An emboldened NATO provides a bittersweet moment for war-torn Ukraine
Congratulating Finland, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Finland now has a “reliable guarantee of safety – a collective guarantee.”
Thomas Trutschel | Photothek | Getty Images
Ukraine heartily congratulated Finland on its accession to NATO, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying Helsinki now had a “reliable guarantee of safety — a collective guarantee.”
But as Finland’s flag was hoisted at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels Tuesday, officially marking its entry as the 31st member of the Western military alliance, there were bound to be a bittersweet feelings in Kyiv.
Ukraine yearns for NATO membership, having long-aspired to join the alliance and for it to feel the security that members enjoy as a result of the collective defense pact.
At the heart of NATO is the tenet that an attack on one member is an attack on all members. If that tenet, enshrined in Article 5, is invoked then all members are bound to come to the defense of that member country.
Ukraine knows that its own journey toward that “guarantee of safety,” as Zelenskyy described it, faces far more barriers to entry, however.
Those include not only the fact Ukraine is actively engaged in an ongoing war with Russia that shows no signs of ending soon, but also a likely reluctance among some NATO members who have warmer relations with Moscow (such as Turkey and Hungary) to antagonize Russia further when relations between NATO and Russia are already at a historic low and more reminiscent of the Cold War.
Finnish President Sauli Niinisto (left) and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg leave after a press conference during a NATO foreign affairs ministers’ meeting, at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, on April 4, 2023.
Kenzo Tribouillard | AFP | Getty Images
Russia has been fuming about the forthcoming expansion of NATO for months, saying it increases the risk of conflict with Moscow.
The Kremlin warned Tuesday it would take “countermeasures to ensure our own security both tactically and strategically.” On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to hold talks with his Belarusian ally President Alexander Lukashenko, with a deepening of defense cooperation and strategy on the agenda.
Bittersweet moment
Having congratulated Finland on its entry to NATO, Zelenskyy said in his nightly address that Russia’s aggression against his country shows that only collective preventive security guarantees were “reliable.”
“Russian aggression clearly proves that only collective guarantees, only preventive guarantees can be reliable. That’s what we’ve always talked about. They also talked about speed — the speed of security decisions matters. Now we see what the speed of procedures can be,” Zelenskyy said.
Finland and Sweden both applied to join NATO last May, prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and their membership bids were fast-tracked. Sweden is still waiting for its bid to be ratified by Turkey and Hungary.
Ukraine applied to join NATO last September, and also requested that its bid be fast-tracked, but analysts have said its application could take years and certainly won’t happen while Russia is occupying swathes of its territory.
NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday that the door remains open to prospective members in future, though he didn’t mention Ukraine by name.
“President Putin wanted to slam NATO’s door shut. Today, we show the world that he failed.
Instead of less NATO, he has achieved the opposite. More NATO. And our door remains firmly open.”
Stoltenberg noted that “Finland now has the strongest friends and allies in the world” adding that “at times like these, friends and allies are more important than ever.” NATO has proved itself a friend and ally of Ukraine over the past year but for now, Kyiv remains outside the alliance, looking in.
Stars unaligned for Ukraine
History could have been very different had Ukraine been a member of NATO earlier and it’s highly unlikely that Russia would have invaded its neighbor had it been under the organization’s protection.
To do so would have triggered NATO members’ commitment to protect one another and Moscow would have faced the collective might of the alliance’s armed forces. Analysts agree Russia’s military power and weaponry, despite its large army, pales in comparison with the advance military hardware and highly trained troops of NATO members, let alone the power this represents when those forces are combined.
As fate would have it, Ukraine was nowhere near to being a member of the alliance when Russia invaded in February 2022.
This was despite several decades of see-sawing between aspirations to join NATO and veering away from it — largely depending on the pro-Russian or pro-Western leanings of Ukraine’s leaders at the time. And, to be fair, an equal amount of yo-yoing by NATO officials over the years when it came to whether Ukraine and other post-Soviet states like Georgia should be able to join.
That’s not to say that NATO didn’t see the war coming in Ukraine in the run up to the invasion.
Russia had made it clear that if NATO didn’t agree to its proposals in late 2021 to roll back on deployments of troops and weaponry in eastern Europe, and to guarantee that Ukraine would never become a member of the alliance, that there would be consequences. That, along with the massing of around 100,000 Russian troops on the border with Ukraine, showed Russia’s true intent although it denied for months that it planned to invade.
NATO was put in a tricky position in the lead up to the war, eager to stop an aggressive Putin seemingly intent on rebuilding a Soviet empire starting with Ukraine, and not wanting to become embroiled in a conflict involving multiple nuclear powers.
Before the invasion, back in January 2022, NATO’s Stoltenberg told the BBC: “We have no plans to deploy NATO combat troops to Ukraine … we are focusing on providing support” before adding that “there is a difference between being a NATO member and being a strong and highly valued partner as Ukraine.”
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