The countdown has begun to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) Washington Summit, which will celebrate the alliance's 75th anniversary from July 9 to 11. These have been 75 years of peace and security for its founding member states. This stability is today being severely tested by Russia's war of invasion in Ukraine, on NATO's border.
Since 2008, the Alliance has promised to invite Ukraine to join, but the conflict between Kyiv and Moscow has made the prospect ever more complicated. The issue is one of the most sensitive topics between the allies, with just over three months to go before the summit that Joe Biden is preparing to host. At that point, he will be in the midst of campaigning for the November presidential election against Donald Trump, who has regularly criticized the US's allies for failing to sufficiently fund the alliance.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has continued to be very insistent. "We are working hard to make a strong and far-reaching step toward Ukraine's NATO membership at the Washington Summit," said Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine's head of diplomacy, in March. "We believe that Ukraine meets the main criterion for membership, namely the ability to defend NATO's borders. That's what we do when we defend Ukraine," he added.
However, the prospect of membership for Kyiv remains highly hypothetical, despite being supported by the most fervent supporters within the organization, led by the Baltic states and Poland. "It is a question of when, not if," said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in Brussels on Wednesday, April 3, at a meeting with the alliance member countries' 32 foreign ministers.
'The Baltic states and Poland are pushing'
In reality, the US and Germany have yet to commit to either a timetable or to sending a formal invitation. These two cornerstones of the organization fear an escalation of the conflict and have refused any direct NATO involvement against Russia. "As the Allies stated in [a summit in] Vilnius, Ukraine will be a member of NATO," said Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, who was in Paris on April 2. However, above all, he reiterated that "a good and clear roadmap" must be drawn up to this end at the Washington summit.
Speaking alongside him, his French counterpart Stéphane Séjourné called for "unity," in the hope that the agreement reached at the Vilnius summit would at least be confirmed. At the time, the Ukrainian president's insistence, while he was in the Lithuanian capital, greatly displeased Washington, Berlin and London. "The Baltic states and Poland are pushing to get more than at Vilnius, in order to show Vladimir Putin that Ukraine is lost to Russia," explained a European diplomat.
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