NATO declared on Tuesday that Ukraine would be invited to join the alliance, but did not say how or when, its president failed but reflected the decision of President Biden and other leaders not to be directly involved in Ukraine’s war with Russia.
In a communiqué agreed to by all 31 NATO countries, the alliance said Ukraine’s “future is in NATO,” and would allow it to join once member nations agree the conditions are ripe — but it has not offered of details or timetable. It has pledged to continue to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia and the alliance’s foreign ministers will engage in a periodic review of Ukraine’s progress toward meeting NATO standards — in both democratization and integration. military evil.
The words mean that Mr. Biden, who declared last week that “Ukraine is not ready for NATO membership,” and similar allies have prevailed on Poland and the Baltic countries to want a formal invitation for Ukraine to join the alliance as soon as possible. the war is over. NATO leaders released the document, a product of compromise after weeks of argument, at a summit meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania.
A few hours earlier, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who seemed to know what to say, gave a blast to the NATO leadership. “It is unprecedented and absurd when a deadline is not set, either for the invitation or for Ukraine’s membership,” he wrote on Twitter before landing in Vilnius.
NATO’s commitment goes beyond its vague statement in 2008 that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become members. Given Ukraine’s shaky democracy, corruption and the old Soviet arsenal, that was a dim prospect, and neither it nor Georgia has joined since.
In exchange for membership, NATO leaders on Tuesday offered Mr. Zelensky of new military aid to fight Russia, promises of further integration and statements intended to convey to President Vladimir V. Putin that his strategy of wearing down European countries will not work. Their communiqué stated that Ukraine has moved closer to the alliance’s political and military standards.
Mr. Zelensky will have dinner with NATO leaders and participate on Wednesday in the first NATO-Ukraine Council, an effort to include the country in alliance discussions even as a nonvoting member.
But what Ukraine wants – and what Mr. Biden and Germany, among others, are reluctant to offer – is the main benefit of full membership: The promise of collective defense, that an attack on any NATO country is an attack to everyone.
Mr. Biden warned that he did not want to be forced into direct combat with Russian forces, warning “that would be World War III.”
Mr. Zelensky threatened not to attend the meeting if he was not satisfied with NATO’s commitment. He and his top aides have argued that if Ukraine had joined NATO, Mr. Putin might not have dared to invade and risk a war with the Western alliance.
Historians and geostrategists will argue about the what-ifs for years. But with the release of the communiqué, Mr. Biden appears to have gotten two of the things he wanted most out of this summit.
Through Swedish concessions and help from Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, Mr. Biden helped persuade Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to end his block on Sweden’s membership, which requires unanimous consent. And in the language adopted Tuesday in Vilnius, there is still no specified date — or even specified conditions — under which Ukraine will become a member.
The closest the statement came to a promise were these words: “We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the alliance when allies agree and conditions are met.”
As a significant concession, NATO agreed that Ukraine would not have to go through a preliminary process to prepare it for an invitation. Both Sweden and Finland, which joined this year, were also allowed to skip such a process.
Moscow has made it clear that it is closely following the summit. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said the new weapons given to Ukraine “force us to take countermeasures,” and criticized Turkey for allowing Sweden to join. Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov said Russia will assess “how fast and how deep NATO’s expansion into the territory of Finland and Sweden is,” and will respond accordingly.
The dispute within NATO over its joint statement has deep roots, said Samuel Charap, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation.
“There is a major division between the United States, Germany and other less vocal allies committed to the principle of an open door to NATO, but without wanting to see a concrete timeline or automatic, and the countries close to Russia that pushing hard. it’s hard to make the vagueness of Bucharest more concrete,” he said. It was a 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, that pledged Ukraine and George to eventual membership.
For the United States, Mr. Charap said, Ukraine’s membership soon “involves the risk of a NATO-Russia war arising from a country at war with Russia entering the alliance,” he said, which noted that Moscow has been called Ukrainian for many years. membership in NATO a red line. “For others, Ukrainian membership is a path to peace and stability, because it will deter Russia and anchor Ukraine and end instability.”
Bucharest’s commitment is a way to kick the can of Ukrainian membership down the road. That may no longer be possible, because of the war. “At some point the road ends, and we may reach that end,” Mr. Charap said.
The NATO alliance was eager to use this Vilnius summit as a demonstration of trans-Atlantic unity, and to that end it largely succeeded. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said in several interviews that Mr. Putin’s strategy was to wait for NATO countries to tire of the war. But the Russian leader, he said, “will not go beyond Ukraine, and the sooner he ends this war of aggression, the better.”
The allies arrived in Vilnius with more promises of weapons and military equipment for Ukraine to bolster its sluggish counteroffensive: long-range “Scalp” cruise missiles from France; 25 more Leopard tanks, 40 more infantry fighting vehicles, and two more Patriot air-defense missile launchers. There is a $770 million package from Germany and $240 million from Norway for unspecified equipment and other support.
Additionally, the defense ministers of Denmark and the Netherlands announced that they have gathered 11 countries to help train Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets next month. Mr. Biden agreed in May to drop his objections to giving Ukraine F-16s, though that may not happen until next year.
The Scalp missiles are the same Storm Shadows weapon that Britain said, in May, it had sent to Ukraine. The missiles, jointly developed by France and Britain, have a range of about 150 miles.
France has previously ruled out supplying Ukraine with such missiles over concerns they could be used to attack targets in Russia, escalating the conflict. But President Emmanuel Macron said he was sending Scalp missiles today to help Ukraine defend itself.
The communiqué also has more than 60 references to nuclear weapons, warning Russia of “grave consequences” if it uses one in war, while pledging to modernize the nuclear forces of the three nuclear NATO powers: the United States, Britain and France.
Kremlin officials have suggested several times that Russia could use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and it recently began deploying them in Belarus. “We condemn Russia’s irresponsible nuclear rhetoric and coercive nuclear signaling,” the leaders’ statement said.
The communiqué also has lengthy sections on China’s threats. While its wording is milder than its references to Russia, it argues that China presents a more long-term danger. The language is significant because in recent years, NATO, focused on European security, has hardly thought about China.
“The PRC aims to control key technological and industrial sectors, critical infrastructure, and strategic materials and supply chains,” it said, using the abbreviation for the People’s Republic of China. “It uses its economic leverage to create strategic dependencies and enhance its influence. It seeks to undermine the rules-based international order, including in the space, cyber and maritime domains.
Taken together, the Russian and Chinese sections of the communiqué leave little doubt that NATO sees the world heading into an era of confrontation even as complex as the Cold War.
Mr. Stoltenberg has struggled to show reporters that NATO’s commitment to Ukrainian membership is different from the vague 2008 pledge.
He said NATO has become closer to Ukraine since Russia annexed Crimea and sparked a separatist war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and NATO has begun training Ukrainian troops. They have grown ever closer since Russia’s full-scale invasion last year, when NATO countries began pouring tens of billions of dollars worth of military equipment into Ukraine.
Mr. Stoltenberg and American officials have argued that Mr. Zelensky could return to Ukraine with several key prizes: direct participation in NATO’s discussion of the war, a firmer commitment to Ukrainian membership, new promises of military and financial aid for the medium and longer term, and the message of resolution being sent to Mr. Putin.
