Ukraine’s Membership Prospects No Clearer After NATO’s Washington Summit

Executive Summary:

• NATO’s Washington Summit Declaration looks noncommittal and conditions-hedged regarding Ukraine’s eventual membership in the alliance. Member states believe that Ukraine’s accession would involve the alliance in a war with Russia so long as Moscow wages war against Ukraine.
• The alliance’s decision to designate Ukrainian membership explicitly as an end goal and the path to it as “irreversible,” significantly improve on previous NATO documents regarding Ukraine.
• Postponing Ukraine’s NATO accession pending an “end to the war,” “peace,” or an armistice overlooks Russia’s erasure of differences between war and peace. Waiting until “after the war” would incentivize Russia to continue waging war against Ukraine precisely to block its path to NATO.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Washington on July 9–11 has again deferred an invitation for Ukraine to commence accession negotiations (a process in its own right) into an ever-receding future. The summit’s concluding document is noncommittal and conditions-hedged regarding Ukraine’s eventual NATO membership (NATO, July 10). As such, it can be used to block Kyiv’s membership path indefinitely without explicitly turning down the candidacy. This was Ukraine’s experience with NATO’s Open Door Policy from 2014 (if not from 2008) until now. The Washington Declaration replaces that “Door” with a “Bridge” to NATO for Ukraine.

Beyond the declaration and other official documents, however, political facts out of Kyiv’s and supportive states’ control stand in the way of Ukraine’s membership. First, Washington has shifted from supporter to naysayer since the Joe Biden administration took office in 2021. Second, Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine has caused many allies supportive of Ukraine’s accession to postpone it until an undefined “end of the war” (see below).

The Washington Summit Declaration still invokes the Open Door as a general principle (NATO, July 10, paragraph 2). It reads, “Every nation has the right to choose its own security arrangements. We reaffirm our commitment to NATO’s Open Door Policy.” This reaffirmation is designed to accommodate prospective membership countries. It does not reference any particular country at this time since Finland and Sweden successfully walked through that door last year, the Georgian government has recently chosen to disqualify itself as an aspirant to NATO membership, and Ukraine is being upgraded to the Bridge process (see EDM, May 13, June 11).

On Ukraine specifically, the allies declare that “Ukraine’s future is in NATO. … We will continue to support it on its irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership. We reaffirm that we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met. The Summit decisions by NATO and the NATO-Ukraine Council, combined with Allies’ ongoing work, constitute a bridge to Ukraine’s membership in NATO” (NATO, July 10, paragraph 16). The “irreversible path” and the “bridge to membership” are novel and unprecedented formulations in NATO political documents.

Several countries supportive of Ukraine (the United Kingdom, France, Poland, and the three Baltic states) are known to have fought down to the wire for “irreversibility” to be included. They wanted to preclude the theoretical possibility that certain member states would trade off Ukraine’s NATO membership prospects in a package agreement with Russia to end the war or renegotiate Europe’s security architecture (Ukrainska Pravda, July 11; Nv.ua, July 14). Such ideas could hardly achieve consensus in NATO once the alliance is committed—as it henceforth is—to an “irreversible” path for Ukrainian membership.

Nevertheless, events intrinsic or extrinsic to the alliance could unpredictably halt or reverse even a path declared to be irreversible. For example, Viktor Yanukovych was narrowly elected as president of Ukraine in 2010, withdrew Ukraine’s 2008 application for NATO membership, and switched Ukraine back to a policy of nonalignment (“nonbloc”) with the parliamentary majority on his side. The Biden administration withdrew US support for Ukraine’s NATO membership (see EDM, May 27, June 1, 2021). And Georgian leaders decided to abandon the country’s membership aspirations to NATO and the European Union in the runup to this NATO summit.

US State Department officials introduced the Bridge metaphor into the pre-summit debates in an effort to strengthen the language of NATO’s 2023 Vilnius Summit Communiqué on Ukraine. That document’s key sentence reads, “We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met” (NATO, July 11, 2023). Attributed to the Biden White House, that phrase deeply disappointed not only Ukraine but also many member states because of its redundant reasoning (i.e., “we will agree when we will agree”) and the failure to specify the conditions to be met, potentially allowing changes in interpretation or moving of goalposts down the road. The same phrase was carried over verbatim from the Vilnius Communiqué to the Washington Declaration and remains a matter of concern. It is, however, mitigated somewhat by the Washington Declaration’s explicit mention of NATO membership as an end goal.

Most, possibly almost all member states, including those supportive of Ukraine, accept as a given that NATO cannot allow Ukraine to become a member so long as the country is at war with Russia. The alliance would find itself at war with Russia in such a case, the argument goes. Many allies, however, consider it possible to invite Ukraine to commence accession negotiations during the war with a view to accession “after the war” or “once peace is achieved.” This view seems to assume a transition from “war” to “peace” between Russia and Ukraine at some point in time.

That anticipation is unrealistic since Russia has erased any clear-cut difference between war and peace in its conflict operations, specifically those in Ukraine. Even in the hypothetical event of a ceasefire or armistice, Russia would not allow any “peace” to take hold or “settlement” to become permanent. Nor would Russia allow Ukraine and the West the option of a “frozen conflict.” Any “freeze” would almost certainly take the form of a low-intensity conflict punctuated by high-intensity phases as in 2014–22 in Ukraine—this time involving far longer frontlines and far larger Ukrainian territories in Russian hands.

The idea of waiting for “peace” or an “armistice” to accept Ukraine into NATO incentivizes Russia to persist waging an open-ended war and preclude a peace settlement by any definition of that term, seeking to destroy the “Bridge” to Ukraine’s NATO membership.