NATO’s failure to accept Ukraine is an insult to a country that has more than proven itself

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The question is not whether Ukraine will join NATO, but whether NATO will join Ukraine. Ukraine has been on the front lines of a bloody war these past 17 months, or truth to tell the last nine years, that is every bit as much NATO’s war, even if no NATO troops are involved.

While Ukraine fights with weapons supplied by NATO countries, it is its soldiers who are suffering and dying – taking the bullets, literally, for the countries to its north and west and south, Poland and Romania and the Baltic states and others, who might otherwise find themselves in imperial Russia’s sights.

It is Ukraine’s sweat and Ukraine’s blood that has stopped the Russian army in its tracks – that has, by some estimates, cut its fighting force in half – and when this war ends and the next has begun it will be Ukraine that will have to do most of the work of stopping Russia again, with or without NATO.

So it is just a little bit precious for NATO, or more particularly for Germany and the United States, to tell Ukraine, in the language of this week’s NATO summit communiqué, that it may be invited to join them at some indeterminate point in future “when Allies agree and conditions are met” – a commitment so watery, so condescending, that Ukraine could be forgiven for saying to hell with it, we’d rather fight the Russians on our own: anything not to have to endure such insults from our so-called allies.

“When allies agree.” The allies, most of them, already have agreed, especially the ones with skin in the game: the countries nearest Russia, the ones it is most likely to attack; the ones with the most to fear but who – I have noted this paradox before – seem strangely to be least in fear.

When “conditions are met.” As if Ukraine had not already met the only condition that counts, a condition no other NATO country has met since the alliance’s founding: that of having actually fought and beaten the Russians on the battlefield. When conditions are met! Is there a fighting force in the world that has proven itself more capable, more courageous?

For that matter, is there a people anywhere that has demonstrated a fiercer commitment to NATO values such as democracy and freedom, measured by their willingness to fight and die for them, than the Ukrainians? How dare the Germans or the Americans or any of the striped-pants set drafting NATO communiqués presume to set them lessons, either in defence or democracy?

Perhaps in 2008, at the NATO summit in Bucharest, when Ukraine’s membership was last considered, there might have been grounds for caution – though if NATO had admitted Ukraine then, does anyone believe Russia would have invaded? But to have made so little progress since then – the Vilnius communiqué even repeats the Bucharest summit’s open-ended, non-committal promise, that “Ukraine will become a member of NATO” – after all that we have learned of Ukraine’s fighting ability, surely sets new records for timidity.

This is not only insulting, it is strategically stupid. On the Russian side, Vladimir Putin has been given a bargaining chip in any future negotiations: a ceasefire, even withdrawal, in exchange for Ukraine’s continued exclusion from NATO – which not only hands him a propaganda victory (“See? It was about NATO all along”) but leaves him free to resume hostilities later, at a time of his choosing.

And on the Ukrainian side? Had Ukraine the sort of ironclad guarantee that comes with NATO membership, it would be in a better position to agree to a peace deal, once it had achieved its war aims. But if all that “peace” buys is a temporary reprieve, what option is there but to fight on? If war was the legacy of Bucharest, the legacy of Vilnius may be a longer and bloodier war than would otherwise have been the case.

The tragedy is that, if not for the failure of nerve over Ukraine’s membership, the Vilnius summit might have been regarded as a success: the pledges of more arms to Ukraine, notably from France and Germany; the admission of Sweden to the alliance, after Turkey dropped its opposition, and the broader Turkish tilt to the West it seemed to signal; the unambiguous “commitment” of member states to spend “at least” 2 per cent of GDP annually on defence, a significant upgrade from the more aspirational language of previous communiqués; the closer co-operation with Japan, South Korea and Australia in the face of China’s rising threat.

But as it is, this will go down in history as at best a missed opportunity. Ukraine may need NATO, but NATO needs Ukraine at least as much.