Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced NATO for developing an “absurd” statement on the future of Western ties to Ukraine, throwing a harsh glare on closed-door resistance to giving his country "an invitation [or] a timetable” for a possible invitation to join NATO.
“It’s unprecedented and absurd when [a] time frame is not set, neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine's membership,” Zelensky tweeted. “While at the same time vague wording about ‘conditions’ is added even for inviting Ukraine. It seems there is no readiness neither to invite Ukraine to NATO nor to make it a member of the Alliance.”
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Zelensky’s public blast cracked the veneer of unity that Western leaders sought to craft for a summit characterized by a monthslong dispute on Ukraine’s prospects for membership in the alliance. NATO leaders have declared since 2008 that Ukraine would join the trans-Atlantic alliance eventually, but their inability to build on that pledge has raised doubts about their sincerity.
“There's no affirmative language [to the effect] Ukraine is going to be brought into NATO,” former Ambassador Kurt Volker, who led the U.S. mission to NATO in 2008 and served as special envoy for Ukraine from 2017 to 2019, told the Washington Examiner. “By repeating, it sends a weaker signal, because at this moment, to actually go no further, is showing a bit of weakness.”
Zelensky's words also put a spotlight on negotiations that persisted into the beginning of the summit. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan and his Ukrainian counterpart, Andriy Yermak, skipped their scheduled appearances at a NATO Public Forum, while the European leaders who did appear before the audience acknowledged that the debate was underway.
"What Ukraine needs beyond equipment, ammunition, [and] money is encouragement and assurance, because this will maintain high morale of Ukrainian forces," Czech President Petr Pavel said Tuesday. "They need to see the light at the end of the tunnel ... to feel that one day they would be welcomed in a family. And we can give them such an assurance by simply saying, 'Once the war is over, we will start [the] accession process.' This is what they would like to hear, and this is what I would wish them to hear."
Zelensky maintained in recent months that he would not attend the summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, unless assured that Ukraine would be “given a signal” to confirm its eventual membership in NATO, though he acknowledged in May that Ukraine could not enter the alliance during the war. Yet the current NATO members have struggled to agree, as the United States and Germany are widely perceived as having resisted proposals to extend a formal invitation to Ukraine to begin an accession process despite the entreaties of Central European and Baltic allies.
“We want to avoid a situation where Ukraine's NATO membership becomes a horizon — it's a more you get closer, the more it moves forward from you,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said Monday. “For me, what is also very important is that Ukraine has a real algorithm of how it’s going to go closer to NATO.”
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Yet that aspiration seemed poised for a defeat on Tuesday morning. "Ukraine will receive neither an invitation nor a timetable for possible accession,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto, whose government has a tense relationship with Ukrainian officials, wrote on social media.
Zelensky turned to public diplomacy in a final bid to influence the outcome. “Today I embarked on a trip here with faith in decisions, with faith in partners, with faith in a strong NATO,” he tweeted. “And I would like this faith to become confidence — confidence in the decisions that we deserve — all of us deserve, and every warrior, every citizen, every mother, every child expects. And is that too much to expect?”