Western leaders declined to make any specific commitment on an eventual invitation for Ukraine to join NATO, to the disappointment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the allies most vulnerable to Russia.
“Ukraine’s future is in NATO,” the allies agreed to declare in Vilnius following a monthslong debate. “We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.”
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NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg hailed the 2023 communique as “stronger than any message NATO has ever sent before on membership for Ukraine.” Yet it came as a severe disappointment for Zelensky and the NATO allies that feel most vulnerable to Russia’s aggression, which urged the United States and Western European powers to make a convincing demonstration that the Kremlin cannot continue to exert a practical veto over Ukraine’s eventual membership.
“The fact that these words are being so hotly debated shows that our allies are also very serious about these words, that they are not just words, but that they too must actually translate these words into action,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told reporters Tuesday, whose government prodded NATO’s larger members to take a more assertive posture. “Of course, I also understand President Zelensky's frustration because he wants to live in peace, just as we who are in NATO live in peace. But this is how much we can offer now.”
No amount of spin will turn this into a "great" or "historic" summit.
— toomas ilves, ex-verif (@IlvesToomas) July 11, 2023
Best not even to start.
The final version of the communique drew an acerbic critique from Russian chess grandmaster and Putin critic Garry Kasparov, who faulted the allies for “moral cowardice and strategic incompetence” in the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“NATO nations are obliged to do everything possible to protect the country defending their eastern flank. And they should seize the opportunity to defeat the enemy NATO was created to fight,” Kasparov tweeted. “Every Ukrainian death at Russian hands over the past nine and a half years has been because the greatest military alliance in the world did too little, not because it did too much. Ukraine has heard these weak Western promises and weasel words before.”
NATO leaders first agreed to declare that Ukraine would join the security bloc at the Bucharest Summit in 2008. That statement, which made no guarantees about when Ukraine would receive membership, was designed to obscure the fact that former President George W. Bush’s effort to bring Kyiv into the trans-Atlantic alliance had been vetoed by Germany and France, in part out of a desire to avoid provoking Putin.
The intensity of the debate about how to update that pledge, more than a year into Putin’s ill-starred campaign to overthrow the Ukrainian government, stoked external speculation that the Western allies no longer agree that Ukraine ever should be in NATO, their indefinite statements notwithstanding.
“I have a really hard time seeing a scenario where the U.S. and Germany relent, and I'm thinking like even five or 10 years down the line,” Atlantic Council senior fellow Rachel Rizzo told the Washington Examiner. “I don’t think every ally agrees that Ukraine will eventually join NATO.”
Western leaders generally try to maintain a celebratory air at NATO summits — “the main message has to be unity,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said Tuesday at a NATO Public Forum — but Zelensky’s public characterization of the document as “absurd” set a sour tone for the release of the communique.
“This is not leadership,” former Lithuanian Ambassador Zygimantas Pavilionis, who now chairs the Lithuanian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, wrote on Twitter. “This is appeasement that normally leads to final defeat. We have to correct Washington DC until Washington NATO Summit.”
The long-term debate about Ukraine’s prospective NATO membership has been characterized by a deep disagreement about what kinds of policies increase or decrease the risk of a war with Russia.
“We are opposed to the entry of ... Ukraine because we think that it is not a good answer to the balance of power within Europe and between Europe and Russia,” then-French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said at the time.
Ukraine, along with the former Soviet vassal states now protected from Russian invasion by NATO’s security guarantee, countered in recent months that this calculation actually tempted Putin to invade.
“It is experience of my own country that NATO membership is the safest, cheapest, and most credible way of deterring Russia,” Kallas said late last month. “Russia's aggression against Ukraine has also proved this point — the only thing that can end its cycles of aggressions against its neighbors is NATO membership. At the Bucharest summit allies agreed that Ukraine would become a member — this should not remain a hollow promise. What we need now is to define a practical path to meet this goal.”
Stoltenberg argued that the allies cleared that threshold by agreeing that, in the event that Ukraine receives an invitation to join NATO, the process will not need to involve any of the hurdles contained in a traditional Membership Action Plan.
“This will change Ukraine’s membership path from a two-step process to a one-step process,” he told reporters. “Ukraine has come so much closer to this alliance over all these years because especially since 2014, when NATO allies started to train and equip Ukrainian armed forces, but even more so after 24 February last year. Ukraine has demonstrated capabilities, skills and has been more and more integrated with NATO. This is also a consequence of the equipment which NATO allies are delivering.”
Stoltenberg emphasized that “when a war is going on, that's not the time for making Ukraine a full member of the alliance,” repeating a refrain of President Joe Biden and other Western European officials who balked at the idea of an invitation. Yet that argument carried little weight with Ukraine and its more ardent supporters because they were not arguing for Ukraine’s immediate admission.
“The decision at the summit does not mean that membership becomes a reality,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said Monday in one of his final public attempts to enhance the communique. “There's a very long process of ratification in the capitals and ... the most important thing is that tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, Vilnius adopts decisions that would make Ukraine's membership in NATO not a theory but a practical possibility.”
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Stoltenberg insisted Tuesday that they cleared that bar, noting that “we have for the first time ‘invitation’ as part of the language” of the communique.
“At this at the end of the day, it has to be allies that assess as we always do, when we have enlargement, whether their conditions are met, and then make the decision on an invitation,” he said. “So this is a big step — never been stronger language from NATO on membership and never been a more specific announcement on what we are actually going to do to ensure that Ukraine becomes a member of the alliance.”