NATO summits tend to be rather drab affairs. Most announcements are known well in advance and the official summit communique that runs to several pages of technocratic prose normally just gets a cursory look by disinterested media.
Not so at the Vilnius summit on July 11-12. The document was eagerly scrutinized for words indicating if or when Ukraine could join the military alliance. Emotions were running high: from the first crushing disappointment, if not downright anger, expressed by the Ukrainian leadership about what was offered to them, to a second day of reconciliation of sorts, and smiles, albeit slightly forced.
To understand what all the fuss is about, one must go back to the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008 when Ukraine (as well as Georgia) got the thumbs-up to join the alliance but were offered no concrete pathway or timeline. What Kyiv and many NATO members, notably in the east, wanted in Vilnius was to go beyond the Bucharest declaration. The phrase I heard most in the run-up to the meeting was to "avoid another Bucharest."
Comparing the Vilnius and Bucharest declarations, it is fair to say that Kyiv got a "Bucharest 2.0" or perhaps a "Bucharest+." It has inched closer to NATO, but only a little. The Bucharest text stated that "NATO welcomes Ukraine's and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO." It then describes the way forward, by stating that "MAP is the next step for Ukraine and Georgia on their direct way to membership." MAP, meaning Membership Action Plan, was a NATO membership waiting room of sorts that many Central and Eastern European candidates were placed in before joining, in which they had to undertake specific political and military reforms.
Deep Background: The Vilnius declaration is linguistically more forward-leaning. It states that "Ukraine's future is in NATO." It then noted that "we reaffirm the commitment we made at the 2008 summit in Bucharest that Ukraine will become a member of NATO, and today we recognize that Ukraine's path to full Euro-Atlantic integration has moved beyond the need for the Membership Action Plan." The MAP being removed was consistent with Finland's and Sweden's routes to joining the alliance.
This new status, in the words of NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, "will change Ukraine's membership path from a two-step process to a one-step process." Yet, the process isn't entirely clear, and what has truly frustrated the Ukrainians was the final sentence of that paragraph that underlines that "we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met." Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy tweeted that it's "unprecedented and absurd when [the] timeframe is not set neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine's membership. While at the same time vague wording about "conditions" is added even for inviting Ukraine."
Drilling Down
What You Need To Know: What did lighten the mood on the second and final day of the NATO summit was the security commitments -- both political and military -- offered to Ukraine while it waits to become a full member. Just as with the summit declaration and Ukraine's membership quest, much of this is about semantics. What most NATO officials think (but don't say out loud) is that NATO can, in fact, only offer one such security guarantee -- and that is membership. And that was not on the table.
At the same time, Kyiv doesn't like the word "assurances." That was offered to Ukraine in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 by the United Kingdom, the United States, and notably Russia, in exchange for giving up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons. These assurances ultimately meant nothing as Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and later that same year fueled a war in the eastern parts of Ukraine that eventually led to the Russian full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022.
What instead happened was that the G7 leaders, who were all gathered in Vilnius, agreed on a "joint declaration of support to Ukraine" on the sidelines of the NATO summit. Biden described it as "a powerful statement of our commitment to Ukraine as it defends its freedom today and as it rebuilds its future." And Zelenskiy, standing alongside the U.S. leader, noted that "the Ukrainian delegation is bringing home significant security victories for Ukraine, for our country, for our people, for our children."
Deep Background: Many questions still remain. What exactly is being offered by the West's leading democracies from the G7? From when does it apply? And will it be ironclad guarantees or something weaker? Looking at the G7 declaration, it is stated that "today we are launching negotiations with Ukraine to formalize -- through bilateral security commitments and arrangements aligned with this multilateral framework, in accordance with our respective legal and constitutional requirements -- our enduring support to Ukraine as it defends its sovereignty and territorial integrity, rebuilds its economy, protects its citizens, and pursues integration into the Euro-Atlantic community."
Two things stand out immediately. The wording "commitments and arrangements" are clearly weaker than "guarantees." On the other hand, the fact that these future bilateral deals with G7 members need to be formalized "in accordance with our respective legal and constitutional requirements" means that national parliaments in the respective G7 countries must back them. And this gives them political weight. Ultimately this will be a question about how fast these deals can be negotiated -- and how much money or arms will be sent Kyiv's way.
Drilling Down
On July 17-18, there will be a summit between the EU and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in Brussels. It's the first such meeting since 2015, and the talk in the run-up to this one has centered around the final summit declaration and the EU being supposedly upset that the CELAC countries have insisted on scrubbing the draft text of any references to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Later this week, on July 20, EU foreign ministers will gather in Brussels for their monthly meeting. Ukraine will, of course, feature prominently, but look out for their lunch discussion on Turkey and the state of play in EU-Ankara relations. Just before the NATO Vilnius summit, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan implored the EU to revive Turkey's stalled membership bid as a precondition for Sweden joining NATO, so it's possible the ministers could discuss a potential visa deal with Ankara or ways to upgrade Turkey's aging customs union with the EU.
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Comments
With the amounts of modern weaponry and financial aid it is receiving from the United States and NATO and the direct and indirect involvement in the fighting by the US and NATO, Ukraine is already in NATO in all but name. If this is so , then why it isn’t officially a member?
The simple answer is that the minute Ukraine membership is approved, the United States and NATO will technically be at war with Russia.
The United States sparked the Ukraine conflict in order to weaken Russia and its strategic alliance with China and also slow down the transitioning of the World Order from a unipolar system led by it into a multipolar one being ushered in by China and Russia. It wanted to use Ukraine as a pawn to achieve its goals without going into war with Russia.
But President Putin has a different scenario. He is determined that Russia will prevail in the Ukraine conflict no matter how long it takes. The alternative is a nuclear war.
If Russia prevails, then any peace treaty will mean a neutral Ukraine outside NATO. On the other hand, if Putin ever felt that the balance of power in the Ukraine battlefield is shifting in favour of the United States and NATO, he won’t hesitate in retaliating with nuclear weapons thus triggering a nuclear war. Either case, Ukraine’s NATO membership becomes remains a mirage.
Dr Mamdouh G Salameh
International Oil Economist
Global Energy Expert
"When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, there were thousands of former Soviet nuclear warheads, as well as hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles and bombers, left on Ukraine’s territory, which it decided to transfer to Russia. Ukraine never had an independent nuclear weapons arsenal, or control over these weapons, but agreed to remove former Soviet weapons stationed on its territory. In 1992, Ukraine signed the Lisbon Protocol and it joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapon state in 1994. The transfer of all nuclear material took some time, but by 2001, all nuclear weapons had been transferred to Russia to be dismantled and all launch silos decommissioned."