For more than a year, the West’s efforts to help Ukraine have been stuck between two tracks: denying Russia a victory but avoiding direct war between the country and NATO. Ukraine wants more and has applied to join the NATO alliance in September 2022. This will be rejected for the time being. Instead, as NATO prepares for the July 11-12 summit in Vilnius, Western leaders are aiming to give Ukraine lasting “security guarantees.” What could they be and will they make a difference?
For Ukraine, the best security guarantee is NATO membership and the promise of mutual defense: Article 5 of the organization’s founding treaty states that an attack on one member is an attack on all. But America in particular is concerned that admitting Ukraine while it is at war would essentially mean forcing NATO countries to fight Russia. Anything less than that – declaring that Article 5 does not apply for the time being, or that it does not cover the front line – risks destroying the commitment to mutual defense.
Instead, Western allies are discussing ways to help Ukraine defend itself now and in the future. Their aim is to shore up the credibility of the West’s pledge to support Ukraine “for as long as necessary” and thereby undermine Russia’s hopes that waging a long war could turn the tables on its disastrous invasion. Another goal, thinly veiled, is to secure Western aid to Ukraine if Donald Trump – or a Trumpist Republican – wins the US presidential election next year.
An early version of the guarantees was published last year in the “Kyiv Security Compact,” a proposal by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO secretary general, and Andriy Yermak, adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. including a “multi-decade effort of sustained investments in Ukraine’s defense industrial base, scalable arms transfers and intelligence support from allies, intensive training missions and joint exercises under the banners of the European Union and NATO.” It also provided that guarantors would use “all elements of their national and collective power” to respond to an attack. This left open the possibility that Ukraine’s friends would intervene more directly than has been the case so far.
Even the label for such a commitment is controversial. America worries that “guarantees” are too strong, implying an obligation to directly defend Ukraine. Ukraine sees one alternative, “guarantees,” as too weak. That was the term used in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which America, Britain and Russia promised that Ukraine would be safe from attack in return for agreeing to remove Soviet nuclear weapons from its territory. The guarantees turned out to be worthless.
Eric Ciaramella, who worked on Ukraine policy in the White House under both Democratic and Republican administrations, suggests more neutral words such as “arrangements” or “obligations” in a recent article for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an American think tank. . He believes that the Kyiv Security Compact should be made more binding, not least through “strong political and legal codification”. He also calls for “mechanisms for political consultation, information exchange and coordination”; and a “clear link with Ukraine’s EU accession process and post-war reconstruction”. The idea is to borrow from the way America arms and supports countries like Israel and Taiwan – even though the situation in Ukraine is different. First of all, Israel is a nuclear power. confronted with non-nuclear nuclear weapons; Ukraine has no nuclear weapons and its enemy has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
It is unlikely that the promises to Ukraine will come directly from NATO. But they will be bilateral and collective – perhaps coming from the G7, but more likely the ‘quad’ of America, Britain, France and Germany. Some European officials say different aspects of the package – strengthening the defense of Ukraine’s air or sea, for example – could be passed through different countries depending on their capacity and risk appetite.
For Ukraine and its friends, the value of such commitments will be judged by two standards. Do they strengthen Ukraine’s ability to deliver a decisive blow with Russian forces in disarray following an uprising by the Wagner mercenary group? And will they bring Ukraine closer to NATO, rather than turning it into an alternative to membership?
© 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under license. Original content can be found at www.economist.com
View all political news and updates on DailyExertNews. Download the Mint News app for daily market updates and live business news.
. or less
Updated: Sep 21, 2023 1:34 PM IST