Tim Black, Spiked: NATO has been nothing but trouble for Ukraine
For decades, it has been goading Russia into a conflict it never intended to fight.
At the Vilnius summit this week, NATO leaders have been telling anyone who will listen that Ukraine’s future lies within NATO. As US president Joe Biden put it to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine is going to become a NATO member.
But these are hollow words. NATO’s torturous communiqué, published on Tuesday, drowned any promise of membership in a sea of caveats. NATO leaders will ‘extend an invitation’ to Ukraine to join NATO after the war ends.
But only if ‘allies agree and conditions are met’; only if they’re satisfied with ‘Ukraine’s progress on interoperability’; and only if Ukraine undertakes ‘democratic and security-sector reforms’. NATO has extended an invitation with one hand and withdrawn it with the other.
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WNU Editor: NATO has not been helpful. But truth be told, they are not the primary reason why Ukraine is in the disastrous mess that it is in right now.
Relations between Ukrainians and Russian-Ukrainians have a long history of hostility that came to a head during the Maidan Revolution when Ukrainian nationalists were successful in overthrowing a democratically led government that was pro-Russian. NATO and the West may have applauded the outcome and give moral encouragement, but they were not the instrument to make it happen.
After 2014 there has been a number of opportunities to end the conflict. The Minsk accord was one of them, an accord that Zelensky himself ran on in the last Presidential election promising that he would sign. He did not. Instead seeking a military solution that this blog since 2014 has been warning about would lead to a never-ending war.
I know it is easy to blame others for mistakes and bad outcomes. This past weekend Foreign Policy had an article blaming Obama's Russian Doctrine for preparing the ground work for this war. But in the end it was the leadership in Kyiv that had the power to influence events for a peaceful outcome. They choose not to, miscalculating what Russia would do, and the consequences of their actions.
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