U.S. and European officials are in the stretch run of a debate about how to signal that Ukraine is making progress toward NATO membership without overcommitting the allies as Russia occupies substantial Ukrainian territory.
“There is a group of countries which say that Ukraine really deserves to be NATO, and this is a matter of formulation — in what wording [we use to] put that in the communique,” a senior European official told the Washington Examiner as NATO defense ministers huddled in Brussels. “Many defense ministers stated that we have to confirm as much as we can, politically, that Ukraine belongs to NATO.”
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That chorus has formed over months of public and private discussions about the message that NATO leaders would send when they meet at in Vilnius next month. And it is emerging as a partial diplomatic victory for the Lithuanian hosts and other governments most haunted by the specter of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s desire for NATO to “be rolled back” to its 1997 boundaries — in the face of resistance from larger powers that have been hesitant to stoke that geopolitical dispute with Russia.
“There are still NATO members that are very careful and are really concerned about anything that would be escalatory,” another senior European official said. “It’s Germany and the U.S. that are really the most careful. And the other counterbalances [in that debate] are the Baltic countries and Poland.”
That subset has insisted that NATO must improve on the 2008 Bucharest Summit Declaration, which saw the allies trumpet their agreement that Ukraine and Georgia would “become members of NATO” while quietly blocking any practical progress toward that goal due to anxiety about how Putin would respond.
“They deserve to be presented with a very quick path to NATO,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in June.
The Biden administration sought to sidestep the debate through an emphasis on “doing what needs to be done to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian aggression,” as Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in April following a meeting of NATO’s foreign ministers in Brussels. That ministerial reportedly saw the United States, Germany, and Hungary shoot down the idea of offering Ukraine a “road map” into NATO.
“The Eastern Europeans, of course, are trying to come up with formulas that start a process,” the Financial Times quoted a source as saying after the Brussels meeting. “They want to suck us into a process that inevitably leads to their desired end state [of Ukraine’s membership], and others are hesitant about that.”
That debate continued over the next two months as officials and lawmakers traversed the trans-Atlantic circuit that ran eventually through Oslo, Norway, where Blinken and his counterparts met for another informal meeting as May turned to June. French President Emmanuel Macron told a security conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, that “we need a path towards membership,” followed by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s declaration that “Ukraine’s rightful place is in NATO,” as he emphasized on the sidelines of a summit of European leaders in Moldova.
“There’s a rich conversation going on across the alliance with a whole array of views,” Ambassador Julianne Smith, who leads the U.S. mission to NATO, told reporters on Wednesday. “This is not a situation where the entire alliance has agreed language for how to describe Ukraine’s membership aspirations, and there’s one or two countries that stand outside of that group in opposition. We are having and we have had a series of conversations where allies are looking at both an array of concrete deliverables and an array of options for describing their membership aspirations.”
Macron and Sunak’s public statements reflected a tide turning in Oslo at the May 31-June 1 meeting. “It was a rather good meeting that really took this process forward,” the second senior European official said. “I think we were rather satisfied with the outcome of the meeting, and now it’s up to colleagues in Brussels to put that into the communique language.”
One of the keys to the meeting was NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s suggestion Ukraine could join NATO at some point without going through the so-called membership action plan process, according to the first senior European official. Such a statement would remove a criterion that NATO leaders included in the 2008 Bucharest declaration, when they agreed that Ukraine and Georgia would “become members of NATO” eventually.
“Stoltenberg said that we can maybe avoid the MAP process,” the first senior European official said. “It sounds like it will happen.”
The former Norwegian prime minister unveiled another political gesture from the alliance following the defense ministerial this week.
“We are now close to finalizing an agreement to establish the NATO-Ukraine Council,” Stoltenberg told reporters Friday. “This will be a body of 31 allies and Ukraine equal, sitting around the table with the same rights and the same possibilities to consult, and also make decisions together if we find that the right thing to do.”
Stoltenberg affirmed Friday “that Ukraine has already moved closer to NATO over the past decade” and maintained that “Russia does not have a veto” over the expansion of the alliance.
Those overtures can’t hide the fact that the allies have treated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a new Kremlin obstruction of Kyiv’s desire to join the alliance, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky well knows.
“We are reasonable people and we understand that we are not going to drag a single NATO country into a war,” Zelensky said one day after the meeting in Oslo. “Therefore, we understand that we will not be members of NATO while this war is going on. Not because we don’t want to, but because it’s impossible.”
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If the Oslo meeting portends a Vilnius communique that goes beyond the 2008 pledge, it’s still a delicate task to do so in the shadow of that impossibility.
“We will see the first draft next week and the discussion will start after one week or even later,” the first senior European official said. “I think that we will end somewhere in between, with wording to [affirm the] Ukrainian path toward the Euro-Atlantic family, or something like that. … Anyway, we will move a bit further than it was in Bucharest. I think that’s for sure.”
