Currently accumulating domestic issues in member states of NATO and the European Union as well as mounting tensions within these international organizations are bad news for such aspiring applicants as Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova.
NATO’s and the EU’s ongoing enlargement in the Western Balkans may still continue more or less unhampered, as North Macedonia’s recent accession to the alliance illustrated. Yet, that is because the former Yugoslav republics and Albania are already partly members of, and surrounded by, NATO and the EU. They, with the partial exception of Serbia, have thus more or less clear membership prospects. Current and future Western integration successes of the Balkan nations may thus imply only little for Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. In contrast, possible future setbacks in former Yugoslavia may have also negative repercussions for the chances of other formerly communist countries to ever enter NATO and the EU.
All this means that Kyiv, Tbilisi, and Chisinau need to rethink their tactical short- and medium-term foreign policy priorities and means of their implementation. Achieving EU and/or NATO membership will certainly remain their top aims. But these targets should, in view of growing geopolitical instability, be acknowledged to be achievable only in the long term. Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova may instead have to make plans what to do within a more or less prolonged interregnum during which their current lack of international embeddedness and grey-zone status will continue for a number of years.
The most obvious interim solution for Kyiv will be to deepen as quickly and as much as possible bilateral ties with those countries that already have or may soon have more or less pro-Ukrainian leaderships. Thus, Kyiv could seek an upgrade of the little-known 2008 Charter on Strategic Partnership between Ukraine and the U.S.
Kyiv could refer vis-à-vis Washington to the American respect for Ukrainian borders, sovereignty, and integrity expressed in the famous 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in connection with Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The content of an update of the 2008 bilateral charter could be (a) a clearer, than was the case in the Budapest Memorandum, of the United States’ security guarantees for Ukraine until it accedes to NATO, and (b) a new package of security cooperation between Washington and Kyiv.
Pavlo Klimkin was minister of foreign affairs of Ukraine in 2014-2019 and is director of the program on European, Regional and Russian Studies of the Ukrainian Institute for the Future in Kyiv. Andreas Umland is editor of the book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” published by ibidem Press in Stuttgart, and Senior Nonresident Fellow at the Institute of International Relations in Prague.
