Security for Ukraine — but how? – POLITICO

In its sixteenth month, the war rages on in Ukraine with no end in sight, making the question of longer-term security guarantees ever more urgent. And at the upcoming NATO summit in Lithuania, the issue of Ukraine’s membership will be on the agenda. 

Since Russia’s attack, the once popular idea of seeing Ukraine as a bridge between East and West has been buried — buried for good. And with Ukraine abandoning its earlier goal of neutrality some years ago, the country has made joining NATO a constitutional objective. 

In 2008, Ukraine, along with Georgia, received a promise from the alliance that it would become a member — a promise made without a clear roadmap or timetable. But while almost everyone agrees that simply a mantra-like repetition of the 2008 promise won’t do justice to the current situation, the question remains, how can and should Ukraine’s security be strengthened? And what exactly should the NATO summit communique in Vilnius say? 

By now, there is consensus that full and immediate NATO membership isn’t possible while war is ongoing. Sweden’s current case demonstrates just how complicated the admission of new alliance members is, as all candidates must be ratified by the parliaments of member countries. It only takes one country for admission to get stuck, and so far, all attempts to persuade Turkey to approve Sweden’s accession have been unsuccessful.  

Moreover, if Ukraine were to join the alliance now, Article 5 of the NATO Treaty would oblige members to become belligerents, achieving the exact opposite of what German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and other NATO leaders have constantly presented as a key aim — avoiding a direct military confrontation between the alliance and Russia. 

Thus, some partners are now proposing to offer Ukraine the prospect of becoming a member as soon as the war is concluded instead. However, while this may sound promising, there’s a big catch: If Moscow knows that the immediate consequence of a ceasefire or peace agreement would be Ukraine’s admission to NATO, it will only agree to a formal end to hostilities when pigs fly. 

NATO would thus indirectly grant Moscow a kind of veto over Ukraine’s membership — not a good option. 

Meanwhile, a few days  ago, former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen wrote that some eastern NATO partners, such as Poland or the Baltic states, might be prepared to send troops to Ukraine to assist. Boots on the ground would be quite an audacious solution, and it’s questionable whether this would even be a viable option. Apart from the fact that not a single NATO partner has so far publicly declared its willingness to send troops to Ukraine, it’s something that could fracture the alliance with potentially serious consequences.  

Let’s assume Polish troops were fighting Russia in Ukraine, and Russia responded by attacking military targets in Poland — would NATO partners then NOT be obliged to offer military assistance if Warsaw was to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, even though it had become a belligerent voluntarily? Could this, in the worst case, trigger a NATO-Russia war?  

This all begs the question, if full NATO membership as such is not immediately available, then what exactly can be done to sustainably strengthen Ukraine’s security? 

Here are three suggestions: 

The alliance could grant Ukraine all the practical and concrete options and opportunities that NATO membership includes — from procurement and full participation in arms and equipment programs to education, training and exercise participation, as well as full involvement and sharing in areas including intelligence, communications and reconnaissance — but without official treaty membership. There’s no good reason why, for example, Ukraine’s foreign minister or NATO ambassador shouldn’t be able to attend all NATO Council meetings as a regular guest, without formal voting rights. 

Another idea is that while Ukraine isn’t a NATO member, it should still be able to rely on bilateral security arrangements — especially with the United States, Canada and, hopefully, individual European partners. This presupposes a longer-term willingness on behalf of such partners to provide continued financial and military support to Ukraine. And much like the West’s support for Israel, the military armament and equipment process for Ukraine would need to be reinforced in such a way that the result would be credible deterrence.  

This approach could make Ukraine the strongest, best equipped and most experienced conventional power in Europe in a relatively short period of time, and one day, Moscow might even be glad to see the country fully integrated into NATO. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recently said he would present this argument to Moscow, and it would be right to do so: It was this U.S. argument that left a lasting impression on Soviet leadership in 1990, regarding NATO membership for a united Germany — that a Germany tied into NATO might be less of a potential threat to the Soviet Union than Germany unbound — and Moscow agreed.  

Finally, a third strategy could be what I call defensive escalation. 

So far, NATO partners have been rather passive-reactive in the face of Russia’s war of aggression — meaning, they have generally reacted to Russian acts of aggression, but without attempting to grab the initiative by adopting proactive measures. In Vilnius, the alliance could turn the tables and signal to Russia’s leadership that, for example, from now on, any Russian shelling of civilian facilities in Ukraine will result in concrete Western responses — from ammunition and weapons deliveries to supplying more advanced ballistic or long-range systems. 

In other words, the message from Vilnius to Moscow would then be that it is up to Russia whether more military targets on its territory will be successfully engaged by the Ukrainian side. 

The bottom line is that even if full NATO membership isn’t currently on the table, the alliance has other options. And it can still significantly strengthen Ukraine, boost its relationship with the country and signal its strategic determination to help restore its full territorial integrity — for as long as it takes.