What Did the NATO Summit Change for Ukraine?

As Western leaders met with top Ukrainian officials at a pivotal NATO summit this week, Ukraine was worried about the ghosts of summits past that may have helped pave the way to the war it’s facing today. During a 2008 NATO meeting in Bucharest, Romania, allied leaders offered Ukraine and Georgia a path—on paper—to one day joining the powerful Western military alliance. In a joint communiqué at the time, NATO leaders added a straightforward line that both countries “will become members of NATO” but failed to reach consensus on when or how.

The Bucharest summit now lives in infamy in the minds of Ukrainians and their biggest champions in NATO. Russian President Vladimir Putin, at the time still being feted (albeit cautiously) as a partner for the West, slammed the sign of NATO enlargement as a “direct threat” to Russia. NATO kept its door cracked open, but not enough for either country to join the alliance and come into its protective fold. That waffling on NATO enlargement, many Western officials widely believe, helped push Putin to invade Georgia later that year, and Ukraine in 2014, followed by its full-scale invasion in 2022, all while both countries remained in a form of limbo for NATO.

In the run-up to the NATO summit this week in Vilnius, Lithuania, Ukraine and its strongest supporters could often be heard in diplomatic meetings, speeches, and security conferences uttering some variation of the common refrain: We can’t have a repeat of Bucharest. In other words, Ukraine needed a clear path to NATO membership as it fends off Russian forces. It didn’t get it. What it got instead was one key line in the Vilnius summit communiqué: “We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the alliance when allies agree and conditions are met.”

It’s perhaps no surprise that a statement from 31 leaders would end in a garbled form of lowest-common-denominator messaging on the controversial matter of bringing Ukraine into NATO. But the line still incensed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his strongest backers, who had hoped for more concrete signals of support and a clear timeline for Ukraine to join NATO. “It’s unprecedented and absurd when time frame is not set neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine’s membership. While at the same time vague wording about ‘conditions’ is added even for inviting Ukraine,” Zelensky tweeted when excerpts of the draft summit communiqué were leaked.

The United States pumped the brakes on a plan to offer an invitation to Ukraine to join NATO now, one that would be fulfilled after the war ended, multiple NATO officials familiar with the matter told Foreign Policy. Admitting Ukraine to NATO now “would have meant NATO’s at war with Russia,” U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said at a conference on the sidelines of the summit.

Some NATO members quietly agreed, wary of escalating the conflict or overpromising Ukraine a clear timeline on membership it may not be able to deliver in the end. (Adding new members to NATO requires unanimous approval from all 31 member states, a politically fraught hurdle to jump, even for a country like Sweden.) Still, the disappointment for Ukraine’s supporters was palpable.

“I think the communiqué language is a bit generic,” said Catherine Sendak, a scholar at the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank and former Pentagon official. “The way it was laid out was not very inspiring, immediately reiterating Bucharest 2008, which is exactly what many did not want to happen.”

Sendak also said the broad condition laid out—admitting Ukraine when the war is over—gives Russia an incentive to keep the conflict going to halt NATO expansion. “You’re giving Russia an unlimited timeline, knowing that is the line in the sand.”

Zelensky acknowledged that getting Kyiv into the 31-nation military alliance is unlikely before any end to the war or an indefinite cease-fire, given neither side wants to escalate the conflict into a war between Russia and NATO.

Still, Ukraine came into the Vilnius summit demanding a concrete timeline for NATO entry, after disappointments in Bucharest and vague—and since unhonored—security guarantees of the 1990s during Ukraine’s campaign of nuclear disarmament following the end of the Cold War.

At the end of the NATO gathering in Vilnius, speaking in a gaggle of top U.S. officials that included U.S. President Joe Biden and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Zelensky tamped down his frustration. “I think by the end of [the] summit, we have great unity from our leaders and the security guarantees,” he said. “That is a success for this summit.”

Even without the timeline on NATO membership, the United States and other allies took pains to reassure Ukraine that it would double down on supporting the country in its fight against Russia through a series of concrete security arrangements and new defense deals. In short, the Bucharest summit declaration was a pledge on paper but not in spirit that Ukraine would join NATO. The Vilnius summit shows a more ardent pledge in spirit, and, in a slightly garbled way, still on paper. The Group of Seven (G-7) leaders, led by the United States, on Wednesday released a joint declaration calling for billions of dollars in international military and economic aid to Ukraine to keep flowing.

The G-7 pledged to continue aiding Ukraine’s wounded defense industrial base, training Ukrainian forces, sending “enhanced” security assistance packages, and giving Kyiv institutional support to fulfill its NATO and European Union ambitions. NATO countries pledged to begin training Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets, signaling that NATO countries could soon deliver the advanced Western aircraft to Ukraine after months of lobbying. France, a major NATO ally, vowed to transfer long-range SCALP-EG missiles to Ukraine, adding the French version of British Storm Shadow cruise missiles to its arsenal. The EU has drafted a plan to cement a “sustained” flow of weapons to Ukraine in the long run. Sweden, soon to be NATO’s newest member, signed an agreement on cooperating on defense procurements, paving the way for Ukraine to gain access to one of Europe’s most advanced defense industrial bases.

But none of those agreements can make up for NATO membership and its security umbrella, leaving officials and lawmakers in Kyiv with the sense that Ukraine is, once again, like in Bucharest, leaving the summit without guarantees on the issue that matters most.

Ukraine’s parliament, known as the Verkhovna Rada, is already working on reforms to clear multiple hurdles outlined by the European Union for membership that range from anti-corruption and money laundering curbs to improvements to the constitutional court, but Ukrainian lawmakers say they’re less clear on what they need to do for NATO membership.

“[Thirty] percent of the bills that parliament is passing right now are about what the EU requires,” said Sasha Ustinova, a Ukrainian lawmaker. “[NATO] is not telling us what the criteria is for us that we need to meet. After Finland and Sweden, everyone understood this is a purely political decision.”

Some seasoned NATO hands don’t see the vague wording on Ukraine’s NATO membership as an insurmountable hurdle. “This is simply lip service, which is based on those who are kind of hesitant for quicker and deeper integration with Ukraine,” said Artis Pabriks, a former defense minister of Latvia, a Baltic country that joined NATO in 2004. “We all understand that NATO is not the European Union, which means the membership in many ways is a political decision. If you are politically ready, you can quite quickly take Ukraine.”