Ukraine After the NATO Summit: The Glass Half-Full?
Plus: New Medvedev screed blows apart Kremlin talking points about the “threat” of Ukraine’s NATO membership.
AS THE DUST SETTLES from the NATO summit in Vilnius, it’s still difficult to evaluate the outcomes for Ukraine. The lack of an invitation to join the alliance, or even a clear path to membership, particularly in conjunction with flaring tempers between Volodymyr Zelensky and some NATO leaders, prompted anti-Ukraine concern trolls to opine that Ukraine had been thrown under the bus and humiliated. Many strong supporters of Ukraine have also expressed disappointment—and have faulted President Joe Biden’s administration for failing to show sufficient leadership and fortitude. (The issue of Ukraine’s admission to NATO may become a focal point for criticism of Biden from Republican hawks.) Meanwhile, Zelensky wrapped up the summit on a conciliatory note, saying that its results were “good”—though not “perfect” because of the still-unresolved issue of future NATO membership—and proclaiming that “the Ukrainian delegation is bringing home a significant security victory.”
Some prominent Ukrainian officials, such as Zelensky adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, also expressed satisfaction with the outcome in Vilnius. Podolyak even portrayed the summit’s verbal fireworks, in which Zelensky described the lack of a clear timetable for Ukraine to join NATO as “absurd” and high-level U.S. and British officials responded with accusations of ingratitude, as evidence of a dynamic and “living” process in contrast to the necrotic tissue of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Are these face-saving moves or do they reflect a complicated reality? The answer to that question may not become fully clear for some time and depends on further developments between Ukraine and its Western partners over the next few months.
The NATO communiqué issued on July 11, which stated that “we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when allies agree and conditions are met,” is frustratingly ambiguous. The promise of NATO membership down the road could have come with fewer qualifiers. But one could also see this statement as a recognition of a simple fact: Under the North Atlantic Treaty, Ukraine cannot join until all member states have given it the green light. Some foreign policy experts argue that overall, the message—Ukraine belongs in the transatlantic alliance—is loud and clear. In the words of former U.S. Ambassador to Poland Daniel Fried: “The ‘when’ and ‘how’ of Ukraine’s accession to NATO have yet to be worked out but, critically, the Vilnius summit has decided the ‘whether’ of Ukraine’s NATO membership in the affirmative—something that the 2008 Bucharest summit did only at a high level of generality.
This message is also reinforced by the unambiguous signal that Ukraine will join NATO after the war with Russia is over. (“An hour and twenty minutes” after, as President Biden jocularly put it at the conclusion of his joint appearance with Zelensky on July 12—though, to be precise, he was answering a question about how soon after the war Zelensky would like to join NATO, not how soon it would actually happen.) Yes, an obvious rejoinder is that this gives Russia an incentive to drag out the war. But the chances of Ukraine joining NATO while embroiled in an active military conflict are practically nil, since such a development would almost inevitably mean direct NATO involvement in that conflict under Article 5 of the alliance’s charter. Setting a date for Ukraine’s admission while the war continues could work as a pressure tactic for Russia to withdraw, or to agree to a peace treaty under which Ukraine would offer minimal or no concessions. But it could also be a dangerous bluff.
The cautious optimists propose looking at the “glass half full” side of the summit. And here’s what Ukraine did get in that glass:
A clear statement in the communiqué that “we do not and will never recognize Russia’s illegal and illegitimate annexations, including Crimea.” (As Fried puts it, “That language, though it reaffirms long-held positions, helps kill the temptation by some to push Ukraine into surrendering its territory in exchange for a dubious ‘peace’ on Putin’s terms.”)
A strong statement from the Group of Seven pledging “an enhanced package of security commitments and arrangements” for Ukraine in the long term, with bilateral talks between Ukraine and G-7 countries to start immediately. These security guarantees immediately drew a sharp reaction from the Kremlin.
The creation of a NATO-Ukraine council where, according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, “Ukraine and NATO Allies will meet as equals, hold crisis consultations, and jointly take decisions.” Yes, we all get that this is rhetoric. But the council (whose meetings can be convened at Ukraine’s initiative) is still an important step.
New aid packages from NATO, G7, and other allies, including, according to the official NATO statement, a multi-year program “to help the Ukrainian armed forces transition from Soviet-era to NATO equipment and standards and become fully interoperable with Allied forces.”
Other Ukraine-friendly developments around the summit include an unmistakable shift by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan from a carefully calibrated neutral position to one leaning more toward Ukraine and away from Russia. Not only did Erdoğan drop his opposition to Sweden’s admission to NATO, removing the last obstacle to its membership, just before the summit, he also hosted Zelensky and expressed at least theoretical support for Ukraine joining the alliance. And he released to Ukraine five commanders of the Azov Batallion (or Brigade, as they now style themselves) whom Russian forces had captured after the surrender of Mariupol; the fighters, labeled as Nazis by the Kremlin, had been transferred to Turkey earlier ostensibly on the condition that they would remain there until the end of the war. Russian officials and propagandists saw the move, correctly, as a slap in Putin’s face.
