NATO still divided over Ukraine's membership path, despite agreeing to pull country closer: Analysts

The lack of a clear pathway for Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) shows that member states are still divided over how soon the country should join the alliance, despite vague assurances of its future membership, said observers. 

Concerns over getting pulled into direct conflict with Russia has left some NATO countries reluctant to let Ukraine in too soon.

“NATO is a consensus organisation. So any agreement that comes out of the alliance needs to be made at consensus. It can't be a consensus minus one (member),” said Ms Rachel Rizzo, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. 

This means all 31 NATO nations must approve of Ukraine’s membership. 

“There's some question about the willingness of certain members to really grant Ukraine a clear pathway to NATO membership,” Ms Rizzo added. 

SPEEDY ACCESSION TO NATO UNLIKELY

NATO leaders on Tuesday (Jul 11) agreed that Ukraine's future lies within the alliance, but stopped short of offering Kyiv an immediate invitation or timeline for accession that the country has been seeking. 

“We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the alliance when allies agree and conditions are met,” said NATO in a declaration at a summit in Lithuanian capital Vilnius, without specifying the conditions Ukraine needs to meet. 

Its members in eastern Europe have supported Kyiv's push for a swift entry, but countries such as the United States and Germany have been more cautious of a move that could draw NATO into direct conflict with Russia.

“The US is still nervous about escalation, and what this might mean for future relationship with Russia,” said Ms Rizzo, whose research focuses on European security, NATO, and the transatlantic relationship. 

“They want to avoid getting pulled into the war, of course.”

The difficulties lie in how a collective defence clause remains a cornerstone of the alliance, said Ms Rizzo, highlighting Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states an attack on one member of NATO is an attack against all members.

“It basically requires, by treaty, NATO countries to come to the aid of another country should they be invaded.”

NO CLEAR PATH TO NATO MEMBERSHIP

While NATO has dropped the requirement for Ukraine to fulfil a so-called Membership Action Plan (MAP), removing a hurdle on Kyiv's way into the alliance, observers are not optimistic of Ukraine’s entry into the bloc any time soon. 

“Unfortunately, I don't see a clear pathway right now where the US would be on board for Ukraine's NATO membership or for offering extremely clear language of how to lay that out,” Ms Rizzo told CNA’s Asia Tonight on Tuesday. 

“The question I always come back to is, if (Ukraine was) a member of NATO, would we come to the defence of Ukraine? And if we didn't, what would that mean for the entire NATO security architecture?

“I think NATO leaders or US leaders ask themselves that same question, which still seems like it would be a really, really difficult proposition, even five or 10 years down the line.”

Speaking at a rally in Vilnius on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy voiced his disappointment that Ukraine was not invited to join the alliance. 

He had been pushing for his country to become a member of the bloc since Russia’s invasion more than a year ago. 

“There is no such thing as de facto NATO membership that President Zelenskyy is referring to,” said Dr Sara Bjerg Moller, senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.  

“You're either in the military alliance or you're not, and the fact is that Ukraine is not currently a member.”

Dr Moller, whose areas of expertise include transatlantic and Indo-Pacific defence and security partnerships, said while the aid that NATO provides Ukraine will increase, it has to “seriously weigh” the possibility of letting the country join. 

“The reality is that NATO simply cannot invite a country that is currently at war - and at war with another country that happens to have the largest nuclear arsenal in the world - into the military lines,” she told CNA938 on Wednesday. 

“At the end of the day, it is often the US that pulls and has the most sway.”

REINFORCING THE ALLIANCE’S COLLECTIVE DEFENCE

Doing away with the requirement of a Membership Action Plan could potentially shorten the timeline for Ukraine, suggested Dr Moller, who is also an associate teaching professor in the security studies programme at Georgetown University. 

However, there are other conditions that Ukraine would still have to meet, “not just in terms of preparing its military and defence operations, so that they are interoperable and standardised with NATO equipment, but also in terms of governance issues and upholding reforms that have already started”, she added.

At the Vilnius summit on Tuesday, NATO members committed to reinforce the alliance’s collective deterrence and defence.

Its new NATO defence plans, designed to counter its two main threats of Russia and terrorism, “will revolutionise the alliance's ability to do collective defence,” said Dr Moller.

“It’s really the first time since the Cold War that there are going to be standing defence plans for how to protect every inch of NATO territory against not just a Russian attack, but also the threat some countries in the alliance fear from terrorism.”

With NATO making progress on several fronts after the Russia-Ukraine war started last year, “there's only one clear loser here and that's (Russian President Vladimir) Putin”, she noted. 

On Moscow’s justification that its invasion of Ukraine was necessary to prevent NATO from expanding, Dr Moller said: “They've gotten that through their actions, so they brought about the thing they claimed they were hoping to prevent.”