When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy strides into Nato’s annual summit in Vilnius on Wednesday, his country will have been fighting a full-scale war of survival against Russia for 503 days.
As his battered troops continue to fight off a relentless invasion and attempt to claw back occupied territory in the country’s south and east, Zelenskyy comes to the Lithuanian capital with another strategic objective: to gain a seat at Nato’s table.
To Zelenskyy and his government, the US-led alliance represents long-term peace and security. Article 5 of Nato’s treaty is an ironclad mutual-defence clause backed up by American, British and French nuclear weapons.
But Kyiv’s objective goes beyond defence. Through Nato membership, Ukraine would receive an unambiguous ticket into “the west”, a break from centuries of subjugation by Moscow, and the security required for its reconstruction and economic revival.
Yet Ukraine poses a series of questions for Nato’s 31 members. Those questions reach to the heart of the alliance’s purpose, from how prepared its members are to fight a war against Russia to whether Nato’s mutual-defence clause is a security blanket to be thrown around states, or a badge of distinction to be earned.
“What I believe is that Ukraine will become a member of this alliance and that Ukraine’s rightful place is in Nato,” the alliance’s secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg tells the FT. “It’s for allies to decide when the time is right.”
“Compared to 2008, Ukraine is much closer to Nato now,” he adds, referring to the year Ukraine’s potential membership was officially announced without a timeline. “That’s a factual thing.”
“[But] of course there are different ideas, different proposals on the table, as it always is when important issues are discussed,” Stoltenberg, whose term as secretary-general will be formally extended to a tenth year this week, says. “I’m absolutely confident that we will end on something that will unite the allies and will send a clear message.”
When the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania acceded to Nato in 2004, it was over a decade since they had regained independence from the USSR. Russia was then in a state of chaos, caught between economic collapse and political upheaval, with ill-equipped and poorly-managed armed forces.
Today is markedly different. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has killed hundreds of thousands of people and forced more than 10mn Ukrainians from their homes, in a stark demonstration of President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to use force to achieve militaristic ambitions.
Now, after more than 17 months of war, during which Nato allies have provided Ukraine with over $160bn in military and financial support, western capitals are grappling with a far larger question. Having given Ukraine the means to stop Russia’s conquest, are they now ready to promise that if it were to happen again, their troops would be fighting and dying too? And if not, what might they be willing to offer instead?
“The sole task here [in Vilnius], and one that all allies agree on, is that we left grey areas on the map 15 years ago which Putin took advantage of, and now we need to make sure there is no more grey,” says one senior Nato diplomat. “It is about making crystal clear where the lines are.”
A fateful breakfast
It was over breakfast in Bucharest in 2008 that the seeds of Nato’s current dilemma were sown.
At an early morning meeting on the second day of the alliance’s summit that year, then-secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer met with US president George W Bush and his French and German counterparts Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel.
The outcome of that breakfast, and a result of Merkel softening her opposition to Bush’s proposal to offer membership to Ukraine and Georgia, was a statement by the entire Nato alliance.
Both countries “will become members of Nato”, it said, without providing a timeline. That declaration, at the same time both unequivocal and non-committal, was hailed as a major achievement. It has since sunk into infamy.
Those like Germany and France who opposed Ukraine’s membership — each of whom had a veto, given Nato’s unanimous requirement for new members — believed it put an indefinite pause on the country’s ambitions.
But in Moscow, it was seen at the other extreme: tantamount to Nato’s annexation of both republics. That, Putin said the next day, posed a “direct threat” to Russia and broke what he understood to be a pledge for Nato not to add members from the ex-USSR.
Kyiv and Tbilisi found themselves trapped between both positions: exposed as future Nato members but without any of the alliance protection that comes with accession.
Four months later Putin’s tanks rolled into northern Georgia. In 2014 his special forces annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Nato, as Putin knew well, refuses to accept new members with “frozen conflict” on their territory. Aside from condemnatory rhetoric, Nato did little to punish Moscow. Putin, who had been present at the Bucharest summit as a guest, had called Nato’s bluff.