Of course, the real test of Western commitments will be whether Ukraine will get the hardware it urgently needs in its counteroffensive (which seems to be progressing at a slow but steady pace and making important gains after some early stumbles as a result of underestimating Russian fortifications and minefields). The coveted F-16 fighter planes still seem to be some a relatively distant prospect, and the Biden administration is still “debating” whether to send long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, which could be a game changer.
Some pro-Ukraine pundits such as expatriate Russian journalist Yulia Latynina see both the waffling on advanced weapons systems and the foot-dragging on inviting Ukraine to join NATO as part of the same depressing pattern: reluctance by the United States and some of its European allies to help Ukraine end the war in a truly shattering rout for Russia because of fears that such a rout may trigger not only a precipitous collapse of the Putin regime, but a chaotic breakup of the Russian Federation. Those concerns, Latynina believes, are likely to result in pressure on Ukraine to agree to “land for peace” talks, perhaps including an offer of NATO membership in exchange for some territorial concessions.
But there is also a far more optimistic view, expressed by Ukrainian journalist Matvei Ganapolsky. Three days after the summit, Ganapolsky told a YouTube talk show:
I can tell you that the mood of Ukrainian society, of Ukrainian elites, kept lurching from “betrayal by the West” to “all right, at least it’s something.” But then, once they counted it up, it turned out that the “something” was actually quite substantial. The most important thing is those bilateral agreements [with G-7 countries]—for instance, for aid from the United States for ten years. . . . Until now Ukraine has been walking around with an outstretched hand: maybe they’ll give something, maybe they won’t. As far as the United States. . . the main question was, “What if Comrade Trump gets in—what are we going to do?” It turns out that these bilateral agreements with various countries—the best analogy is Israel with the U.S. government. [The aid] has nothing to do with transitions of power. So if Trump comes in, or some other American Putin, he’ll still have to abide by this agreement, like it or not.
On that last point, Ganapolsky’s optimistic view may well be too optimistic, since it presumes that Trump or some other anti-establishment populist in the White House would feel sufficiently bound by norms to abide by Biden-era agreements. (Ganapolsky suggests that breaking them would be practically an impeachable matter, but has he seen the Republican Congress lately?) Nonetheless, the significance of these long-term arrangements should not be underestimated. They do provide fairly substantial assurances of continuing aid for Ukraine—and, no less important, undercut the incentives for the Kremlin’s strategy of drawing out the war until Western support for Ukraine becomes a casualty of fatigue or leadership changes.
THE NATO SUMMIT AND THE QUESTION of Ukraine’s membership—which will no doubt dominate the next year’s summit in Washington, D.C.—has once again revived the perennial claims that Russia’s attack on Ukraine was “provoked” by reckless NATO expansion and that stopping Ukraine from joining NATO is a legitimate Russian security concern. But few people have noticed that earlier this month, these claims were inadvertently blown out of the water by none other than former Russian faux-president Dmitry Medvedev. Currently the deputy chair of the Russian Federation Security Council, Medvedev has positioned himself as something of official spokesman for the “insane war clown” point of view. (When he’s not claiming that Russia is doing battle against Satan himself, he’s threatening a nuclear apocalypse.)
This time, Medvedev spewed forth a lengthy article for the official gazette of the Russian government titled “The Era of Confrontation.” In it, amid the usual insult-laden tirades about “senile Russophobes in the American Senate” and “fat burghers” in Europe, he attempted to rebut the claim that Russia’s attempts at NATO containment had backfired by inducing Finland and Sweden to join:
This is pure lies. We never tried to contain NATO. We don’t have the strength or the ability to do that. . . . We have always asked for only one thing: to take into account our concerns and not to invite former parts of our country to join NATO. Especially those with which we have territorial disputes. Therefore, our goal is simple: to eliminate the threat of Ukraine's membership in NATO. [Emphasis in original.]
So much, then, for cries about the peril of NATO bases and missiles creeping up to Russia’s borders. Medvedev’s bizarre screed—which ignores the fact that Ukraine was never part of the Russian Federation and that Russia recognized Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders in 1991, 1994, and 1997 without any “territorial dispute”—makes it clear that the Kremlin’s rhetoric about the “threat” of Ukraine’s NATO membership is not about an actual military threat. It’s about the injury to what Putin and his cronies see as Russia’s imperial self-esteem, a blow to Russia’s supposed right to see former Soviet republics as “former parts of our country,” and an obstacle to the Kremlin project of rebuilding the Russian empire. One may speculate about the extent to which the Putin elites’ anxieties about ex-Soviet republics joining the community of liberal democracies have to do with the example this sets for discontented people in Russia itself. Regardless, Medvedev’s own words make it clear that there are no valid national security concerns involved. The “threat” the Kremlin is hyping is a cultural and political challenge.
And if NATO’s mission is to defend the liberal order, then such a challenge to Putin’s autocratic Russia should be a part of that mission.