Don’t Promise Ukraine NATO Membership Now

In two months, NATO leaders will gather in Vilnius for their annual summit, and leading the agenda will be the West’s ongoing support for Ukraine today and in the years ahead. Prominent experts have called for the United States and its trans-Atlantic allies to formally lay out a path for Ukrainian membership in NATO, one that is clearer than the mere promise of eventually joining the club, or at least to provide Ukraine with some other kind of security guarantee short of NATO membership.

While these proposals are well-intentioned insofar as they seek to deter Russia from future attacks on Ukraine after the present war ends, neither of the alternatives suggested is likely to prove effective and may, in fact, worsen Ukraine’s security in the short run. Instead, a more prudent approach is to remain focused on helping Ukraine win the war by significantly expanding Western military assistance.

At a previous NATO summit—Bucharest in 2008—Ukraine and Georgia became the only two countries in the alliance’s 74-year history to be promised eventual membership, without conditions. The Kremlin reacted with concern over the threat NATO posed, even though the alliance was in the midst of a 25-year decline in defense spending and combat power. Given Moscow’s quiescence regarding several rounds of alliance enlargement—including Finland just last month, with which it shares an 830-mile border—Moscow appears more concerned with losing influence in the post-Soviet space than with an expanded NATO. Regardless, no other countries that have joined the original 12 alliance members have ever received such a no-strings-attached commitment from NATO.

Granting Ukraine membership as soon as possible or precisely defining how it will join NATO soon plays into Putin’s misinformation campaign on the war.

The Bucharest summit declaration fundamentally short-circuited the accession process, putting the cart of NATO membership ahead of the horse of military and political reforms. The promise let Georgia and Ukraine off the hook too easily while strongly incentivizing the Kremlin to create frozen conflicts in each before they joined NATO. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia—and has occupied South Ossetia and Abkhazia ever since—and in 2014 Russia invaded Ukraine, occupying Crimea and parts of Luhansk and Donetsk.

Given NATO’s requirement that aspirants have no unresolved border disputes with neighboring countries, Moscow’s frozen conflicts effectively prevented Georgia or Ukraine from joining the alliance. Of course, today the frozen conflict in Ukraine has given way to a brutal, devastating war, notwithstanding NATO’s routine reiteration of the Bucharest language.

The Bucharest declaration wasn’t the first time in which rhetorical tools failed to prove sufficient for Ukraine. Several years prior, in a 1994 Budapest memorandum, Russia pledged it wouldn’t use force against Ukraine, and in exchange Kyiv gave up all nuclear weapons and related delivery systems on its territory in the wake of the Soviet Union’s demise. Clearly, that agreement hasn’t benefited Ukraine. The point is, rhetoric and political agreements are insufficient—ultimately, only accession to NATO will provide Ukraine the security it needs to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from trying to incorporate it into Russia or turn it into a puppet buffer state like Belarus.

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So why not offer a more concrete path to NATO membership now? Three reasons stand out. First, because doing so frustrates an eventual political settlement to the war that is favorable to Ukraine. Kyiv’s willpower and its military forces have proved remarkably strong, but it’s highly unlikely Ukrainian troops will vanquish the entire Russian military, causing Moscow to completely capitulate. Instead, a political agreement is the most likely path to the war’s end, eventually. So clearly drawing Ukraine into or toward NATO now risks strengthening Russia’s will to persist, prolonging what is already Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II and resulting in potentially thousands more Ukrainian civilian casualties.

Drawing Ukraine further into NATO’s orbit now is premature. Instead, both the West and Kyiv should remain laser-focused on the most important task at hand: ensuring Ukraine repels Russia’s invasion.

Second, granting Ukraine membership as soon as possible, as some in the alliance’s eastern flank have advocated privately, or precisely defining how it will join NATO someday soon plays into Putin’s misinformation campaign on the war. Putin has claimed the West started the war through its attempted domination of Ukraine, all in an effort to ultimately attack Russia itself. Placing Ukraine on a speedier, clearer road toward membership in NATO turns Putin’s propaganda into prophecy. In turn, this facilitates Putin’s grip on Russian public opinion and undermines dissent among elites and within the military.

And finally, inviting Ukraine into NATO now or formalizing the inevitability of its joining ignores the fact that the country is arguably not ready politically. Over the last three decades, Western values have become increasingly important for NATO, Hungary’s slippage in this regard notwithstanding. Following President Volodymyr Zelensky’s election in 2019 but before Russia’s invasion in 2022, Ukraine was at best a country struggling to solidify its democratic foundations.

Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization that surveys governance, cited a lack of government transparency, endemic official corruption, and the lack of judicial independence as key reasons why Ukraine was deemed only “partly free.” Since the invasion and a wartime crackdown on civil liberties, Ukraine has arguably become even less free. Can Kyiv turn this around? Yes, but probably not until after the war ends and then contingent upon a broader consensus across Ukrainian society.

For all these reasons, drawing Ukraine further into NATO’s orbit now is premature. Instead, both the West and Kyiv should remain laser-focused on the most important task at hand: ensuring Ukraine repels Russia’s invasion. For this reason, discussion around NATO’s table in Vilnius this summer should focus on how all allies—especially those in Europe—will significantly ramp up production of, delivery of, and training on advanced military platforms from the West and its allies elsewhere as the best way to overcome continuing Russian quantitative advantages in manpower and material.

Talk is cheap, especially relative to the costs that allies will incur to provide Kyiv what it needs to prevail in the war. But a dramatic expansion of advanced Western aid and assistance will do far more to help Ukraine overcome Russia’s numeric advantages than mere promises of what’s to come after the war.