Ukraine war: Zelensky says Nato membership could end 'hot phase'

Zelensky suggests war could end if unoccupied Ukraine comes under Nato

Ukraine could then attempt to negotiate the return of territory currently under Russian control "in a diplomatic way", he said in a wide-ranging interview.

Zelensky said he would, but only if Nato membership was offered to the whole of Ukraine, within its internationally recognised borders, first.

He was asked by Sky News whether he would accept Nato membership, but only on the territory that Kyiv currently holds.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has suggested that the parts of Ukraine under his control should be taken "under the Nato umbrella" to try and stop the "hot phase" of the war.

But the suggestion is highly theoretical. Zelensky is not floating any new proposals - this was a television interview, not a diplomatic forum - but he is sending signals.

Whether Nato would ever consider such a move is highly doubtful.

“Ukraine has never considered such a proposal, because no-one has officially offered it to us,” Zelensky said.

Nato would need to offer membership to the whole country, including those parts currently under Russian control, he said.

"You can't give [an] invitation to just one part of a country," the president said, according to a translation provided by Sky News. "Why? Because thus, you would recognise that Ukraine is only that territory of Ukraine, and the other one is Russia."

Lots of people were proposing ceasefires, he said, but without a mechanism to prevent Russia from attacking again, ceasefires were simply too dangerous.

Only NATO membership, he said, could offer that kind of guarantee.

The Ukrainian president has already said that he thinks the war could end in the coming year if Ukraine’s allies show sufficient resolve.

Reports suggest that discussion of the so-called West German model - Nato membership offered to a divided country - has been going on in Western circles for more than a year.

But no formal proposals have yet been made.

Meanwhile, Zelensky has been keen to sound willing to engage with whatever proposals US President-elect Donald Trump might be considering.

“I want to share with him ideas, and I want to hear from him, his ideas,” Zelensky said.

The Ukrainian leader said he would be sending a team in the coming days to meet Trump officials, including the president-elect’s recently appointed special envoy for Ukraine, retired general Keith Kellogg.

In April, Gen Kellogg co-authored a plan, called America First: Russia & Ukraine, which would freeze the front lines in Ukraine and pressure both Kyiv and Moscow to come to the negotiating table.

Future US military assistance to Ukraine would be conditioned on Kyiv’s willingness to enter peace talks.

But in the event of a ceasefire, Washington would continue to provide military assistance and “strengthen [Ukraine’s] defences to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a ceasefire or peace agreement.”

Under the proposals, NATO membership for Ukraine would be put off for an extended period.

For Zelensky, this begs a crucial question: what guarantees of security would the Trump administration be willing to offer?

“Without NATO, it’s not real independence for Ukraine because he [Russian President Vladimir Putin] will come back,” Zelensky insisted.

The differences between Zelensky’s peace plan and the nascent Trump policy are still substantial.

But by engaging with the idea of a ceasefire and painful territorial sacrifices (in the short term at least), the Ukrainian leader is doing his utmost to sound constructive, conscious that there are so far no equivalent signs coming from Moscow.

Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014. Eight years later, it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and has occupied territory in the country's east.

But It is also worth noting that so far Putin has given absolutely no indication that he’s abandoned his desire to subjugate Ukraine entirely.

The idea that he would be willing to allow any part of Ukraine to join Nato is, for now, unthinkable.

All the indications so far suggest that any involvement of Nato is a complete non-starter.

Additional reporting by Sofia Ferreira Santos.

Itakie on November 30th, 2024 at 12:56 UTC »

Kagan wrote a very good piece about why such ideas are misguided:

Advocates of a negotiated settlement with territorial concessions by Ukraine do not deny this danger and attempt to address it in various ways. All seem to assume the postwar Ukraine will have full access to American and NATO weaponry, training and other forms of military assistance, and substantial reconstruction aid. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, in what he calls, “A Trump Peace Plan for Ukraine,” would provide Ukraine $100 billion from a special NATO fund and an additional $500 billion worth of U.S. “lend-lease” loans to purchase weaponry (which, presumably, like the original lend-lease, would not have to be paid back for decades, if ever). Others call for “sustained military assistance in peacetime” to “help Kyiv create a credible deterrent.” Even Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) envisions some kind of guarantee of Ukraine’s security so that “the Russians don’t invade again.” He calls for a “heavily fortified” “demilitarized zone” between Russian and Ukrainian forces, which must mean one of two things: either establishing some kind of international peacekeeping force between the two armies or building a Ukrainian military sufficient on its own to repel a Russia attack.

