2023-07-11 06:00:39
A poster for the NATO summit in Vilnius on July 9, 2023. SEAN GALLUP / GETTY IMAGES VIA AFP
Vilnius will become, for a week, the best protected capital in the world. A dozen members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) dispatched a thousand soldiers and dozens of military equipment – Patriot anti-missile launchers, Caesar guns, surveillance devices, special forces – to secure the Lithuanian city, which hosts, Tuesday 11 and Wednesday 12 July, the annual summit of the Atlantic Alliance.
A year after Madrid, which saw the awakening of a long moribund Alliance and provided it with a new defense strategy in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this summit is being held at the gates of Russia and its Belarusian ally. And, while the counter-offensive launched by Kiev seems to be marking time more than five hundred days after the start of the conflict, Ukraine will be part of all the discussions between the forty heads of state and government.
In addition to Joe Biden, the US President, and European leaders, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to attend the summit on Wednesday, to inaugurate the first “NATO-Ukraine council”. But this political signal does not yet foreshadow the country’s entry into the Transatlantic Alliance, far from it. This is what Mr. Zelensky forcefully demanded again this week during an interview with the American channel ABC. He wanted Westerners to show ” political will “ pour “Find the right formation and invite Ukraine” to join them, at least after the cessation of hostilities with Russia.
“A gray area”
The “unity” shown in support of Ukraine is not enough to hide deep divisions among Western allies over its prospects for NATO membership. On the eve of the summit, the latter were still discussing the best way to send a new signal to the invaded country, which would be more engaging than that emitted at the Bucharest summit, fifteen years ago, without cutting corners. In 2008, after stormy exchanges, in particular between the United States of George W. Bush – who pleaded to integrate Ukraine -, Germany of Angela Merkel and France of Nicolas Sarkozy, who refused this prospect to spare Moscow , the countries of the Alliance had agreed to ” to open the door “ to the accession of Ukraine and Georgia. Without giving a more precise timetable.
Read also the editorial: NATO must send a political invitation to Kyiv
Since then, this door has remained open, “but that’s not enough anymore, it’s a gray area that allowed Vladimir Putin to invade the countryrecalled the Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, at the end of June in Brussels. To protect Ukraine, there is only one solution today, to integrate it into NATO, because the only guarantee of security, and the most economical, is Article 5”. This clause specifies, in the name of mutual assistance between allies, that an attack against a Member State is an attack against the whole Alliance.
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