Ukraine’s Nato fantasy

Ukraine’s President Zelensky was in Downing Street last week – as well as Paris, Rome, Berlin and Dubrovnik – asking for Nato membership. In every city, he heard the same ‘not yet’ as he’d received in Washington last month.

Some of Kyiv’s western allies believe membership is the only way to guarantee Ukraine’s independence. Russia has never attacked a Nato country, because of the Article 5 guarantee that an attack against one is an attack against all. Therefore, Ukraine will never be safe from Russia unless it joins.

But there’s a fundamental flaw to this logic: Ukraine cannot join Nato in the foreseeable future. Legally, the organisation’s charter bans any state with disputed borders from joining – and no state in modern times has more viciously disputed borders than Ukraine. Politically, new members must be ratified by all members – and Hungary, Turkey, Croatia, Germany and the US have weighty constituencies who believe Ukrainian admittance would be a profound folly. The Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte was peddling a dangerous fantasy when he promised this month: ‘Ukraine is closer to Nato than ever before. And will continue on this path until you become a member of our alliance.’

Kyiv finds itself in the worst of all possible worlds. It suffers the downsides of remaining an aspiring member, to which Vladimir Putin is violently opposed. At the same time, it receives military and financial aid from Nato countries, but not enough to beat Russia.

The US won’t give Zelensky permission to use Nato-supplied missiles on targets inside Russia. Washington doesn’t trust him following the Kursk incursion in August (the US had advised against it, according to both a senior Nato official and a member of Zelensky’s administration). The White House’s ‘absolute priority remains preventing the war from tipping into a direct Nato-Russia kinetic war’, one Nato source tells me.