Tag: nato

A key reason that Russia went to war in Ukraine was to prevent Ukraine from ever joining NATO; a key reason that Ukraine went to war with Russia was to defend their right to join NATO. On December 14, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave up Ukraine’s right to join NATO. He presented the concession as a compromise. But it is not really a compromise. Zelensky may intend the non-compromise to leverage concessions from Russia, but it may not really change anything.

That blocking Ukraine accession to NATO was Moscow’s primary motivation has been confirmed by NATO, by Ukraine and by the United States. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General at the start of the war, says that “no more NATO enlargement… was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine… [Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”

Davyd Arakhamiia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team in Istanbul, says that an assurance that Ukraine would not join NATO was the “key point” for Russia. “It was the most important thing for them… They were prepared to end the war if we agreed to… neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO.”  Zelensky said, in his first interview after the invasion, “As far as I remember, they started the war because of this.”

Amanda Sloat, the former Special assistant to President Biden and Senior Director for Europe at the National Security Council, was recently caught suggesting that a guarantee that Ukraine not join NATO could have prevented the war. “We had some conversations even before the war started about, what if Ukraine comes out and just says to Russia, ‘Fine, you know, we won’t go into NATO, you know, if that stops the war, if that stops the invasion’ – which at that point it may well have done,” she said. “There is certainly a question, three years on now, you know, would that have been better to do before the war started, would that have been better to do in Istanbul talks? It certainly would have prevented the destruction and loss of life… If you wanna do an alternative version of history, you know, one option would have just been for Ukraine to say in January 2022, ‘Fine, you know, we won’t go into NATO, we’ll stay neutral. Ukraine could’ve made a deal, I guess, in, what, March, April 2022 around the time of the Istanbul talks.”

But Ukraine did not make that deal because the United States, the U.K., Poland and their partners pushed them not to. They promised Ukraine whatever they need for as long as they need it to fight Russia in defense of the “core principle” that Ukraine has the right to choose its alliances and that NATO has the right to expand.

Nearly four years and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, Ukraine has surrendered the right to join NATO. On December 14, Zelensky said that he is ready to give up the demand for NATO membership in exchange for “bilateral security guarantees between Ukraine and the United States – namely, Article 5–like guarantees… as well as security guarantees for us from our European partners and from other countries such as Canada, Japan and others.”

Zelensky presented this concession as “a compromise on our part.” But it is not really a compromise for three reasons.

The first is that the retraction of the promise that Ukraine would join NATO was already a done deal. Ukraine’s accession to NATO was never going to happen.

That reality was implicitly stated by Biden and explicitly stated by Trump. It is point number 7 in Trump’s 28-point peace plan. The reality has been recognized by Zelensky who has “understood that NATO is not prepared to accept Ukraine” since the start of the war. He has, since that time, “acknowledged” that Ukraine “cannot enter” the “supposedly open” NATO door and that, though “publicly, the doors remain open,” in reality, Ukraine is “not going to be a NATO member.” Any hope of resuscitating that dream died in the recently released 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America that states the policy priority of “Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

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With Zelensky having much-belatedly dropped aspirations for Ukraine’s NATO membership, European officials are now openly admitting what pretty much everyone knew but was afraid to say.

EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas has newly acknowledged in fresh remarks that Ukraine’s membership in the military alliance is now obviously “out of the question” – but that the European Union now needs to provide concrete security guarantees.

“Now if this [Ukraine’s NATO membership] is not in question, or this is out of the question, then we need to see what are the security guarantees that are tangible. They can’t be papers, or promises, they have to be real troops, real capabilities,” she told reporters ahead of an EU Foreign Ministers meeting.

Kallas asserted that “in the last 100 years, Russia has attacked at least 19 countries,” and so this means “the security guarantees are needed for all other members” in the EU.

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Ukraine’s dream of NATO membership is dead. It died, surprisingly, not on the battlefields of Ukraine nor at the negotiating table with Russia. It died in a document written in the White House to be sent to Congress to explain America’s national security vision.

The 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, dated November 2025, was released on December 4. Embedded unimposingly, without fanfare, in a section on The Regions called Promoting European Greatness, and not even in the section that discusses the war in Ukraine, the Security Strategy quietly states the priority policy of “Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” Those fourteen words seem to have pulled the plug on a dream that was already on life support.

That policy priority found expression in point 7 of Trump’s 28 point peace plan that states that “Ukraine agrees to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future.”

Since it was first promised at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO,” the dream has been an unrealistic one. It did not take into account the real wishes of Ukraine, NATO or Russia, and it did not take into account previous promises already made by NATO and Ukraine. At the time of the Bucharest summit, the U.S. may have wanted NATO membership for Ukraine, but only 20% of Ukrainians did.

In 1990 and 1991, at the end of the Cold War, NATO promised Gorbachev and the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand any further east. But it was not just NATO that promised to stay out of Ukraine, it was also Ukraine that promised to stay out of NATO. Article IX  of the 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine, “External and Internal Security,” says that Ukraine “solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs…” That promise was later enshrined in Ukraine’s constitution, which committed Ukraine to neutrality and prohibited it from joining any military alliance: that included NATO. Moscow has recently reminded that Russia “recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine back in 1991, on the basis of the Declaration of Independence” and added that one of the main points for [Russia] in the declaration was that Ukraine would be a non-bloc, non-alliance country; it would not join any military alliances.”

Ukraine’s constitution was only amended to include a mandate for all future governments to seek NATO membership in 2019, five years after the U.S. supported coup. The amendment was made with neither vote nor referendum. At the time, public support in Ukraine for NATO membership hovered around a tepid 40%.

That that amendment could be reversed, and that Ukraine could be willing to do so, was signaled by Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, in the early days of the war. At the start of the war, Zelensky said he has “understood that NATO is not prepared to accept Ukraine.” In March 2022, he said “For years we have been hearing about how the door is supposedly open [to NATO membership] but now we hear that we cannot enter. And it is true, and it must be acknowledged.”

In April 2022, after the war had begun, polling indicates that only 24%-39% of Ukrainians wanted NATO membership. At that time, the tentative agreement arrived at in Istanbul included that “Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership…” The draft reportedly stipulated that “permanent neutrality” be enshrined in Ukraine’s constitution.

Ukraine was pushed off that path by the U.S. for their own policy reasons, including the “core principle” that Ukraine has the right to choose their alliances and that NATO has the right to expand.

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