Lara Marlowe: Can Ukraine join Nato before the war ends?

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s negation of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s justification for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was one of the most damaging aspects of his short-lived mutiny.

“The armed forces of Ukraine were not going to attack Russia with the Nato bloc,” Wagner chief Prigozhin said in his June 23rd rant against the conduct of the war.

“Nato made me do it” has been Putin’s constant refrain for 15 years. If Ukraine and Nato did not threaten Russia, why did Putin invade? And why did Prigozhin sacrifice the lives of thousands of Wagner mercenaries? Prigozhin’s outburst tacitly acknowledged the truth: that Russia is engaged in a neocolonial war of territorial expansion.

Putin’s dismay over Nato enlargement may be understandable, but nothing can justify his invasion of Ukraine. One can imagine how the US would have reacted if the Warsaw Pact had survived and recruited Canada and Mexico as members. But there is a major difference. The former vassals of the Soviet Union were haunted by centuries of persecution at the hands of the Russian empire, and clamoured to join Nato.

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In a speech on June 26th, Putin even seemed to blame Nato for Prigozhin’s rebellion, saying “It was precisely this outcome – fratricide – that Russia’s enemies wanted: both the neo-Nazis in Kyiv, and their western patrons.”

At the Bucharest summit in April 2008, US president George W Bush and US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice insisted that Georgia and Ukraine be invited to join Nato. Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel and president of France Nicolas Sarkozy opposed the move because they feared it would provoke Putin. An unsatisfactory compromise concluded that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually join, but failed to say when. Some believe the mélange of provocation and timidity led to the present war in Ukraine.

Four months after the Bucharest summit, Putin invaded Georgia and seized territory amounting to 20 per cent of the country. He has captured a comparable percentage of Ukrainian territory since 2014.

Ukraine’s wish to join the alliance will again be at the top of the agenda at the July 11th-12th Nato summit in Vilnius. Poland and the Baltic states, the most ardent supporters of Ukraine’s candidacy, are reportedly willing to send ground troops to Ukraine, while the US and Germany still fear becoming “co-belligerents” in the Ukraine war. France is somewhere between.

Washington can be faulted for triumphalism after it won the Cold War, and shares blame for failing to construct the promised partnership with Russia

Nato’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg will attempt to reach a consensus on a phrase acceptable to all, such as “Ukraine’s rightful place is in Nato” or “Euro-Atlantic security is incomplete without Ukraine inside Nato”.

French president Emmanuel Macron predicts the alliance will offer Ukraine “something between the security provided to Israel and a full-fledged membership”.

[ Ukraine steps up calls for ‘political invitation’ to join Nato ]

Article 5 of the Atlantic Treaty, which requires member states to defend one another, is the main impediment to rapid Ukrainian accession, because if Ukraine joins while the war is ongoing, it would mean direct confrontation between Nato and Russia.

“If we make Nato accession dependent on the cessation of hostilities, we give Vladimir Putin the incentive to pursue the war indefinitely,” former Nato secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s chief of cabinet, warned recently in Le Monde. “An official invitation sends a clear message to Putin: Ukraine will become a member of Nato. You cannot stop this process.”

Washington can be faulted for triumphalism after it won the Cold War, and shares blame for failing to construct the promised partnership with Russia. Before his death in 2005, the US diplomat George F Kennan, father of the doctrine of containment, called Nato expansion “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era”.

Western disingenuousness in dealing with Russia shifted to meek inconsistency with Putin’s invasion of Georgia

William Burns, who like Kennan served as US ambassador to Moscow, and who is now director of the CIA, also opposed Nato expansion, according to Anatol Lieven in the Financial Times.

As recounted in US historian ME Sarotte’s 2021 book Not One Inch, America, Russia and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, US secretary of state James Baker promised president of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall that if the moribund Soviet Union allowed East Germany to reunite with West Germany, Nato would move “not one inch” eastward.

Later, Russian president Boris Yeltsin believed Nato promised – at the Founding Act Between Nato and Russia at the Élysée Palace in May 1997 – that it would not incorporate former Warsaw Pact members. Western sources later said the promise was vague and merely verbal. Yeltsin should have got it in writing.

Western disingenuousness in dealing with Russia shifted to meek inconsistency with Putin’s invasion of Georgia, and especially after Russia seized Crimea and invaded Donbas in 2014.

Fifteen countries have joined Nato since German reunification, most of them former Warsaw Pact members or former republics of the Soviet Union. Sweden could become the alliance’s 32nd adherent at Vilnius. No one expects Ukraine to become a fully fledged member of Nato this month, though Ukrainian officials argue that it is already a de facto member.

The world has changed utterly since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but Nato’s dilemma in Vilnius is virtually the same as it was in Bucharest 15 years ago: how to secure the freedom and territorial integrity of a nation which aspires to belong to the West, without going to war with Russia.