A British columnist believes that NATO's commitment to defending Ukraine as an ally may end up being worth a little more than the paper it was written on.
The promise of Ukraine's entry into NATO at the July summit in Washington threatens to demonstrate the vulnerability of the Alliance and make further negotiations on peace in Ukraine with the president of the aggressor state Vladimir Putin impossible.
This opinion was expressed in a column for The Guardian by Christopher Chivvis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, ex-US national intelligence officer in Europe from 2018 to 2021.
NATO's failure to defend Ukraine
“A promise to grant NATO membership to Ukraine would jeopardize the credibility of the alliance's existing mutual defense commitments, as set out in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. This promise obliges alliance members to treat an attack on one of them as an attack on all But applying this standard to Ukraine after the war would be extremely difficult, and while it continues, it will be even more difficult,” he believes.
A columnist for the British publication writes that in any case of ending the war, Ukraine will face hostility from Russia, which will remain much more combat-ready militarily. If Ukraine were to join NATO, other members of the alliance would have to deploy their own forces, likely in significant numbers, directly to Ukraine indefinitely.
Chivvis noted that previously such deployments, such as in the Baltic states and Poland, were largely the responsibility of U.S. troops, considered the most effective deterrent against Russia. But the United States is unlikely to deploy forces on the scale needed to defend Ukraine.
Some proponents of Ukraine's membership in the alliance hope that nuclear weapons will fill that gap, he said, but the idea that NATO would be willing to fight a nuclear war with Russia to protect Ukraine, potentially ending civilization, as we know her, Chivvis argues, is a fantasy.
“NATO's commitment to defending Ukraine as an ally could end up being worth little more than the paper it was written on. It would call into question existing commitments to other allies, weakening the alliance and other US global commitments,” Chivvis noted.
No need to irritate Putin?
The analyst is sure that even the proclamation a serious intention to admit Ukraine into NATO would complicate attempts to negotiate a cessation of hostilities, since “Russia is neurotic about this issue.”
“Anyone who accepts that this war will have to be ended through negotiations, including the Biden administration, should not promise to take Ukraine into NATO at this point. Gestures about NATO membership would also play into Putin's war narrative, which he partially justifies on the grounds that he is fighting an aggressive, expansionist NATO,” states Chivvis.
What protection does Ukraine need
Christopher Chivvis believes that Ukraine needs to extend the current agreements in one form or another after the end of the war, not only to ensure Ukraine's security, but also to persuade the country to accept a painful truce.< /p>
“Ukraine's leaders must stop asking for NATO membership, and the Biden administration must stop considering it. The focus of the summit must be ending the war and beginning Ukraine's path to recovery. Only in this way can Ukraine flourish and thus truly win this war,” the analyst concluded.
Recall that the UK and the US are arguing over Ukraine's relations with NATO after American officials said that Kyiv's path to membership in the Alliance should not be called “irreversible”.
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