President Emmanuel Macron has reportedly agreed to the possibility of speeding up Ukrainian accession into NATO, reversing course on a policy pursued jointly by Paris and Berlin since 2008 to avoid triggering a direct conflict with Moscow.
“Ukraine’s entry into NATO would be perceived by Russia as something confrontational. You can’t imagine it with this kind of Russia,” Macron said as recently as December 2022.
The apparent shift in position, which comes against the backdrop of the Ukrainian military’s stalled counteroffensive, which has run into well-prepared Russian defensive lines costing Ukraine thousands of troops and hundreds of NATO-provided heavy tanks and armored vehicles, renews concerns about the proxy conflict escalating or even going nuclear as Western powers are sucked directly into the crisis.
Naive, Dangerous Step
It’s “very naive” for President Macron to believe that Ukrainian membership in NATO could somehow bring an end to the conflict, says Paul E. Vallely, a retired US Army major general now serving as chairman of the Stand Up America Foundation, a US advocacy and non-profit.
“It’s not going to make any sense. Putin is not going to agree to that. So it’s not going to happen. I mean they can try to put [Ukraine] into NATO, but then they’re escalating the conflict, and we could have a possible nuclear war,” Vallely told Sputnik. Western powers have “got to back off” and “understand that that’s not going to happen and it should not happen,” the observer stressed.
If Ukrainian integration into NATO proceeds, it will give Moscow the justification to expand its military operations, “maybe take Kiev, Odessa and basically finalize the conflict and remove Zelensky from power,” the retired general added.
David T. Pyne, an EMP Task Force scholar and former DoD officer, says that behind the scenes, NATO members know that membership for Kiev is a fairy tale, and always has been.
"Macron's statement that he thinks French support for Ukraine's membership in NATO will bring Russia to the negotiating table is absurd. It is Biden, the UK, and Zelensky that have refused all of Russia's attempts to negotiate a mutually acceptable compromise peace agreement to end the war since April 2022. Were it not for the Biden administration's decision to urge Ukraine to repudiate its tentative peace agreement with Russia and continue sending military and financial assistance to Ukraine, the war would have ended 14 months ago, and a couple hundred thousand Russian and Ukrainian lives would have been saved," Pyne told Sputnik.
"The Biden administration and many NATO members, including Germany, Hungary, and Turkiye understand very well that NATO membership for Ukraine would effectively mean war with Russia and they very much want to avoid that. NATO leaders are not suicidal, although sometimes it seems they act that way. The time has long passed for the US and NATO to support a ceasefire and armistice agreement along the lines of my peace proposal in The National Interest," Pyne added.
In fact, the observer recalled, "if the Biden administration had issued a written guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would never be allowed to join NATO, I think the chances that President Putin would have ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine would have been very low." Moscow's hand was forced after the failure of diplomatic efforts to avert the crisis, with US leaders "refus[ing] to conclude a mutual security agreement with Russia that would ensure Ukraine's security and enable it to keep most or all of its internationally recognized territory."
Even after the conflict escalated in February 2022, Russia was immediately "waiting at the negotiating table," striking a draft peace deal with Kiev which was broken off by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who "flew to Kiev" in April 2022 "to persuade Zelensky to renege on his commitment to peace with Russia," Pyne said.
No NATO ‘Not the End of the World’
The Western alliance set the stage for the present crisis in 2008, when the bloc agreed that Ukraine and Georgia should eventually become members of NATO. Russia warned repeatedly that it would act if NATO crossed its security “red lines” in Ukraine, stressing that alliance military equipment and missiles would undermine Russian strategic security.
In late 2021, as Kiev prepared an offensive to crush Donbass, Russia urgently sent the US and NATO a pair of comprehensive security proposals designed to squash tensions, including a dramatic scaling back of conventional troop deployments and exercises, and no Ukrainian membership in the bloc. Washington and Brussels balked at the proposals, saying the alliance would not alter its “open door” policy. Weeks later, Eastern Europe became engulfed in the military conflict.
France’s apparent about-face on Ukrainian NATO membership notwithstanding, officials in Kiev have tempered their expectations for the upcoming Vilnius summit. Kiev wants “some kind of invitation – or at least commitment…to look at the time frame and modalities of our membership,” Ukrainian ambassador to NATO Natalia Galibarenko said this week, referring to alliance chief Jens Stoltenberg’s comments on Monday that the summit will not include a formal invitation for membership.
NATO’s membership rules prohibit countries that have unresolved internal conflicts or border disputes with neighbors from joining. Ukraine, which claims Russian-controlled territory in Crimea, Donbass, Kherson, and Zaporozhye, does not match these criteria, and its membership in the alliance would threaten to trigger Article 5 – the NATO Charter article requiring collective defense in support of a bloc member.
The Western alliance has been known to bend these rules, integrating Greece and Turkiye into the alliance in the early 1950s in spite of the history of conflict between the two nations. But to date, the bloc has not moved to expand into a country engaged directly in an armed conflict with a neighbor, much less a nuclear weapons-armed power like Russia.