Russia invaded Ukraine for no good reason, they say. Some in the West say there was no reason at all.
But that’s just not true. Ukraine was making a push to join NATO, and the alliance was considering it despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s blood-curdling threats. Putin does not want NATO to expand eastward and even though Ukraine was a long way from being accepted into the NATO alliance, Putin decided to invade anyway.
It was a stupid move. There are other reasons Putin wanted to invade Ukraine — reasons that have more to do with history than anything related to the present. But Putin used the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine as a propaganda cause for his invasion.
If the U.S. and NATO were smart, they’d put Ukraine’s membership in the alliance on hold for a while and keep their mouths shut about any plans for NATO expansion that included Ukraine until there was some kind of negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia. True, Russia may demand that Ukraine maintain some sort of neutrality as part of any peace deal, but any move to get Ukraine into NATO would force Putin to continue the fight until Russia wins through to a military victory.
So naturally, NATO is saying publicly exactly what Putin needs to hear to keep fighting.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that Ukraine’s future is in the “Euro-Atlantic family,” and that Ukraine’s “rightful place is in NATO.”
“All NATO Allies have agreed that Ukraine will become a NATO member. But the main focus now is of course on how to ensure that Ukraine prevails,” Stoltenberg said at Ramstein Air Base.
Ukraine has long sought NATO membership. As early as April 2008, NATO said it “welcomed” aspirations from Ukraine and Georgia — the latter was attacked by Russia later that year — to join the military alliance. Allies agreed at the time that the two countries would eventually become members, NATO said. But 15 years later, neither has. Though it’s been discussed, there has so far been no movement.
There’s a damn good reason for NATO not inviting either Georgia or Ukraine into the alliance at that time; no one wanted to fight a war against Russia. So what’s changed?
Russia has become a threat to NATO countries on the periphery, and creating a buffer state by accepting Ukraine’s NATO membership would solve a lot of messy strategic problems for the alliance.
“Russia continues to fail in achieving its strategic objectives. They failed to seize Kyiv, they failed to topple the Ukrainian government, and they failed to fracture NATO,” U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters on Friday. “In fact, they’ve done just the opposite. Kyiv stands, the people of Ukraine are emboldened, and NATO has never been stronger.”
As the recently leaked Pentagon documents show, that statement is accurate — as far as it goes. What’s also accurate is that there are definite fractures in the alliance, with Germany and France pushing for some kind of peace deal last December. Biden may have shot the idea down but NATO is hardly united on the way the war is going. Recall that it took the U.S. promising to deliver Abrams tanks before Germany would allow exports of its Leopard tanks, which are far more suitable for Ukraine.
“No one can tell when and how this war ends. But what we do know is that when the war ends, we need to ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself, that Russia is not able to continue to attack and wage war again against Ukraine and to continue to chip away at European security,” Stoltenberg said.
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The only way to ensure Russia won’t attack Ukraine again is to disarm them. But that won’t be possible in any case. Putin will continue to fight unless he is given something to take back to the folks at home showing them that the 200,000 dead Russian soldiers so far didn’t die in vain.
And hinting that Ukraine will be in NATO only guarantees perpetual war and the growing possibility of U.S. involvement and the use of nuclear weapons.
