The Wisdom of NATO entry for Poland and Ukraine

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Neutrality was the answer, not NATO membership.

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In May ’23, the Polish parliament’s upper house — the Senate — unanimously adopted a resolution on Ukraine’s membership in NATO as a key link in Europe’s defense. The resolution reads,

Ukraine’s accession to NATO should be a political decision, as in the case of Finland and Sweden – the result of a strategic analysis of challenges and threats outside the Alliance’s eastern border,” The document notes that Finland and Sweden were invited to NATO by a procedure that had never been used before. “The Senate of the Republic of Poland appeals to NATO member states to apply a similar emergency procedure to Ukraine.

It is understandable why the Polish parliament would feel strongly about Ukraine’s membership in NATO. The Polish government and by all accounts the Polish people view their country’s membership in NATO as a good thing that has greatly enhanced Polish and European security. For them, it follows logically that such a benefit should be extended to their eastern neighbor, Ukraine. However, to determine if this is wise, one should examine the histories of Poland and Ukraine from their emergence as nation states in the aftermath of WWI to the present day. 

With their defeat in WWI, the empires of Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottomans dissolved. The Russian Empire had already disintegrated with the Bolshevik revolution and the signing of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans. This treaty ceded large tracts of former Russian territory in central and eastern Europe to the Germans just prior to their defeat on the Western front.  This left the two remaining members of the victorious Entente, England and France, with a free hand to redraw the map of central Europe at the treaty of Versailles.

From the Versailles treaty emerged what we recognize as the modern states of central Europe with the most prominent addition being the nation of Poland. However, the Polish state that was drawn up at Versailles differs from modern Poland in a very distinctive way. Poland today is essentially ethnically homogenous with other national minorities estimated at no more than 3% of its total population. In contrast, a Polish census in 1931 documented the population as being 14% Ukrainian, 10% Jew, 3% Belarusian, 2% German, and 3% Lithuanian and Czech. 

WWII started with the invasion by Nazi Germany of Poland from the west and Soviet Union from the east.  During the war, its Jewish population, the largest in Europe, was exterminated by the Nazis in the Holocaust. At the end of war, Stalin, with the aid of the Red Army, installed a communist puppet regime in Poland. With the consent of his WWII allies in the West, he modified its borders making it ethnically homogeneous and excluding large minority communities, most notably Ukrainians. Poland remained ensconced in the Soviet bloc until the end of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union in 1991.

Like Poland, Ukraine emerged as an independent state in the aftermath of WWI with the collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. Unlike Poland, Ukraine’s independence was short-lived. In 1922, it was incorporated as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic into the Soviet Union. In 1932–33, the peasantry of Ukraine suffered greatly from Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture that resulted in a widespread famine killing millions. Following the German invasion of Russia and Ukraine in WWII, a Ukrainian nationalist movement emerged briefly that was later to be romanticized by elements of the current Ukrainian government.

In 1991, President Yeltsin of the Russian Republic acquiesced to Ukrainian independence as part of a Faustian bargain that he made with former Soviet party bosses in Ukraine that allowed him to get his Russian republic out from under Kremlin rule. Yeltsin’s gambit was successful, the Soviet Union collapsed, and independent Russian and Ukrainian republics emerged. However, Yeltsin and his successors would come to regret the deal that they struck allowing Ukrainian independence. Yeltsin had believed that after Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union, Ukraine and Russia would soon reunite in a strong economic and political union. However, with the collapse of the Russian economy in the aftermath of the Soviet state breakup, the newly independent state of Ukraine viewed partnership with Russia as a less attractive option and turned its gaze toward the West.

Unlike Poland, the newly independent Ukraine was not ethnically homogenous. Large concentrations of ethnic Russians lived in the eastern Donbas region, up to 20% of the total population of Ukraine. This population of ethnic Russians had closer economic and cultural ties with Russia than they did with the rest of Ukraine. This divide manifested itself as discordant internal politics from the start of Ukraine’s statehood in 1991.  It ultimately led to a schism following the Maidan uprising in 2014.  Ethnic Russians in Donbas and Crimea pursued political autonomy and a war followed with the Ukrainian government attempting to assert control over the rebellious regions.  In 2022, the war escalated with open Russia participation and its annexation of Donbas provinces, Crimea, and a corridor along the Black Sea connecting the two regions.

Since the time of Yeltsin, Russian leaders have decried the encroachment of NATO into the former Russian sphere of interest. In 1999, when Poland joined NATO, Russia was in no position economically or militarily to oppose the West on this issue. Russia was still recovering from the previous decade in which Russia’s GDP fell by an estimated 40%.  However, Russia has recovered under Putin to the point of being able to oppose NATO expansion into Ukraine. Russian intransigence on this point and the large restive Russian ethnic minority in Ukraine provide enough reasons to view NATO’s expansion into Ukraine as ill-advised.

Ukraine retaining its status as a neutral buffer state sandwiched between the West and Russia might have averted the current war.  Finland adopted a similar strategy of neutrality throughout the Cold War, but Finland never faced the same internal division along ethnic lines as Ukraine. It is now likely that the war in Ukraine will end with a ceasefire that leaves Ukraine in control of a rump state in the west and Russia in control of Ukrainian territory extending along the Black Sea coast, from Russia proper to the Crimean Peninsula — a situation reminiscent of Yugoslavia’s dissolution in the aftermath of war in the 1990s.