent once the current conflict concludes. NATO diplomats are fervidly discussing security assurances to assuage Ukraine’s concerns and say that the final wording may go down the wire at the Vilnius summit.

There are, as always, disagreements in the grouping. The United States and Germany are steering the conversation to the here and now, and say the focus must be on the ongoing war rather than a future attack by Russia, whereas the Eastern and central European states are pushing for a coherent plan for Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO and binding security guarantees rather than assurances of a little more military support than currently provided. “Nothing short of Ukraine’s full inclusion in NATO will deter Putin,” Luik added.

Alina Frolova, the former Ukrainian deputy defense minister, said the delay in providing Ukraine with a road map is mainly a result of U.S. policy. “From what I hear, the U.S. is objecting,” she told FP via encrypted communications from Kyiv. “The U.S. still thinks [by offering Ukraine a road map] they might provoke Russia.”

Olena Halushka, a board member of a Ukrainian nongovernmental organization called Anti-Corruption Action Center, said that the Ukrainian state has earnestly worked on being more accountable and will continue to unveil reforms to build more confidence among EU and NATO nations for its inclusion. The real reason for the long delay in Ukraine’s NATO acceptance might not be the state of Ukrainian democracy, but Russia’s “informal veto on NATO’s enlargement,” Halushka told FP.

NATO members are busy discussing security arrangements that they can offer, both through the NATO framework and through bilateral agreements to send a strong message of support to Ukraine. Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, outlined the contours of the alliance’s thinking this week. NATO was working on a package for Ukraine that includes “not just practical support to assist them with their current efforts to defend their territorial integrity,” she said in an online briefing, “but practical support tied to longer-term questions, longer-term modernization issues that they will be grappling with, questions of standardization, interoperability, and thinking about what type of force they will have in the future.”

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said he hoped Vilnius will bring Ukraine closer to NATO through assurances of a multiyear program to help the country transition from “Soviet era doctrines, equipment, standards, to NATO doctrines, equipment, and standards.”

Individual states are planning to offer bilateral agreements for longer-term support outside the NATO framework. FP has learned that Germany may be open to the idea of sending more defense capabilities to Ukraine to enable it to defend its cities from future Russian attacks and has not ruled out the possibility of sending military trainers to Ukraine once the war has passed and the time is right. French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed something more, in the vein of the huge amounts of military funding and intelligence-sharing that Israel enjoys from the United States. “France is prepared to sign agreements with Ukraine providing it with security guarantees that will help it defend itself in the long term and prevent any future aggressions, as our leaders stated in the joint declaration at the 36th Franco-British summit,” according to the French Foreign Ministry. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has also voiced his country’s support to put in place long-term security arrangements for Ukraine but did not spell out what they might be.

Zelensky’s office had developed a concept called the Kyiv Security Compact in collaboration with former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen as an acceptable way out of the predicament faced by NATO countries. It suggested that until Ukraine becomes a full member, some of the strongest NATO members could commit to a legally binding guarantee to protect Ukraine militarily in case of a future Russian attack.

“That would be something similar to NATO Article 5 but not in NATO framework,” Pierre Haroche, a lecturer in international relations and international security at Queen Mary University of London, told FP. “It would be an ad hoc framework of willing states of the U.S., France, Germany, Poland, and eastern and central states, a coalition of the willing.”

But other than Poland—which, according to Rasmussen, would be willing to send troops to Ukraine if substantial security guarantees are not offered to Ukraine in the Vilnius summit—so far, none of the big members have said they intend to send troops or planes to protect Ukrainian sovereignty.

Based on what NATO heavyweights have so far said publicly, and told FP, although providing Ukraine with more defense systems, training, and strengthening its defense industry are all on the table, any assurances on sending planes or boots to the ground were out.

However, a senior diplomat said the policy to arm Ukraine to the teeth is flawed and noted that Ukraine is not Israel. “First, Israel has nuclear weapons,” he told FP. “Secondly, Israel’s main enemy is Iran, not so much Russia—the biggest country in the world, and the U.S.’s stated policy is to ensure Iran never gets nukes, while Russia is a nuclear-weapon power.” Ukraine was made to give up its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal in 1994 under the Budapest Memorandum.

Among other deliverables at Vilnius would be an upgraded political relationship. Member states have decided to elevate the NATO-Ukraine Commission to a NATO-Ukraine Council, which they say would allow Zelensky to summon the council for support at any time.

Ukrainians say they are grateful for any support and upgrade that NATO is willing to offer. Frolova said that if NATO nations agreed to provide state-of-the-art defense systems to protect all of Ukraine “as Kyiv is currently protected,” that would be a “good thing.” But some Ukrainians were still disappointed and said much of the Vilnius package sounds like more of the same. Commitments regarding NATO “membership are clear—everything else is how good you are at negotiations,” Frolova added.

There is growing frustration among Eastern and central European states that see Russia’s ever-threatening demeanor to Ukraine as a risk to their sovereignty, too, and believe that bigger NATO nations are creating deliberately watered-down security guarantees for Ukraine. These larger NATO countries defend themselves by emphasizing that they are committed to the promise made in Bucharest in 2008 that Ukraine will be a part of NATO someday—just not yet, nor in the foreseeable future.

Anchal Vohra is a columnist at Foreign Policy. FP subscribers can now receive alerts when new stories written by this author are published.