Ukraine’s Membership of NATO is Important to Russia—It Would be Precluded from Ever Invading Ukraine Again

In a recent piece for Australian Outlook Graeme Gill writes that I and others “dispute the importance of NATO,” claiming it has no role in the current conflict, while we “rarely interrogate the evidence relating to [Russia’s] fear of Ukraine joining NATO.” In the article below, I respond to these claims.

My position is that NATO plays a vital role. However, Russia’s fear is not that Ukraine would become the launch pad for an invasion of Russia—there was not a hint of that through 28 years of the Berlin Wall, nor in the last 20 years since the contiguous Baltic countries have been in NATO. Rather that Ukraine’s membership in NATO would preclude a future Russian invasion of Ukraine, a point Vladimir Putin could not abide.

Why NATO is important to Ukraine and Russia

Gill asks “Why on the eve of the invasion, did Putin propose to the NATO powers a security arrangement that, inter alia, involved Ukrainian neutrality (i.e. not becoming a member of NATO)? This was presented as an explicit condition for not invading and was immediately rebuffed by NATO without any discussion or negotiation.”

NATO was always a vital interest to both Ukraine and Russia, although most Ukrainians didn’t understand that until Russia invaded in 2014. Importantly, Ukraine was neutral when Russia invaded, and most Ukrainians up to that time opposed joining NATO because they could not imagine a Russian invasion. For Russia, Ukrainian neutrality and military weakness ensured that its interests in Ukraine were safeguarded given that it could invade Ukraine as it pleased. That is why, unless defeated in this war, Russia is unlikely to agree to a negotiated settlement that declares Ukraine “neutral” and allows it secure military and security guarantees that are the equivalent of Article 5 of the NATO charter.

My question is why, in the absence of very serious security guarantees, should Ukrainians accept a negotiated peace determining international borders with Russia? Ukraine already signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, exchanging guarantees for security when giving up its nuclear weapons. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 (twice) it reneged on that treaty and the Russia-Ukraine border security treaty that Vladimir Putin himself had signed with Ukraine’s President Leonid Kuchma in 2003 after joint mapping—it is still referenced on Putin’s official website.

Apologists for Russia who argue for appreciating Russia’s “security concerns” are quick to recall that Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Adolf Hitler invaded Russia / the USSR from the west. Of course, in doing so, they often omit mentioning that Russia first mobilised against the German Empire in 1914, and in 1939 Hitler conspired with Josef Stalin to jointly invade and dismember pre-war Poland (reneging on the Treaty of Riga and trampling the borders that Russia had agreed to 19 years earlier). Neither do they mention Russia’s revanchist agenda, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when it invaded Moldova.

In my recent piece for Australian Outlook, I recalled that the Polish-American National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski also thought NATO membership for former Soviet satellites and “republics” was vitally important. In the 1990s Brzezinski accurately foreshadowed the threat to Ukraine and other newly independent (formerly Soviet) countries of a resurgent Russian imperialism, and danger of a major war–which is exactly what has happened in Ukraine.

For over a decade some NATO countries flippantly dangled the possibility of Ukraine’s future membership of NATO. Of course, this was a major concern to Putin’s Russia, which already had plans to absorb Ukraine via Lukashenko-like vassalage, if not in a quick hot war a la Georgia. Even worse, when Russia reneged on the Budapest Memorandum by invading Ukraine in 2014, so did the Western signatories—the US and UK—who merely applied token sanctions, provided some military assistance, and expressed “deep concern.” This signalled Western weakness to Putin and was a factor in his decision to undertake the full-scale invasion in 2022, along with his hubristic assumption that it would be a three-day affair.

In her book Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, Mary Elise Sarotte writes that as part of the Final Settlement on German unification the Soviet Union agreed—which as the successor state Russia is bound to uphold—free association and membership with NATO. In other words, there was “no clear prohibition on NATO adding more members.”

Hence, there was never any merit in Putin’s cries that “Russia was cheated.” NATO intelligence, weapons, and logistics only moved eastwards after Russia’s three unprovoked invasions of Ukraine.

