The first day of the NATO summit in Vilnius was dedicated to determining Ukraine’s future in the Alliance. On July 11, a multi-year program of support for Ukraine was adopted, which will accelerate the transition from soviet to NATO standards. A new NATO-Ukraine Council was also established to serve as a forum for consultations. At the same time, the leaders of the military bloc agreed that in the future Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance without the need to fulfill the NATO Membership Action Plan. As for the specific timing, it was stated that Ukraine will receive an invitation to join NATO when “all allies agree and the conditions are met.”
Have Ukraine’s expectations regarding the decisions of the Vilnius Summit been met?
Obviously, it is impossible to be completely satisfied with the summit’s decisions, as they do not include the membership invitation Kyiv wanted. Therefore, the Ukrainian side’s disappointment is understandable. President V. Zelenskyy called the absence of a timeframe for inviting Ukraine to join NATO “unprecedented and absurd.” According to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, when it comes to membership, NATO continues to keep “the whole situation and Ukraine in limbo.”
The fact that the country would not receive a fateful decision on a political invitation to join NATO at the Vilnius summit was not a surprise to Ukraine’s leadership, so the signals of disputes over the wording of the summit declaration were known in advance. The main motivation for some Allies why Ukraine cannot join NATO right now (according to unofficial sources, the United States and Germany) was the risk of a direct nuclear clash with russia. This is the reason for the maximum vagueness of the wording and the absence of any specifics on which “conditions” should be met. This strategic uncertainty leaves open absolutely all scenarios for further relations between Ukraine and NATO. Therefore, the recognition of the “conditions” as fulfilled will depend on the political will of the Alliance, and they may change under the influence of the situation on the Ukrainian-russian front.
At the same time, the NATO Summit in Vilnius certainly cannot be called a failure. Unlike the Bucharest Summit in 2008, this year’s decisions contain rather positive wording regarding Ukraine. The abolition of the MAP implementation stage will shorten Ukraine’s path to the Alliance from a two-step to a one-step process, and the accession procedure itself will be at least several years shorter (Eastern European countries that joined NATO and implemented the Membership Action Plan went through the procedures for three to five years). Although the summit decision does not list the conditions that Ukraine must fulfill to join NATO, it does define a mechanism for their evaluation. The instrument for monitoring reforms will be the Annual National Program (ANP), which Ukraine already has at its disposal.
However, it is clear that as long as the war continues, we cannot expect a quick positive decision from the Alliance on Ukraine. Western fears of the russian threat remain the main obstacle to Ukraine’s accession to the military bloc. No wonder NATO Secretary General J. Stoltenberg stated: “If Ukraine is not winning, there is no point in discussing NATO membership.”
In addition, this approach (Ukraine will join NATO only after the war is over) motivates russia to continue the war as long as possible. In terms of the balance of power and the availability of human and military resources, Ukraine needs a significant increase in financial and military assistance to at least force russia to stop the active phase of hostilities and launch a general offensive. No wonder, in addition to the communiqué’s approval of an annual $500 million aid package for Ukraine to modernize its army, the Alliance decided to deploy 300,000 troops to the eastern flank bordering Belarus and russia, as well as increase investments in defense. The summit also confirmed that the 11-nation coalition will begin training Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets in August.
Moreover, the threat of the war spilling over into NATO member states and directly engaging in a war with russia, which some NATO member states use to justify their cowardice, is largely a myth from the Cold War. The attempted military coup by the wagnerites, total corruption in the army, economic exhaustion due to Western sanctions, and human losses in Ukraine have weakened the kremlin regime to the point where it is unable to decide to use nuclear weapons against NATO.
Despite the fact that the Vilnius summit unfortunately became a symbol of lost opportunities for Ukraine, there is hope that NATO member states will have the courage to overcome the psychological unwillingness to decide to invite Ukraine to join the Alliance at the next summit in Washington in April 2024. On the one hand, this would help avoid escalation, and on the other hand, it would push the Russians to realize the futility of continuing to wage war in Ukraine. We hope that this issue will be raised during the meeting between the US and Ukrainian presidents on the final day of the summit on July 12.
