As was reported in our last issue for 2014/first issue of 2015, the Verkhovna Rada voted on December 23, 2014, to abandon the country’s neutral “non-bloc” status and set a course for NATO membership. President Petro Poroshenko signed the bill on December 29. To be sure, NATO membership is not something that will happen quickly, since certain standards must be met by prospective members of the alliance. Mr. Poroshenko himself predicted that those standards could be met “within five-six years in the framework of Strategy 2020.” He added that “then the people of Ukraine will determine whether the country will join NATO,” a reference to a possible referendum on NATO membership.
Obviously, the Ukrainian public’s support for NATO membership has mushroomed thanks to the events of 2014: Russian forces first invaded and annexed the Crimea peninsula and then invaded Ukraine’s eastern regions. Thus, the outcome of a referendum on NATO membership today should not be questioned.
Predictably, Ukraine’s move was immediately characterized by Russia as “unfriendly.” The stone-faced Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov called the step “counterproductive” and one that would result in increased tensions. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned that Ukraine’s rejection of neutrality and the Ukrainian Freedom Support Act of 2014 signed by President Barack Obama “will both have very negative consequences” and “our country will have to respond to them.”
The amendment to Ukraine’s law on domestic and foreign policy, which was proposed by President Poroshenko, passed easily, receiving 303 votes in favor. It stated that the previous version of the law providing for “non-bloc” status and adopted under the Yanukovych administration had made Ukraine vulnerable to “external aggression and pressure.” As reported by RFE/RL, the new legislation said “the Russian Federation’s aggression against Ukraine, its illegal annexation of Crimea… its military intervention in eastern regions” and other forms of pressure created the need for “more effective guarantees of independence, sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity.”
Indeed, is there anyone who wonders why Ukraine has declared its intention to someday join NATO?
More than 4,700 people have been killed in the eastern regions of Ukraine since April 2014 – more than 1,300 of them after the so-called ceasefire was declared in September in Minsk. The casualties have continued into 2015, with the first death of a Ukrainian soldier recorded on January 2 and over a dozen more since then. Plus, according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), violations of the ceasefire continued on a daily basis. And then there are those “humanitarian” convoys. The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine reported on January 8 that the 11th such convoy – 124 trucks in all – had illegally entered Ukrainian territory from Russia. Meanwhile, Crimea has become a veritable Russian military base. The Ukraine Crisis Media Center reported that nearly 40,000 troops, 43 battleships, and dozens of missile launchers and fighter jets recently deployed to the Ukrainian peninsula now threaten the security of the entire European region. Furthermore, Russia has threatened to deploy nuclear weapons on the peninsula.
“Ukraine’s fight for its independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty has turned into a decisive factor in our relations with the world,” were the words President Poroshenko aptly used when he addressed foreign ambassadors in Kyiv on the day before the Verkhovna Rada’s vote on abandoning the country’s neutral status. But former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s choice of words to describe the legislation was even more appropriate. This, she said, is “a bill about our place in Western civilization.”