The common assumption is that the Ukrainians are the biggest obstacle to such a settlement because they refuse to give up on the territory they have lost. That’s wrong. If the United States and NATO wanted to force Kyiv to accept it, they could. Brave and determined as the Ukrainians may be, they cannot continue fighting without U.S. and Western support and so must eventually accept the West’s dictation, just as the Czechs did in 1938.

But what about Vladimir Putin? Little thought seems to have been given as to whether the Russian president would accept the kind of peace settlement advocates of negotiations have proposed. Consider what such a settlement would look like from Moscow’s perspective: Before the war, Russia faced a relatively weak and politically divided Ukraine trying with only modest success to forge closer ties with a hesitant Europe and an ambivalent United States. At the end of 2021, Ukraine had a little over 200,000 active-duty soldiers, while Russia had more than 900,000.

Three years later, the war has transformed both Ukraine and the military balance in central and Eastern Europe. Today, Ukraine has more than 900,000 active-duty soldiers and hundreds of thousands of trained and battle-tested reserves. It has become, in fact, larger than the forces of Britain, Germany and Poland combined. And according to the proposals of Pompeo and others, it will remain so, aided by a continuous flow of billions of dollars of military aid. NATO this summer established a permanent center at Wiesbaden, Germany, staffed by 700 personnel to oversee the training and “long-term development” of the Ukrainian military, to increase interoperability between Ukrainian and NATO forces, and to manage the distribution and repair of the vast amounts of military equipment flowing to Ukraine now and in the future. Presumably, the U.S. and NATO allies plan to continue providing intelligence and targeting advice, as they have done increasingly over the course of the war.

This well-armed postwar Ukraine, moreover, is going to be an intensely hostile neighbor. Ukrainians won’t soon forget the death, destruction, murder and torture suffered at Russia’s hands during the war. There will be potent strains of revanchism as Ukrainians mourn their lost territory and yearn for its eventual return, especially given that, according to Pompeo, the United States and much of the international community will not officially recognize Russia’s conquests but, in Pavel’s words, will regard them as “temporary.” Indeed, according to one of the leading advocates of a negotiated peace, the goal of any settlement would be to ensure that the Ukrainian military has the capacity “to hold at risk any areas under Russian occupation” and even “to strike Russia itself.”

So, in return for the acquisition of Donbas, Crimea and some other strategically significant territories (much of which was beyond Kyiv’s control even before the war), Putin gets an angry, powerful, revanchist Ukraine, heavily armed and trained by the West and increasingly integrated in NATO, with or without formal membership.

[..]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/15/ukraine-stalemate-putin-pompeo-peacetalks-negotiations/

What does Russia get out of such a settlement? Some parts of Ukraine (not de jure)? Would this be good enough for Putin while losing the rest forever to the West? All while having a hateful Ukraine armed to their teeth as a neighbor. Sure he could sell it at home but Putin wants to be compared to Peter the Great and not be remembered as the dude who lost a war against the little brother.

The West is saying Putin does not care about the life of his soldiers or the average Russian. He does not care about the Russian economy. About prestige in the international setting and so on. So why do people think he would accept a bad deal (from his point of view)? To end the war and bring peace? After three years of telling us he's a danger to Europe and "mad"?

We are still talking like the war is in its first 3 months and both sides could get a "good" deal out of it. Putin even spells it out for us: a peace deal must recognize the current battlefield.

garbagemanlb on November 30th, 2024 at 09:09 UTC »

Admission to NATO requires every NATO member's legislature to agree to admitting Ukraine. I just do not see that happening with the current situation on the ground.

This is newsworthy though in that it shows an evolution of Ukraine's position. The ultimate end result will likely be some sort of security guarantee outside NATO though. Maybe through UK/France or some former eastern block country like Poland.

Designer_Economics94 on November 30th, 2024 at 06:16 UTC »

SS : President Volodymyr Zelensky has suggested that the parts of Ukraine under his control should be taken "under the Nato umbrella" to try and stop the "hot phase" of the war.

In a long, wide-ranging interview with Sky News, the Ukrainian president was asked whether he would accept Nato membership, but only on the territory that Kyiv currently holds.

Ukraine could then attempt to negotiate the return of territory currently under Russian control "in a diplomatic way", he said.

But the suggestion is highly theoretical. As Zelensky pointed out, no-one has yet made such an offer.