Of all the things Kiev could have done to try to defuse its conflicts with its eastern rebels and their Russian backers, this was definitely, um, a thing that they did anyway:
Ukraine’s parliament has voted to drop the country’s non-aligned status and work towards Nato membership.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the move “counterproductive” and said it would boost tensions.
The BBC’s David Stern in Kiev says it is not clear when Ukraine will apply for Nato membership and many officials see it as a distant prospect.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko pledged to seek Nato membership over Russian support for rebels in the east.
Obviously this is not a conciliatory step in Moscow’s direction, but it’s not unexpected. Poroshenko promised last month that Ukraine would hold a national referendum on joining NATO, and dropping the country’s “non-aligned” status (which has been legally in place since 2010) is the preliminary requirement for taking that step. The reactions from Moscow have been swift and angry.
On the other hand, it’s not clear where Kiev thinks it can go with this. NATO isn’t going to fast-track Ukraine’s membership — to be honest, it’s not even clear they’d be interested in slow-tracking it. It’s impossible to know this for sure without testing it, but it seems pretty clear that NATO expansion into Ukraine is a big national security red-line for Russia, maybe its biggest. Nobody apart from the fascist fringe in Kiev and a few Cold War dead-enders here in the U.S. (like TNR’s former Greatest Literary Editor EVER) wants a war with Russia, least of all the European members of NATO, who when push comes to shove aren’t even willing risk having their Russian natural gas supply cut off, to say nothing of the calamities that a real shooting war would bring. So NATO isn’t likely to roll out a welcome mat for Ukraine. In fact, if you go by the alliance’s “Principles of Enlargement,” Ukraine legitimately doesn’t qualify for membership:
4. Enlargement of the Alliance will be through accession of new member states to the Washington Treaty. Enlargement should :
- Accord with, and help to promote, the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and the safeguarding of the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of all Alliance members and their people, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. New members will need to conform to these basic principles;
…
6. States which have ethnic disputes or external territorial disputes, including irredentist claims, or internal jurisdictional disputes must settle those disputes by peaceful means in accordance with OSCE principles. Resolution of such disputes would be a factor in determining whether to invite a state to join the Alliance.
On number 4 up there, while I know the fine people of the non-besieged parts of Ukraine would argue that their nation is obviously rooted in principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law, I wonder if you’d get the same answer from the people in Donetsk, if you can ask them while they’re dodging artillery and trying to scrape together enough food to make it through the day. It’s hard to ignore the fact that the government now in place in Kiev is there because of a coup that’s less than a year behind us, and an electoral process that, deliberately or not, shut a third or so of the country out of voting.
But the real sticking point is obviously number 6, since Ukraine manifestly is in the middle of both an “ethnic dispute” and an “external territorial dispute, including irredentist claims.” Unless NATO wants to bend the rules for Ukraine (and since “bending the rules” in this case would be inviting deeper conflict with Russia, why would they?) there’s no way they could admit the country until its dispute with Russia and its separatists is settled, and if that were to somehow happen it would obviate Ukraine’s need for quick entry into NATO in the first place.
None of these considerations may matter as the politics of this move play out in Kiev. As I noted, Poroshenko has already promised a referendum on joining NATO (though he can’t possibly think that such a vote would be legitimate if voters in Donetsk and Luhansk are once again unable to participate), and even if Poroshenko weren’t supportive of the idea it’s not clear that he’s actually running the country anyway. But I think there’s potentially another way to view today’s vote, which is as a bargaining chip with Moscow. Russia fears NATO expansion further east, which means it values an assurance that NATO won’t expand east. In reality, NATO isn’t going to expand into Ukraine. NATO knows this. Kiev probably knows this. Moscow probably knows it too, but even the small chance that they (and I) are wrong, and NATO would admit Ukraine, is enough of a national security fear that the Russians may be willing to trade something important in order to get the possibility taken off the table. It’s possible that the Ukrainian parliament just gave Poroshenko a significant bit of leverage in the back-and-forth with Russia, just by passing a bill.
By “possible” I don’t mean “probable.” In the several months since the coup that ousted Viktor Yanukovych, there’s been no sign that anybody in Kiev is savvy enough to have schemed something like this. So Occam’s Razor probably applies, and the Rada probably voted to drop the non-aligned status because its members really do dream of being part of NATO one day. In that case, they’re setting themselves up for disappointment and irritating Russia for no good reason.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 