“The most dangerous place for Russia’s neighbouring countries is to sit in the waiting room of Nato,” says Margus Tsahkna, Estonia’s foreign minister. “And we did exactly that 15 years ago with Georgia and Ukraine.”
It’s like arriving at triage in a hospital emergency room, he adds: “ . . . you go in, but you’re waiting and you’re not labelled yet. Are you a green, yellow or red patient? We must label [Ukraine]. We must start the process.”
Nato has a self-proclaimed “open door” policy towards prospective new members. Since 2008 it has not stood still, accepting five new members in the 15 years that have passed. Last year, in response to Russia’s invasion, Finland and Sweden launched fast-tracked applications to join the alliance. Finland acceded in April; Sweden is hopeful of becoming a member in the next few months after Turkey lifts its veto.
Dotting the i’s
Updating the language on Ukraine agreed at Bucharest is Nato’s thorniest task this week. While no member of the alliance believes Kyiv can join while at war, the discussions on whether to advance its status, and how to convey that, are intense and emotive.
“There’s this huge spectrum from 2008 language through to full membership. As an alliance we have whipsawed up and down that spectrum over the past year of debate,” says a senior US diplomat. “We’re pretty close to knowing where we will land as 31 [members], and everyone agrees that unity is the primary objective here.”
Few officials are willing to disclose what language their government has proposed or would accept, such is the sensitivity over what will probably end up as one sentence in summit conclusions running into pages.
Those like the Americans and Germans, who are more strongly opposed to any sort of language that would imply immediate Article 5 commitments, want to make sure that Ukraine only enters when it can make the necessary reforms.
Biden said last month that he would not fast-track Ukraine’s path to membership. “I’m not going to make it easier. I think they’ve done everything relating to demonstrating the ability to co-ordinate militarily, but there’s a whole issue of: is their system secure? Is it non-corrupt? Does it meet all the standards every other nation in Nato does? . . . it’s not automatic.”
Others have shifted their prior position. Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, said in May that Ukraine should be given a “path to Nato membership”.
The intervention from Macron, who only four years ago voiced his belief that Nato was “brain dead”, has been crucial for those campaigning for more ambitious language in Vilnius.
“Of course, the Ukrainians want to see the word ‘invitation’ in there somewhere,” says one European official involved in the negotiations. “But it won’t be unqualified; instead, some kind of words will be found that don’t allow for it to be automatic.”
Having recognised that a membership invitation would fail to meet US and German approval, in a private meeting of Nato foreign ministers in May, Stoltenberg offered an alternative sweetener. When the invitation is finally presented to Ukraine, he suggested, it should be shorn of the bureaucracy that comes with the formal Membership Action Plan most states go through to join.
That should speed up the process, Nato officials say. But it would not cut corners on non-negotiable issues including anti-corruption reforms, use of modern, Nato-standard weaponry interoperable with allies’ armies, and structures to protect secret alliance intelligence.
“If the Membership Action Plan is no longer the path to Nato membership, there can be no so-called shortcut,” the European official adds. “Preconditions must still be fulfilled.”
How long that might take depends on who is asked. Russia hawks such as Poland, for example, say that Ukraine is already meeting some of those preconditions.
“Poland is very clear that we want Ukraine to become closer to Nato at an institutional level,” foreign minister Zbigniew Rau told reporters last week. “When [the preconditions] are met, we can think of a relatively quick pace of bringing Ukraine into Nato.”
An ‘Israeli model’?
Ukraine has realistic expectations of what will happen this week.
“Membership is not on the table and it’s too late to change the agenda,” says one Ukrainian adviser to his country’s defence ministry.
“Turkey and Hungary have even opposed Sweden’s accession to the alliance. It’s not going to be possible to achieve anything [on Ukraine],” the adviser adds.
But Nato leaders are aware that a message would be sent were Zelenskyy to leave Vilnius empty-handed. They have a plan: formalising security commitments.
Nato is at pains to stress that proposed security assurances are wholly separate from the issue of alliance membership, to protect the distinction of Article 5. But the reality is they are generally regarded as a stepping stone to accession.
Not least because the core countries set to provide them — the so-called Quad of the US, UK, France and Germany — are four of Nato’s five biggest military powers.
