CNN
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President Joe Biden and his team are in the middle of a conversation with other NATO members about how and when Ukraine can join, a debate that could expose tensions in the alliance ahead of a key summit.
The question of Ukraine’s membership in NATO is one of the issues the leaders will address when they meet in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius in mid-July. Also under discussion are new defense spending commitments and a successor to Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who plans to leave his post in the fall.
However, it is the question of Ukraine’s membership that will be a sticking point for the group, which has managed to remain remarkably united amid Russia’s unprovoked invasion.
At past NATO summits, the allies have drawn up a joint statement outlining their shared views. A failure to reach a consensus this year would be hugely consequential and spell trouble for alliance unity as the war in Ukraine continues.
Some allies, particularly those in Eastern Europe who are closer to Ukraine and Russia, have advocated for a more concrete path for Kiev to join the defensive alliance after the war ends.
Other European officials, particularly those in western and southern Europe, have argued that Ukraine’s accelerated entry into NATO could be too provocative and could represent an extremely risky bet for the alliance until and all if there is an end to the fighting, especially if Russia still has claims on Ukrainian territory.
Biden and members of his administration have remained committed to the alliance’s current stance, which states that Ukraine will join NATO but with no certainty as to when.
The split has led to urgent discussions ahead of the summit. The outcome of the talks could determine whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky attends.
“If we are not recognized and given a signal in Vilnius, I think it makes no sense for Ukraine to be at this summit,” he told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month.
The invasion and its aftermath have increased pressure on all NATO members to provide Ukraine with some sort of security guarantee going forward, although there is still disagreement over exactly what those might look like.
“At the summit in Vilnius, we will send a strong message of support and solidarity with Ukraine. And make it clear that Ukraine’s future is in NATO,” Stoltenberg said at a press conference on Wednesday, a day after meeting se with Biden in the White House.
Stoltenberg said he expects member states to agree on a “multi-year program where we help make Ukraine transition from old standards, equipment, procedures, doctrines to NATO standards and become fully interoperable with NATO.” Such steps, he said, would bring “Ukraine closer to NATO.”
But he acknowledged that consultations between the group were still ongoing ahead of the summit.
Ukraine’s ambitions to join NATO predate both Russia’s invasion last year and its annexation of Crimea in 2014. The group agreed in 2008 to allow eventual membership, the so-called “open door policy”, but governance problems, including persistent corruption, have prevented it. that of joining the alliance.
During his first year in office, Biden made it clear that many of these issues would need to be resolved before he entertained the prospect of Kiev becoming a NATO member.
“The fact is that they still have to clean up the corruption and the fact is that they have to meet other criteria to get into the action plan,” he said in June 2021, declaring “school finished” on the question of whether Ukraine could join the organization. .
Russia’s invasion the following February provided a dramatic illustration of Ukraine’s security fears and prompted Zelensky to renew his calls for full NATO membership.
It also helped make Ukraine one of the most heavily armed countries in Europe, with systems and equipment sourced primarily from NATO nations, furthering a case for membership in the alliance.
However, full membership in Ukraine carries significant complications. Under the organization’s Article 5 commitments, an attack on one member is an attack on all, committing the entire bloc to a collective military response. And while Biden has contributed tens of billions of dollars in increasingly advanced military equipment, he has remained staunchly opposed to sending US troops to the country in direct conflict with Russia.
Similarly, Biden has shown caution over moves that could provoke an escalation by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who sees an eastward expansion of NATO as an encroachment on Russian influence.
In recent months, Biden administration officials have stressed their commitment to the Bucharest Summit Declaration – the 2008 agreement that welcomed Ukraine’s aspirations to join the NATO-, but have suggested that the focus should be on practical support to Kiev for the war with Russia.
“All the allies are on Bucharest’s side. There is no division in this proposal,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a news conference in Oslo after an informal meeting of NATO foreign ministers in early June .
The White House said this week that its stance on Ukraine’s NATO membership had not changed.
“Obviously we still support NATO’s open door policy. And these are discussions that have to be had with all 31 allies and of course with the nation in question here. So we’re not taking a position of ‘one way or another,” said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby. “I think you know that in Bucharest there was a statement that made it very clear that NATO should be in Ukraine’s future at some point in the future. Nothing has changed about that.”
However, senior US officials have acknowledged that “there is a spectrum of opinion” among NATO allies about the path to Ukraine’s NATO membership.
“I think the best way to describe it is that there is an enriched conversation across the alliance with a whole range of viewpoints,” US Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said on Wednesday.
“This is not a situation where the whole alliance has agreed on language on how to describe Ukraine’s membership aspirations, and there are one or two countries that are outside that group in opposition. We are having, and we’ve had, a series of conversations where allies are exploring both a number of concrete outcomes and a variety of options to describe their membership aspirations,” he said.
Among NATO countries bordering Ukraine or Russia, there is a stronger push for a commitment to extend membership to Ukraine, including providing a more concrete timetable.
“For the European continent to be secure, the steps on Ukraine’s path to NATO must be clearly defined and fully agreed upon. (Fifteen) years of vague promises must end with a firm commitment, including the protection of Ukraine as we take these steps,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis tweeted last week.
Some European diplomats have argued that the only real deterrent for Russia is the threat of triggering NATO’s collective defense agreement, and that deterrence in the medium to long term will not be enough to prevent Putin from trying retake Ukraine, even if it fails on the battlefield. this time.
Other nations, including Germany, have expressed concern about the risks that full membership of Ukraine would pose. And most diplomats involved in discussions leading up to the Lithuania summit acknowledge that the security guarantees provided by the alliance will stop short of a full Article 5 collective defense commitment.
A European diplomat told CNN that the United States may be willing to drop language on the Accession Action Plan, which the Bucharest statement described as “the next step for Ukraine … in the their direct path to membership.” CNN has asked the National Security Council for comment on the diplomat’s suggestion.
And other diplomats raised the possibility of establishing an urgent consultation mechanism with Ukraine, another benefit of NATO membership that falls short of drawing other nations directly into the conflict.
There is a strong consensus among lawmakers in Europe about the need for leaders to create a clear path forward for Ukraine. Foreign Affairs Committee chairs from 22 nations, including US House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, signed an early June letter calling for such a move at the Vilnius Summit.
