Russian President Vladimir Putin has made clear that he views Ukraine’s possible accession to NATO as a red-line problem for Russia’s security. While not the sole reason for his threat to invade that nation, the NATO factor looms large in Putin’s calculations.
Still, there are two key reasons Ukraine is unlikely to join NATO anytime soon.
First, NATO’s 30 members would have to agree on Ukraine’s membership unanimously. While NATO insists that “each sovereign country has the right to choose for itself whether it joins any treaty or alliance,” a significant majority of NATO members, if quietly, oppose Ukraine’s membership. Even the United States would not support Ukraine’s membership at present, let alone Western European nations such as Belgium, France, Germany, and Italy, which prioritize close economic and energy links with Russia. Indeed, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz made this quite clear to Putin just this week.
This skepticism is further fueled by Russia’s occupation of Crimea and its control over the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine.
Putin regularly hints that Ukrainian membership in NATO would precipitate a war between NATO and Russia. His reasoning is that any Ukrainian effort to restore control over its lost territories would risk the activation of NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense assurance.
Considering that Russia has offered no interest in negotiating over Crimea — Russia declared on Thursday that the “issue of Crimea’s belonging is closed” — the territory gives Putin a very useful impediment to Ukraine’s membership of NATO. Again, while some governments such as the U.S., Britain, Poland, and the Baltic states might one day view Ukraine’s NATO membership as a means to force Russia’s compromise over Crimea, other Western European countries would likely take the opposite approach.
As a final point, although Ukraine has made progress in areas such as democratic accountability and an independent judiciary, challenges such as corruption and politicized institutions endure. This matters because a NATO “membership action plan” for prospective members includes that member’s ability to prove it has a “functioning democratic political system based on a market economy; fair treatment of minority populations … a commitment to democratic civil-military relations and institutions.”
Ukraine cannot yet make this case convincingly.
Bottom line: Ukraine may one day find a unified NATO ready to welcome its membership. But it’s hard to see that day coming along anytime soon.
