YAVORIV, Ukraine – NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg didn’t bring promises of anti-tank weapons or a membership action plan to Ukraine during his first visit to the war-torn country Sept. 21-22.
Instead NATO offered symbolic support of solidarity and pledged other types of aid.
While some still call for more NATO involvement in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine, experts agreed with President Petro Poroshenko that any Ukrainian rapprochement with NATO would be a long and gradual process.
Denis Vasilev, a national security expert with the Reanimation Package of Reform group, was one of those who saw Stoltenberg’s visit as an important first step, even if a lot more still lie ahead. “We have to move towards the European security system if we don’t want to be absorbed by Russia,” he said. “The third way – being none affiliated in between – turned out to be a dangerous illusion covering up Russian preparations for armed aggression.”
Following Stoltenberg’s visit, the NATO offices in Kyiv are to be strengthened into a consolidated and enhanced representation with diplomatic status. “Now they can begin practical work on providing assistance to Ukraine, as opposed to the seminars they have held in the past,” Vasilev said, explaining the changing role of the alliance in Ukraine.
NATO would also help upgrade technical standards in the armed forces. Out of a total of 1,300 NATO standards, Ukraine currently only complies with three, Vasilev said. “The military is still suffering from an outdated Soviet style of management, and Soviet equipment, and at the current pace it could take us decades to comply,” he said. In contrast, with the newly announced assistance from NATO, significant progress could be made “in a year’s time,” he said.
One type of assistance that NATO has already been providing for a year is a strategic communications program that aims to overhaul the way government bodies communicate between each other, and to the general public.
Long-term prospects aside, Vasilev stressed the immediate political importance of Stoltenberg’s visit. “It’s a diplomatic victory for (Ukraine’s) president, providing much needed support for Ukraine on the eve on the debate in the United Nations General Assembly,” where Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to deliver a key speech on Sept. 28.
“NATO is taking its corporation with Ukraine much further with this visit,” Vasilev said.
Meanwhile, President Poroshenko said that “Ukraine isn’t ready for NATO, and NATO is not ready for Ukraine,” at the opening of a joint NATO-Ukraine disaster emergency exercise at the Yavoriv military training ground in western Ukraine, which he attended together with Stoltenberg. Poroshenko’s comment came in a response to a question from the Kyiv Post on whether it had been a mistake by the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008 to leave Georgia and Ukraine in a precautious situation with no Membership Action Plan but with a vague promise that they “will become members of the alliance.”
Some have argued that Putin, in response to that statement, proceeded to invade both Georgia and Ukraine in order to secure Russian influence over the countries.
Poroshenko’s answer about the lack of current readiness implied that Ukraine also wasn’t ready for NATO in 2008, making speculation moot as to whether Ukraine could have been saved from Russian invasions by a NATO Membership Action Plan.
Speaking in Yavoriv, Stoltenberg restated that it was the “right of any nation to decide which path it wants to pursue and also what kind of security arrangements it wants to be a part of” and that the door to NATO was open to Ukraine once it met the alliance’s requirements.
While Stoltenberg’s “open door” statement could be considered bold given the Kremlin’s repeated warnings that it won’t brook closer ties between the alliance and its former imperial possession, the mention of required reforms suggested that a MAP for Ukraine just wasn’t realistic in 2008.
Vasilev agreed, saying that the logical precursor to a MAP – the NATO-Ukraine Action Plan of 2002 – had largely stayed on paper, and that by 2008, “there was nothing to build on.”
Oleksiy Melnyk, a defense expert at the Razumkov Center, said that to blame Putin’s aggression on western reluctance to draw closer to Ukraine would be to repeat a Kremlin propaganda trick, of accusing others of your own faults. Melnyk said that apart from army modernization efforts, a MAP would require national consensus and NATO-member consensus – none of which was in place in 2008.
Melnyk’s view was reflected by Stoltenberg, who underlined that the alliance back in 2008 had merely stated the obvious – that the two countries had the right to apply for membership. No specific promise was made to Ukraine – depriving Putin of any imagined right to point to a need for his actions. Vasilev believed that internal factors in Russian politics determined the Kremlin’s appetite for military adventures – not external issues.
Melnyk agreed about the importance of Stoltenberg’s visit. “The signal to Russia is that its aggression hasn’t achieved its goal – in fact it’s counterproductive,” he said. “With practical corporation increasing, NATO is operating in Ukraine as the two parties want – even in Russia’s ‘backyard’ – and the framework is much wider than the military aspects,” Melnyk said.
Earlier NATO set up five trust funds to assist Ukraine in areas like command and control, cyber defense, logistics, medical rehabilitation and military career transition.
President Petro Poroshenko and NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg greeting commanders of multinational emergency first response teams at the Yavoriv training facility in western Ukraine on Sept. 21. (NATO)
Speaking in Yavoriv, Stoltenberg also said Russia and its proxies should comply with the Minsk II accords to the letter. “Any elections held in eastern Ukraine that are not in accordance with Ukrainian legislation are false and will not be recognized by any NATO ally.” Free and fair local elections in the occupied territories were a key element in the Minsk II peace accords, but the sides have long been at loggerheads over the procedure for holding them. The Russian-separatists forces are now preparing to conduct elections with the occupation still in place, which Kyiv says defeats the notion of free elections.
Although shelling from within the occupied territories has decreased recently, the latest disagreements over the Minsk peace process have highlighted the need for continued western engagement in Ukraine to ensure fighting does not flare up again.
Talking in his native Norwegian to Norway’s NRK broadcaster, Stoltenberg said that his visit “is about Ukraine’s security and the security of Europe.”
“Ukraine needs international support; it’s a country under pressure because of Russia’s support for the separatists. It is important that we (NATO) assist the Ukrainians,” he said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Johannes Wamberg Andersen can be reached at [email protected].
