Ukraine’s push for Nato membership is rooted in its European past — and its future

In some ways, Zelenskyy is steering Ukraine through a war on two fronts, writes Kateryna Shynkaruk

A law enforcement officer stands next to a gymnasium building destroyed as a result of hostilities in 2022 in the town of Izyum, Kharkiv region, on September 10, 2023, during the first anniversary of liberation of the small town in eastern Ukraine. Picture: Sergey Bobok/ AFP via Getty Images

During a recent meeting with the nation’s diplomatic corps, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave Ukraine’s ambassadors their marching orders for the rest of the year: work to secure Ukraine’s membership in Nato and the EU.

Zelenskyy also told them to focus on helping Ukraine to secure bilateral agreements for security guarantees between Ukraine and individual G7 countries, including the US.

“The task of ambassadors to Nato countries is to work to consolidate all the capitals of the Alliance around common security priorities,” he said.

“It is in Ukraine that security for our continent and for the rules-based international order as a whole is being gained, and this deserves political and legal recognition by all our allies.”

Zelenskyy met the ambassadors in August, three weeks after leaving the Nato summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, without the timetable he wanted, for Ukraine to join the alliance.

In some ways, Zelenskyy is steering Ukraine through a war on two fronts. There is the hot counteroffensive against Russia in Ukrainian cities, villages, and towns. 

And there is its long fight to be a formal part of the West through inclusion in Nato and the EU. The latter fight is not just about Ukraine’s desire for long-term security. It is also about its geopolitical identity.

Nato members promised in a July communiqué during the alliance’s two-day summit that Ukraine could join Nato “when Allies agree and conditions are met”. 

Although the communiqué acknowledged Ukraine did not need to follow the alliance’s membership action plan, it lacked specific steps to receive a membership invitation.

Public criticism

Zelenskyy tweeted about the lack of specifics: “It’s unprecedented and absurd when [a] time frame is not set either for the invitation or for Ukraine’s membership. While at the same time vague wording about ‘conditions’ is added even for inviting Ukraine.”

Some leaders were reportedly stunned by his public criticism.

As a scholar of international relations, Ukrainian politics, and European security, I have studied and taught about Ukraine’s geopolitical and ideological moves away from Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union and how its policy decisions have often depended on the status of its relationship with Russia, the EU, and the US.

I have also studied how Ukraine might follow the examples of other countries to gain membership in Western alliances.

Zelenskyy, like a majority of Ukrainians, sees Ukraine as ideologically and geopolitically separate from Russia.

Before the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was its second-most populous republic, after Russia, and had the USSR’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. 

Since then it has worked to separate from Russia and move toward the West, seeking national security and economic growth through ideological land-political realignment with Europe.

There have been many steps toward the West and some away from it.

In 1994, Ukraine joined the Nato Partnership for Peace programme and worked with the alliance to fight corruption in Ukraine’s military, improve its military training, and to get other countries to take its excess and obsolete weapons. 

This showed a post-Soviet Ukraine was willing to work with Nato even when membership was not an option.

During the 1990s and 2000s, Nato and the EU admitted some of Ukraine’s neighbors from post-communist Europe and post-Soviet Baltic, leaving Russian President Putin to view the few countries left outside of these alliances — Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova — as without protection from the West.

The 2004 presidential contest between then-Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and Viktor Yushchenko, a former prime minister, was marred by such widespread allegations of election tampering by the Yanukovych campaign that it sparked a series of peaceful protests. Known as the Orange Revolution, these protests against electoral fraud were followed by a December 2004 election rerun. Ukrainians elected pro-Western Yushchenko president.

No plan for reforms

At the April 2008 Nato summit in Romania, member nations agreed Ukraine and Georgia would join Nato, but with suggested conditions, including democratic reforms, yet with no clear plan for achieving those reforms.

In 2010, Yanukovych, who campaigned on a promise to keep Ukraine out of Nato, was elected president. Once in office, he abolished a commission that had been established to help Ukraine integrate with Nato. In 2013, Yanukovych ended discussions between Ukraine and the EU for a political and trade deal known as an association agreement. That decision sparked protests in Kyiv and around the country.

That protest, the Euromaidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, lasted until February 2014 and forced the Kremlin-aligned Yanukovych to flee to Russia. By March 2014, Russia had annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Donetsk and Luhansk in April with help from Russian-backed separatists.

Following these aggressions by Russia, a November 2015 nationwide poll showed 57% of the Ukrainian citizens queried favored joining the EU, and 48% favored joining Nato.

People exercise next to a monument to Italian poet Dante Alighieri, wrapped in sandbags to prevent it from damage from Russian air attacks, in Kyiv earlier this month. Picture: Getty Images

In 2014, Ukraine signed a deal with the EU that included a new comprehensive free trade agreement. That was followed in 2017 by a visa agreement allowing Ukrainians visa-free EU travel for 90 days every six months.

Putin, still angry about the collapse of the Soviet Union, ordered an invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He claimed Russia needed to “demilitarise and denazify” the country.

Regardless of his motives, many security analysts maintain invasion was possible because Ukraine and Georgia, which Russia attacked in 2008, had no protection, neither was part of a Western alliance such as Nato or the EU.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Zelenskyy looked to the West for help. On the third day of the invasion, he applied for Ukraine’s EU membership, and on September 30, 2022, he applied for Ukraine’s membership of Nato, with overwhelming national support, 83% of those surveyed in a February 2023 poll.

By June 2023, the EU’s leaders had determined that Ukraine had met two of seven conditions required for the country to begin membership talks. 

One condition concerns judicial reform, and the other is about its standards in media law. The country is making “good progress” on the third and “some progress” on the remaining four conditions, including the fight against corruption, said Olivér Várhelyi, the EU’s commissioner for enlargement.

Zelenskyy’s push for Nato membership is part of a long-term goal for Ukraine to gain security from Russia which has never attacked a member of Nato or the EU.

Kateryna Shynkaruk is affiliated as a nonresident scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This article was first published on The Conversation.