Some Ukrainians were disappointed that NATO’s Warsaw summit did not move further toward integrating Ukraine and Georgia into the Western alliance, Maksim Mikhailenko says. But they should take heart from seven signs NATO did give at that meeting which show that it has “finally come out of its coma.”
First of all, he writes in a commentary in the Kyiv-based Russian-language publication Delovaya Stolitsa, the alliance agreed to base troops in Poland and the Baltic states, and the countries that agreed to put troops there included many Vladimir Putin had been counting on to slow the recovery of NATO. He thus suffered a defeat (dsnews.ua/world/nato-okonchatelno-vyshel-iz-komy-11072016023900).
But this is “only the tip of the iceberg” into which the Kremlin’s ship ran: it also now must cope with the fact that the Western alliance again “views Russia as a threat and has begun to officially apply the principles of containment to it,” Mr. Mikhailenko says.
Second, the Kyiv commentator says, the fact that the alliance said it was open to dialogue with Moscow was a defeat for the Kremlin as well, because it undercuts the Kremlin’s repeated propagandistic claims that the West won’t talk and therefore Russia has to proceed without talking to NATO. That alliance position puts the ball in the Kremlin’s court.
Third, Mr. Mikhailenko continues, the Western alliance has made it clear that it is going to be more involved in Ukrainian affairs not only by overseeing the Minsk accords but also by forming a group of countries that is ready to provide arms to Kyiv. Moreover, NATO has demonstrated that both these policies have the approval of all the countries of the alliance.
Fourth, simple content analysis of the Warsaw summit documents highlights the new centrality of Ukraine in the thinking of NATO countries. In the final communiqué, NATO mentioned Ukraine 32 times – far more than it did even at the Bucharest summit in 2008. And it mentioned containing Russia 56 times, far more than it said the same about ISIS.
Fifth and perhaps most important, the alliance declared that “Russia is a moral threat to the world,” a declaration that is symbolically extremely important given the alliance’s Article 5 guarantees.
Sixth, the alliance specified that NATO is concerned not only about its member states but about the region around them, a region that includes Ukraine, and that intends to be “a global player in the military-political sphere” rather than a regional one with a geographically limited purview.
These six things give Ukraine important support: NATO now recognizes that Russia is responsible for the war in Ukraine, that Moscow is thus a side in the conflict and not an observer as the Kremlin insists, that there is no possibility of conducting elections in the occupied areas at the present time, that sanctions can only be lifted after Moscow withdraws from eastern Ukraine, and that the alliance wants to work with all countries at risk of Russian aggression.
And seventh, NATO at Warsaw defined its relationship with Ukraine as “a distinctive partnership,” a term it had not used before, and thus set the stage for movement toward a Membership Action Plan. Thus, Mr. Mikhailenko says, the ball is in Kyiv’s court. To move toward a MAP will require that Ukraine conduct reforms and bring its military into correspondence with NATO standards.
It will also require that NATO carry out the package of policy declarations that it made in Warsaw, something Kyiv should do everything it can to make easier and more likely in the coming months.
Paul Goble is a long-time specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia who has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau, as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The article above is reprinted with permission from his blog called “Window on Eurasia” (http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/).