Ukraine’s NATO bid: Why Zelensky is living under illusions

In the spring of 2002, the NATO-Russia Council was established in Rome for ‘joint decision making and joint action’ between Brussels and Moscow. Two years before that, at the peak of Washington's global unipolarity, the Moscow-Washington ties were ‘off to a good start’ according to US President Bill Clinton. Then in the middle of 2002 came the beginning of the end of the ‘good start’ for Moscow-Washington ties.

The then US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice asked her Russian counterpart how far Russia under Vladimir Putin was willing to integrate with NATO.

“Condi, forget it. We are not going to join an alliance where our vote is the same as a country like Latvia. You need not ask me that again,” Sergei Ivanov, secretary of the Russian Security Council told her.

File photo of former US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Sergei Ivanov, former secretary of the Russian Security Council | state.gov

The incident finds its mention in ‘A Bonfire of Illusions’, a chapter in a Putin biography by Philip Short, which describes how the rift between the US-led West became too deep to heal by the time he completed his second four-year term as Russian president in 2008.

NATO’s ‘worst-kept secret’

During the NATO summit, that concluded earlier this month in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky blasted the absence of a timetable for his country’s formal entry to the alliance as 'absurd'.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attends a NATO leaders summit in Vilnius, Lithuania July 12, 2023 | Reuters

"We value our allies," Zelensky said but added that "Ukraine also deserves respect."

Not every nation has an equal weight in NATO.  

The worst-kept secret of the US-led alliance is that an informal group consisting of the United States, Britain, France and Germany ‘pre-cook’ NATO decisions which the rest 27 members then endorse, Philip Short adds in 'Putin: Life and Times'.

French Premier and Foreign Secretary Pierre Mendès-France, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at Paris Conference, 23 October 1954 | German Historical Institute

The informal group of NATO’s Big Four — US, France, Britain, and Germany — remains very much active during the ongoing war in Ukraine in boosting Kyiv’s war effort.

But the alliance has fallen short of accepting Ukraine as a fellow ally due to Zelensky’s inconsistencies towards joining NATO and Ukraine’s own fallacies.

An odd among NATO’s aces in Vilnius, while Zelensky appeared desperate to make Ukraine enter the alliance, he had called for "new institutions, new alliances" in his address to the US Congress in March 2023.

Furthermore, to meet one of the three main criteria for entry into NATO, a European nation must demonstrate a commitment to democracy, individual liberty and support for the rule of law. 

Finland, the latest NATO entrant justifies this criteria while Ukraine’s record in these domains remains faltered. 

Zelensky's big diplomatic illusion

For Kyiv, peace with Russia will not come from the capitals of the Big Four NATO countries, but from Moscow. 

By signing a peace treaty with Russia in the spring of 2022 and then throwing it into the ‘garbage of history’, Kyiv with Zelensky at its helm has signed up for a prolonged conflict with Moscow, meaning further devastation for people in the region. 

By unsuccessfully trying to be yet another Latvia in NATO’s purported hierarchy dominated by the Big Four, Zelensky is playing into a bonfire of diplomatic illusions that are making him believe that the US-led NATO will support its war effort ‘for as long as it takes’.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.) 

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