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*Kyiv battles Russia, seeks signal on membership
NATO leaders have gathered in Washington DC, United States of America, to mark the alliance’s 75th anniversary this week to formalise a clear path on whether to include Ukraine as member, even while its war with Russia still lingers.
The offer is complicated by the fact that Russia now occupies roughly a fifth of Ukraine’s territory and Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly made clear that Ukrainian membership in NATO is a red line.
White House officials late last week said they would expect more commitments from alliance members to provide Kyiv with additional “military, political and financial support,” part of what the Joe Biden administration officials described as Ukraine’s “bridge” to NATO membership.
The details of that “bridge” aren’t entirely clear.
Outgoing NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said recently that he wanted to see Ukraine join the bloc by 2034, though he, along with the U.S. and other key members, have stressed that Kyiv’s NATO bid cannot move forward until the war with Russia has ended.
The murky timeline for accession to NATO has frustrated Ukrainian officials, particularly after they watched the alliance put Finland and Sweden on a fast track to membership shortly after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Both Scandinavian nations are now full-fledged members of the 32-country alliance.
The three-day summit starting on Tuesday will mark a coming-out party of sorts for two key participants: Former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, set to take over as NATO secretary-general this fall, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, representing Britain just days after taking office in a landslide election.
But for all of NATO’s talk of bridges and roadmaps, Ukrainian officials appear frustrated as the Washington summit kicks off.
They view NATO membership — or at least a clear path to such membership in the foreseeable future — as the only reliable long-term guarantee against Russian aggression.
Top officials in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government have made clear that they’ve waited long enough and expect clear, definitive action from the alliance this week.
“We would like to see [allies] fixing an irreversible path of Ukraine at NATO membership,” Ukrainian Ambassador to NATO Nataliia Galibarenko told Politico last week. “We are not asking for something extraordinary.”
For Ukraine, the prospect of NATO membership has never been more urgent.
Ukrainian officials fear that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump could offer to squash Kyiv’s NATO bid as part of a broader cease-fire deal aimed at ending the Russia-Ukraine war.
Trump has made it clear that he would seek to end the conflict quickly if elected, though he has not explicitly said that he would use Ukraine’s potential NATO membership as a bargaining chip.
Still, Mr. Zelenskyy urged the GOP presidential hopeful to share his ideas now.
“If Trump knows how to end this war, he should tell us today,” Mr. Zelenskyy said in a recent interview with Bloomberg.
