Congress Pressures Biden to Help Ukraine Into NATO

Some lawmakers in Congress are urging the Biden administration to help give Ukraine a concrete path to NATO membership at the 31-nation alliance’s annual summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, next month, as Kyiv and Eastern European nations have already begun to try to build momentum for the yearslong bid. 

In a letter sent to U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday and obtained by Foreign Policy, 13 members of Congress from across the aisle and in both chambers, including the leaders of the bipartisan Helsinki Commission, urged the administration to “take a forward leaning position” at the NATO summit to give Ukraine a “concrete, near-term path” to NATO membership “as soon as conditions allow.”

It’s a sign that Congress is becoming increasingly resolute on the idea that Ukraine’s economic recovery and long-term European security could hinge on Ukraine’s NATO bid, which has been largely dormant since Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008. 

“Russia could continue to be a threat to Ukraine, a disaster for European peace, and a challenge to U.S. interests around the world,” the lawmakers wrote to Biden. “Ukrainian membership will also be a powerful expression of our shared values and solidarity with a democratic, open society that has demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of the unendurable.”

Ukraine was first given a path into the alliance 15 years ago, at NATO’s 2008 Bucharest summit, where members pledged that both Ukraine and Georgia would “become members of NATO” but offered no concrete guarantees, including the so-called membership action plan (MAP), which allows existing members to review proposals to expand NATO. Politico reported last week that the Biden administration may be willing to drop the MAP requirement, perhaps in connection with the upcoming Vilnius summit. 

But Biden is not willing to go that far in public yet. Speaking to reporters in Philadelphia on Saturday, Biden said his administration would not “make it easy” for Ukraine to enter NATO, hinting that the MAP was still on the table. Ukrainian military units have undergone extensive reforms since Russia’s lightning invasion of Crimea in 2014, including changes to the military’s medical corps, tactical and schoolroom reforms, and more extensive English-language training, and some Ukrainian troops have even tested themselves against NATO combat standards. Yet it is not clear how the entire Ukrainian military would stack up. 

“During the war, they’ve been moving at a double-fast speed toward NATO standards because they’ve been operating more and more NATO equipment,” said Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary-general. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov has even gone as far as to call Ukraine a “de facto” member of NATO that will aim to implement at least 30 percent of the alliance’s military standards by the end of 2023, though experts are more skeptical. 

“If you look at it from a MAP perspective, it needs to be the whole force,” Grand said. “It’s not only a few units that operate under NATO standards.”

Still, there remains momentum to bypass the typical process. Finland entered NATO this year without undergoing the MAP procedure, and Sweden, if it clears political hurdles set forth by Turkey and Hungary over its bid, also will have skipped the process. Some Western leaders, such as French President Emmanuel Macron, have gone further, calling for NATO nations to provide Ukraine a “path” into the alliance and Israel-like security guarantees in the interim, setting up the potential for an inverse of the Bucharest dynamic in Vilnius, with France pushing for Ukraine’s entry into NATO while the United States demurs.

“We don’t have time,” said Jim Townsend, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense. “Once the fighting comes to an end, all of a sudden you’re in this never-never land. The sooner we get [Ukraine] into NATO, the better. If not, you’re condemning them to this gray zone.”

And Congress is convinced that the alliance has a lot to learn from Ukraine. “Counting Ukraine as an Ally is also squarely in the Alliance’s self-interest: Ukraine in NATO will be a premier military power and the only European state to have faced Russian forces on the field since the end of the Cold War—and won,” the lawmakers wrote. Though the lawmakers acknowledged that establishing a date for Ukraine to join the alliance may be out of reach politically at the Vilnius summit, they called an achievable pathway to membership and robust security commitments the “minimum outcome” that should be expected of the meeting. 

But the talk of security guarantees has left Western officials stuck in difficult discussions about how, even if Ukraine joins NATO after Russia’s full-scale invasion is spent, the alliance’s mutual defense clause, known as Article 5, might apply to Kyiv. “Nobody is seriously considering Ukraine joining NATO now, in the middle of a war,” Grand said. “Imagine we end up with a bit of a frozen conflict. How does that work?”

Congress is getting increasingly bullish on Ukraine’s NATO bid as it also looks to push the Biden administration to send the last major Western weapons system to Ukraine that has been on Kyiv’s list for more than a year: long-range weapons. The House Foreign Affairs Committee is set to mark up a bipartisan resolution on Wednesday led by Republican Rep. Michael McCaul that calls on the administration to transfer Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) to Ukraine. But with the possibility of Western fighter jets getting into Ukrainian hands no longer a pipe dream, NATO membership has become the top priority. 

“It’s not about specific weaponry we would ask for next,” said Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies, which advises the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “It’s about Ukraine being very vocal about NATO membership.”