BRUSSELS – Ukraine will not be the main event when the leaders of 28 nations that form the NATO alliance get together for dinner on May 25, but Kyiv will be on the agenda.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said he expects that German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron will brief the others on the lack of progress in ending Russia’s war against Ukraine.
But the depth of the briefing should not be overstated.
In the diplomatic version of speed dating, each of the 28 leaders will likely be limited to remarks of three minutes in length in a gathering whose twin priorities are fighting terrorism and increasing defense budgets, not the situation in Ukraine.
More than 1,000 journalists are in Brussels to cover the event that will be attended by U.S. President Donald J. Trump as part of his first foreign trip as America’s leader. According to the U.S. NATO delegation’s press service, Trump is not planning a press conference during his stay.
Germany and France have been leading the Minsk peace process, which, as Stoltenberg noted in his press conference on May 24, has not been going well. Russia continues its aggression in the three-year-old war that has killed at least 10,000 Ukrainians and that the Kremlin shows no signs of ending.
At the same time, there was no discussion publicly in NATO headquarters of any new ideas or plan to force Russia to observe the 2015 Minsk peace agreement and abide by a cease-fire, withdraw militarily from eastern Ukraine, allow international monitors unfettered movement and return border control to Ukraine – the essential conditions of the deal that Russian President Vladimir Putin approved.
The lack of new ideas to pressure Russia left Stoltenberg reiterating NATO’s support for European Union and United States-led economic sanctions against Russia.
He also noted that Russian aggression against Ukraine is one of the main reasons why NATO allies are increasing their defenses, especially among eastern alliance members such as the three Baltic nations and Poland. “We don’t want to provoke a conflict with Russia,” Stoltenberg said. “Our presence there is to prevent a conflict.”
Stoltenberg said that NATO allies are concerned about cease-fire violations, the continued presence of heavy weapons at the war front and that Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe monitors “are not allowed to operate.” He noted the killing of one monitor, American Joseph Stone on April 23, in an explosion and the wounding of others. All the incidents are “hampering OSCE’s ability to monitor the cease-fire, which is key to the implementation of the Minsk agreement,” Stoltenberg said.
Visual symbolism is likely to be the most-remembered part of this meeting. NATO’s new headquarters, a sleek and glassy design meant to show off the alliance’s modernity, is set to replace the old headquarters across the street and now still in use.
Merkel will christen the new building near the display of a portion of the Berlin Wall, which came down in 1989, two years ahead of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Trump is set to stand by a piece of the wreckage of one of the New York City World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, destroyed by terrorists who piloted two planes into the buildings on Sept. 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people. The event is meant to symbolize his expected public support for Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which calls on members to defend each other in case of attack. The last time that the mutual defense clause was invoked came after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
However, Ukraine will stay high on NATO’s agenda at least through the summer.
Stoltenberg will lead a delegation of the North Atlantic Council to Kyiv in July for its first-ever meeting in Ukraine. The council sets policy for NATO and, while official details are so far scant, President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman are expected to seize on the event to advance Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO by 2020.
At the May 24 press conference, Stoltenberg also accepted Poroshenko’s explanation that blocking Russian social media sites earlier this month “is an issue of security, not one of freedom of speech.”
In the end, however, Ukraine is likely to be disappointed if it expects quick and strong action by the Trump administration against Russia, according to one expert.
Andrew S. Weiss, a Carnegie Endowment vice president who oversees research on Russia and Eurasia, has called attention to recent news accounts that show Trump is not particularly concerned about Ukraine and that administration officials have been talking with Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Putin oligarch in Ukraine who is considered to be a traitor by many Ukrainians.
In a May 19 story in The New York Times, the newspaper, citing an official who talked about Trump’s May 10 Oval Office meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, wrote: “And while Mr. Trump played down his personal concern about the fighting in Ukraine, according to the official, the president said American critics cared about the issue and asked the Russians to help resolve the dispute.”
Also, a May 18 Reuters story cited the Trump campaign’s contacts with 18 Russian officials or people considered to be pro-Kremlin, including Medvedchuk, who denied the allegations.
However, Weiss said Trump’s foreign policy with Russia and Ukraine is still a work in progress.
“I think the administration is at the every earliest stages of formulating policies toward the region and haven’t fully thought through the game plan for managing the crisis” in Ukraine, Weiss told the Kyiv Post on May 24. “By all accounts, the crisis is in a festering stage; where the real risk is that there will not be a hard-fought negotiation, at the end of which some sort of compromise gets struck, but that a single incident or series of incidents could lead to more escalation and the conflict getting out of control again. This is what really worries people in government circles.”
He said “it’s hard to see” how Ukraine will get Trump’s attention to the same degree that Merkel has devoted to ending the war.
“The Europeans would welcome a more active U.S. role,” Weiss said. “They realize Russians would rather cut a deal with the U.S., not with Europe.”
Given Trump’s disinterest in Ukraine, “we’re likely to stay stuck” in an “unsteady equilibrium,” Weiss said. “I think it’s tragic; if this administration had clarity of vision about Russia, that’s a big if; if it understood the role of U.S. leadership in Europe, that’s a big if; if it understood how pivotal Ukraine is to transatlantic security, it would approach these issues differently.”
This will put more of the onus on Ukraine to show itself worthy of defending by the West
“To the extent Ukraine looks like it is helping itself, accelerating reforms, cracking down on corruption, modernizing society; it will look like a more attractive partner,” Weiss said. Now Trump uses Ukraine “as a pejorative term in his tweets: ‘Ukraine equals friend of Hillary Clinton’ as opposed to ‘Ukraine as a crucial pillar of the transatlantic security system.’ The politicization of what Ukraine is, is really unfortunate.”
A photo taken on May 23 shows a view of the new NATO buildings at the NATO headquarters in Brussels.
U.S President Donald J. Trump will visit Brussels on May 25 to attend a meeting of the 28 heads of state that form the alliance. (AFP)
About the new NATO headquarters:
- Cost is $1.12 billion euros;
- Replaces current headquarters in use since 1967, when NATO had only 15 member nations, not the 28 it has today;
- 254,000 square meters of space to accommodate 1,500 personnel from allied delegations, 1,700 international military and civilian staff; 800 staff from NATO agencies and an average of 500 visitors per day;
- It is a “green building” that reduces energy use through thermal insulation, solar-glazing protection and advanced lighting systems, making maximum use of natural light; a system of rainwater collection and storage will supply 90 percent of the water needed for bathrooms, cleaning and landscaping;
- The site of the new headquarters, across the street from the current one, was the location of Belgium’s first airfield, in 1908. During World War II, the site was occupied again and bombed by both German and Allied forces. During construction work on the new headquarters in 2010 and 2011, four pieces of unexploded ordnance were discovered.
