In Washington and New York last month, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said his country’s people were fiercely committed to a just and lasting peace to end the war on their nation. This week in Kyiv, I heard a similar sentiment from every Ukrainian I spoke with, from senior officials to frontline soldiers. They want Russians out of their country and security guarantees to protect Ukrainian sovereignty.
When the war ends, Ukraine must join NATO. An end to the conflict will come either with Ukraine repelling the Russian invaders or with the international community pressuring Russia to halt it, or both, as President Zelensky has suggested. But without Ukraine in the alliance, that nation will never be safe from the Russian aggression that has menaced it for 300 years, and Europe as a whole will not be secure.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia has made clear he intends to eliminate Ukraine as a nation. He took a step in that direction in 2014 when he invaded Ukraine and occupied Crimea, and since February 2022 he has attempted to smash Ukrainians into submission through his savage invasion.
With support from the United States, Canada and Europe, and allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, Ukraine has held off the Russians for two years and eight months. Ukrainians have shown that they will continue the fight and, as President Biden has said, will win. But they have been clear they need more support during the war and NATO membership after.
The last time the United States tried to secure NATO membership for Ukraine, at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, in 2008, we failed. Some policy experts in Washington use that as an excuse to say the NATO alliance will never accept Ukraine a member. I was the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv at the time, and I think the real lesson is different: We might have succeeded if we had started earlier and pushed harder.
A decision to invite Ukraine (and Georgia) to begin the process of joining NATO was high on the agenda in Bucharest. President George W. Bush had pushed his administration and the other NATO leaders to move ahead with that decision. Unfortunately, he started too late.