While the formal promises are not yet agreed or stated publicly, officials involved in the discussions tell the FT that they will centre on codifying existing military supplies and making a clear pledge that they will continue. Plus there will be guarantees on the training of Ukrainian troops, intelligence-sharing and assistance with defence policy reforms. There is also likely to be a multilateral declaration of some kind with countries making individual pledges.
Nato will also elevate the existing Ukraine-Nato commission to a council. That gives Kyiv an equal seat at the table with Nato members and allows it to call meetings for “crisis consultations”. The inaugural meeting will take place on Wednesday in Vilnius.
Proponents say that these measures not only help to protect Ukraine in the short-term, but both increase longer-term security and better prepare the country for Nato membership.
But sceptics, such as Estonia’s prime minister Kaja Kallas, warn that they “blur the picture” and distract from Nato membership. Kallas likes to joke that to a non-native English speaker, “assurances”, “commitments” and “guarantees” can pass for synonyms, whereas only Article 5 can be relied upon.
Ukraine is understandably wary of paper promises. In 1994, under an agreement called the Budapest Memorandum, it gave up its arsenal of Soviet-era nuclear weapons, then the third-largest in the world, in return for security assurances from Russia, the US and the UK. These counted for nothing in 2014 and 2022.
Some officials have pitched the commitments as an “Israeli model” akin to the overt military support Washington provides to the Jewish state.
The US currently commits to making sure Israel has a “qualitative military edge” in the Middle East and signs memorandums of understanding every 10 years. Officials envision Ukraine could have something similar, putting the country’s defences on a suitable footing — it would be impossible to commit to parity with Russia.
Ben Tallis, a senior research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, says that such commitments have an additional benefit for the US. “The US is still blocking [Ukraine’s membership], and blocking for not wholly unfair if still blinkered reasons: they want Europeans to take more care of their own defence and to not simply add another European country that is dependent on them,” says Tallis.
But some countries are nervous about the potential cost of the commitments, tying up tens of billions of taxpayer money at a time of rising inflationary and budgetary pressures.
“The concern is that the more we talk about security guarantees, or assurances, or commitments, the more it becomes obvious that this is really expensive,” says one senior European official who speaks regularly to Zelenskyy’s cabinet about security issues.
The choice for Nato members, the official adds, is: “either the Israel model, which is them [Ukraine] being able to defend themselves, which is expensive in terms of investment, or the Nato model of us defending them if they need it, which is expensive in terms of the responsibility we take on.”
‘Too much hesitation’
Russia’s land forces may have taken a beating in Ukraine, with western intelligence estimating that over 200,000 soldiers have been killed or wounded since last February. But the country’s armed forces remain a potent force. And they are learning invaluable lessons about modern war on Ukraine’s battlefields.
Ukraine’s most vocal supporters, particularly in eastern Europe, say this fear should only compel Nato to move faster. Only with Ukraine in Nato and armed to the teeth can Europe sleep soundly, they argue.
“There’s too much hesitation, and so much of that runs through Berlin,” says Tallis. “What we are seeing is an interesting historical forgetfulness, from Germany in particular, given that they relied on Nato and the Americans to protect them as they rebuilt themselves after the second world war into the state we see today.
“They’re not realising the real cost of European security. The short-term savings aren’t real if they come with long-term insecurity,” says Tallis. “They need to see this as an investment, not a cost.”
For Stoltenberg, the answer to the alliance’s Vilnius dilemma on Ukraine may come to define his tenure.
Having maintained Nato’s unity through the war so far — and ensuring allies provided the support that has allowed Ukraine to fight back — he must now find agreement on an issue that will define what Ukraine, Europe and Nato’s future security looks like.
One big thing that the war has changed, according to Tsahkna, the Estonian minister, is Ukraine’s place in the western world. Before the invasion, doubts remained about whether Ukraine had fully shed its Soviet past — whether it was still in Moscow’s orbit. “Now, it’s clear for generations, the Ukrainian nation has made their own choice,” he says. “Our question is whether we ask them to join. They are sharing the same values . . . They belong to us, to the west.
“They have decided,” he adds. “And I think we also have to have the courage to make historical decisions.”
Additional reporting by Laura Pitel in Berlin