Ukraine's progress towards NATO membership: Going from Bucharest to Vilnius without moving?

• Partition. This is the least desirable option, since it would reward Putin’s violation of international law, but it seems to be the approach that China is pushing for. During a tour of several European capitals, Li Hui, China’s envoy for the conflict, has reportedly urged his interlocutors to recognise occupied territories as Russian. The American political scientist Samuel Charap has also suggested that the war might end with an armistice which “would leave Ukraine – at least temporarily – without all its territory”. The world has lived with partitioned countries for many years, but the precedents are not encouraging. Charap argues that South Korea eventually became a stable democracy, and flourished economically. The unfortunate population of North Korea, however, have suffered decades of oppression and periodic famines – probably not a fate that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy feels he can accept for Ukrainians under Russian occupation. And 70 years after the Korean War ended, South Korea’s security still relies on the presence of almost 30,000 US troops in the country – a force not likely to be on offer for Ukraine.   
  
  
• Neutrality. Even after the war started, Ukraine explored this as a possibility, and some Western analysts promoted the idea. There have been various models of neutrality in Europe, some of which have worked better than others: Switzerland’s neutrality has been respected since 1815; Belgium’s was violated when it suited Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1914. Finland had neutrality forced on it after the Second World War as the price of maintaining its independence from the Soviet Union, but ultimately sought greater security first in the EU and now in NATO. Ukraine’s problem, however, is that regardless of its foreign policy choices, it is a land which Putin and many Russians regard as indissolubly Russian. Ukraine’s neutrality would not address Putin’s belief that Ukrainians are really Russians and that Ukraine has no right to exist as a sovereign entity independent of Russia – a point he underlined again in a recent meeting with the Chairman of Russia’s Constitutional Court.   

Ukraine’s problem is that regardless of its foreign policy choices, it is a land which Putin and many Russians regard as indissolubly Russian.

• The ‘hedgehog’ strategy. Some Western analysts have suggested that Ukraine’s best option is to emulate Israel, and make itself too ‘prickly’ to be an attractive target – with military support from friendly countries, but no security guarantees and no allied ‘boots on the ground’. That would imply Ukraine maintaining a large army and still larger well-trained on-call reserves even after hostilities end, with a permanently high defence budget. If it was lucky, and future Western governments saw it as something very close to a treaty ally, in the way that US administrations have seen Israel, then it too could hope to be given a ‘qualitative military edge’ (QME). US law obliges the administration to preserve Israel’s QME, by ensuring that it always has access to better weapons and more advanced military technology than its Arab neighbours – even those that are closely aligned with the US, such as Saudi Arabia.  
  
  There are two problems with this option. One is financial: given the devastation that eastern and southern Ukraine have suffered in the war, Ukraine and its partners will have to invest enormous sums in reconstruction as soon as it is possible to rebuild – both for humanitarian reasons and because the country needs to get its economy restarted. It is unrealistic to expect that they could simultaneously maintain the kind of defence budget that Israel had when its confrontation with the Arab states was at its height: Israel’s military spending exceeded 10 per cent of GDP in every year from 1967 to 1994.   
  
  The other problem is that Israel’s strategic position vis-à-vis its Arab neighbours is very different from Ukraine’s position with regard to Russia. Israel has had nuclear weapons since the late 1960s or early 1970s, while the Arab states have not (and Israel has conducted military operations against Iraqi and Syrian nuclear facilities to keep it that way). By contrast, Russia has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, while Ukraine has no nuclear weapons. Former US ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder has warned that if Ukraine had to rely on its own resources to deter future Russian attacks, it might seek its own nuclear weapons. A nuclear-armed Ukraine might indeed be more secure, but it would alienate many of its Western partners by eroding the credibility of the global nuclear non-proliferation regime, thereby encouraging other vulnerable states with aggressive neighbours to go nuclear.  
  
  
• The EU mutual defence commitment (Article 42.7). This option would only be available once Ukraine joined the EU – which might be a decade or more away. Leaving that problem to one side, the EU’s mutual defence commitment is in theory more binding than NATO’s Article 5. The latter states that in the event of an armed attack on an ally, each other ally “will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force”. Article 42.7 of the Treaty on European Union goes further: “If a Member-State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member-States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power” (author’s emphasis). But even if all EU members were willing to go to war for each other, the Union is not equipped with the command structures to co-ordinate them or the enablers to support them in fulfilling this guarantee (such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or logistics). Even in aggregate, European forces are smaller and much less capable than the US forces that are the backbone of NATO. Soon after the war began, the Finnish and Swedish prime ministers wrote a letter to the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, stressing the importance of the Article 42.7 commitment; within weeks, however, both countries had applied to join NATO – concluding, presumably, that EU membership on its own was not enough to ensure their security. Apart from the timing problem (what security guarantees would Ukraine have before it joined the EU?), Kyiv would have to wrestle with the same uncertainty about the solidity of Article 42.7. 
  
  
• Guarantees from a ‘coalition of the willing’. If Ukraine cannot benefit from a guarantee provided by all the members of the EU or NATO, could a coalition of the states most interested in its success do it? Perhaps Emmanuel Macron had such an arrangement in mind when he said at GLOBSEC in Bratislava in May: “We should provide Ukraine with solid security guarantees” – without mentioning NATO as the potential guarantor. At a recent private meeting of US and European officials and think-tankers, there was some discussion of the possibility of some NATO member-states having a relationship with Ukraine like the one that allies had with Finland (and still have with Sweden) in the run-up to NATO accession. The UK and Sweden, for example, agreed in May 2022 that in the event of an attack on one of them, they would “upon request from the affected country assist each other in a variety of ways, which may include military means”. That does not constitute a legally binding guarantee of help, but such an agreement might give Ukraine more certainty than it now has that Western assistance would continue as long as the country remained under attack. Such a guarantee would look unconvincing from a Moscow perspective, however, unless the US was a party to it. All the indications are that the US is not interested in offering Ukraine the kind of bilateral commitment to come to its defence that South Korea, Japan or the Philippines rely on.  
  
  Even if a credible coalition could be put together without US participation, it would leave other NATO members in an uncomfortable position: alliance unity would be placed under strain if one group of allies felt that another group was knowingly increasing the risk of a conflict with Russia in the expectation that the rest of NATO would come to their rescue. If, say, Polish forces responding to a further Russian attack on Ukraine came under attack themselves while they were still on Polish soil, would all allies feel that that was an Article 5 contingency? Would some take the view that Poland had provoked Russia, and decide that they were not prepared to go to war in such a case?  

NATO membership for Ukraine would have clear advantages over any of these options. It would not reward Putin for his aggression. Unlike the neutrality option, it would not leave Ukraine reliant on Russia’s goodwill for its future security. By sharing the burden of defending Ukraine and deterring further Russian attacks among all the NATO allies, it would make the costs bearable for all, rather than forcing Kyiv to devote a large proportion of its economic output to defence. And by bringing Ukraine under NATO’s nuclear umbrella, it would considerably reduce the incentive for Volodymyr Zelenskyy or a successor to develop a nuclear weapons programme of their own. Unlike the EU option, a NATO defence guarantee can be put in place as quickly as allies can be persuaded to ratify Ukraine’s accession to the alliance (with bilateral guarantees from interested allies as a stop-gap until the ratification process is complete); and unlike the EU or any coalition of the willing, NATO membership would bring with it ready-made forces, command structures and enablers.  

A NATO defence guarantee can be put in place as quickly as allies can be persuaded to ratify Ukraine’s accession to the alliance.