The rationale for NATO’s decision to rebuff a Russian veto right for NATO membership is straight forward. NATO can ill afford to establish a precedent by which it—the most powerful military alliance in human history—can be manipulated by Russian threats. It is the same reason that some NATO members today are supplying weapons to Ukraine with no constraints on how they might be used in Ukraine’s defence (including striking valid military targets deep inside Russia). To accede to Russia’s fictional “red lines” while it “rattles its nukes” would be to bow to nuclear blackmail—which would open up a geopolitical nightmare. In this case, the veto question was more about form than substance, and Putin most likely had already determined that the full-scale invasion would proceed, bringing a quick end to Ukraine.

There was no “provisional agreement” in Istanbul

The theory that talks in Istanbul during March-April 2022 resulted in “provisional agreement that Ukraine would not join NATO but would have its security underpinned by broad security guarantees” is a conspiracy theory promoted by pro-Russia advocates like Ivan Katchanovski, Aaron Mate, Glenn Greenwald and David Sacks and Jeffrey Sachs. It holds that Ukraine was willing to give in to Russian demands until Boris Johnson arrived to veto the Ukrainians, forcing them to continue the war because in the West’s view the Russian withdrawal from around Kyiv in early March demonstrated that “Russia could be defeated.”

Such arguments deny Ukrainian agency. For a start, Putin’s choice for lead negotiator was presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, which sent a message in itself. Although born in central Ukraine, Medinsky was Russia’s hard-line Culture Minister who has been central to creating Russian imperial myths such as “Ukraine does not exist,” (a key pretext for this war).

What Russia attempted to impose on Ukraine in Istanbul was terms for Ukrainian capitulation—a subjugation of Ukraine by diplomatic means. As observed in his interview with the Kyiv Post, Dr Daniel Szeligowski:

Essentially, the Russians simply laid out a draft treaty that would have made Ukraine a puppet state – a Russian protectorate completely dependent on Moscow. Ukraine couldn’t accept such an agreement. Firstly, it would have been political suicide for Zelensky. Secondly, there was no need for it because the situation on the front began to change in March and April 2022 in favor of Ukraine. Thirdly, none of the Western leaders wanted to sign such an agreement – none of them believed Putin would keep his word. No one wanted to be the guarantor of the agreement that would incapacitate Ukraine, and Ukraine demanded international security guarantees if it were to sign anything with Russia.

For close observers, the “peace [that] was within reach in April 2022” never existed for obvious reasons.

Language and identity

In a final section here, it is worth briefly discussing assertions made by Gill and other analysts that “Ukraine is a state but not a nation”; that “Kyiv was known as the mother of Russian cities,” “the point from which the settlement of Russia was undertaken,” and that the interim Ukrainian government in 2014 declared that “Ukrainian should be the only language of business in Ukraine.”

I do not wish to divert to a lengthy rebuttal of the grossly inaccurate conflation of “Rus’” and “Russia.” However, on the last point the interim Ukrainian government did vote to repeal Yanukovych’s controversial 2012 language law that had granted the Russian language “regional status” in some regions of Ukraine. The 2012 law had previously been opposed by Ukrainian civil society and raised concerns at the Venice Commission internationally. However, its repeal would most certainly not have made Ukrainian “the only language of business in Ukraine” as wrongly assumed by some. Propounding that idea betrays a miscomprehension of Ukraine. In any event, the 23 February 2014 vote against the law was vetoed by acting president Oleksandr Turchynov, and four years later Ukraine’s Constitutional Court, which found the law itself unconstitutional. Despite this, most business in Ukraine continued to be transacted in Russian.

While denying that Ukraine exists as a nation, and promoting the myth that “Russia started in Kyiv,” it is curious why so many observers in the non-English and English speaking West fail to understand that Russia does not want Ukraine as a “neutral security buffer” but rather sees Ukraine as a mythical “core Russia.”

Once that is understood, Russia’s views on NATO can be understood, as well as Ukraine’s reticence to sign a “peace treaty” with Russia that rewards its genocidal war of aggression and only ensures more war in the future.

Dr Michael Lawriwsky is an author, former chair of the Ukrainian Studies Foundation at Monash University, former editor for the Australian Ukrainian Review, and a former trustee of Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance. His career has included positions in academia, investment banking, and consulting.

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.