Nato must protect Ukraine from Russian aggression, and also Ukraine cannot join Nato while it is at war with Russia. That is the conundrum that leaders of the western military alliance grapple with at their annual summit in Vilnius.
Kyiv craves the security of a mutual assistance pact – the ultimate solidarity that treats an attack on one Nato member as an aggression against them all. Nothing short of that guarantee, underwritten by US firepower, will persuade Russia to respect post-Soviet borders.
But Vladimir Putin’s armies have already smudged Ukraine’s border with blood. Nato abhors the violation but draws the line at direct military confrontation with Russia, not least because nuclear weapons potentially come into play when former cold war adversaries meet in battle.
For President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, it is catch-22: to earn collective protection from the invader he must first fight off the invasion alone. The leaders gathered in Vilnius express maximum support for that endeavour, but membership of their club can be defined only loosely, as a work in progress.
Rishi Sunak is one of the strongest cheerleaders for Ukraine’s prompt inclusion in the alliance; more so than Joe Biden, who dwells on the technical conditions of entry – tests of good governance and military modernisation. But even the hawkish UK prime minister cannot say when he thinks Kyiv should formally cross the threshold.
A similar diplomatic dance is happening around Ukraine’s hopes of joining the European Union. Zelenskiy put in a bid for membership last February, within days of the Russian invasion. Formal candidate status was granted four months later.
That was a symbolic statement of support for a country that has paid a horrific price for the aspiration to be counted among European democracies, and not just in the last 17 months.
There was the Maidan uprising of 2013-14, triggered by the refusal of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin president, to sign an association agreement with Brussels. Yanukovych was eventually ousted, but not before dozens of protesters had been killed. Putin then decided it was time to upgrade Russian involvement in Ukraine from proxy manipulation of the country’s politics to annexation of its territory, starting with Crimea in March 2014.
Ukraine is the only country in Europe where people have taken bullets because they dared to drape themselves in the blue-and-yellow starred flag of the EU. That is what Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission president, means when she speaks of a “special responsibility” to Kyiv.
But, as with Nato, there is a big gap between the moral imperative to include a heroic nation in the European project and the political reality of qualification on the usual terms. It is easy to invoke the EU’s founding ethos of continental harmony by way of economic interdependence. It is a lot harder to find room for a big, poor, war-battered country in the complex and rigid legal apparatus of Brussels decision-making, budget allocations and, in the case of Ukraine’s gigantic Soviet-scale farms, agricultural subsidies.
On her most recent visit to Kyiv, earlier this month, Von der Leyen said it was impossible to envisage a future for the EU without Ukraine. That was an elegant way to balance firmness of commitment with vagueness over the timetable. The same delicate line between offering Ukrainians hope and managing their expectations is being trodden in Vilnius.
The EU and Nato are reprising a double act familiar from the turn of the century, when a number of former Warsaw Pact countries followed twin-track accession to both clubs. Legal harmonisation for the single market and military interoperability required very different reforms. But the combination described a coherent strategic imperative to be part of the west, which was understood most urgently by countries that bordered Russia as irreversible emancipation from the Kremlin’s bullying reach.
That sense of imminent threat was not universally shared by established club members. One view, commonly expressed, was that Russia had swallowed enough defeat when the USSR unravelled, and could be allowed a residual cordon of superpower influence in its back yard. The warnings from Poland and the Baltic states that their liberty would soon be dissolved in such a grey zone were often belittled as paranoid Russophobia.
But they were right. Russia’s neighbours knew it best. Putin has no more respect for the borders of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia than he has shown for Ukrainian sovereignty. The difference is that the Balts not only got away, but closed the door behind them. Nato membership was the lock; EU membership was the passport to a better economic future – literally, for those citizens who acquired freedom of movement within the single market.
Britain, then under a Labour government, was an enthusiastic advocate of that process. The favour has not been forgotten in eastern Europe, although goodwill acquired as a friend of EU accession countries was most useful in the business of coalition-building and trading favours on the European Council.
Brexit put a stop to that. It has also imposed an asymmetric view of continental security on a Conservative government that is ideologically allergic to acknowledgment of the EU as a primary institution for the advancement of western interests in Europe – Nato’s economic sibling.
For all the progress that Sunak has made befriending Von der Leyen – signing the Windsor framework, dropping the prancing bombast of his predecessors – his foreign policy is still rooted in denial of facts about Europe in the 21st century.
The axiomatic Tory view of Brussels as an alien conspiracy against national sovereignty has hardly evolved since squabbles over the Maastricht treaty 30 years ago. Delusions of market parity with a bloc of 27 other countries persist despite a barrage of proof that the relationship is wildly unbalanced and not to Britain’s advantage.
For the time being, a downgrade in the economic sphere doesn’t change Britain’s status as a leading military power in Europe, which is what matters most in Kyiv right now. Nato is the alliance to which Zelenskiy appeals first and foremost to secure his country’s survival as an independent state. EU membership is the longer journey that offers Ukrainians the prospect of a more stable and prosperous democracy – full escape from Russia’s coercive orbit.
Nato and the EU are two arms of the same embrace, but Sunak can only do continental strategy with one hand behind his back. There are many downsides to Brexit, most of them parochial misfortunes for Britain to bear alone. But there is one that is more poignant because it reaches so much further. Having turned our backs on the European project, we are half the friend to Ukraine that we could be.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
