If NATO failed to live up to its membership promise to Ukraine, this would be a serious reputational blow, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda says.
“We have very clearly reinforced the text on Ukraine’s NATO prospects at least at the last three NATO summits. Now to just take it and remove it all away, well, that would hurt NATO’s credibility very badly,” the president said an interview with the radio Žinių Radijas aired on Tuesday. “That would be a huge blow to NATO’s reputation.”
Ukraine needs to be invited to the NATO summit in The Hague in June in order to be able to present its own position on these issues, Nausėda argued.
Citing diplomatic sources, several foreign media outlets have previously reported that the United States does not want Ukraine to be represented at the summit. And Russia has consistently made it a condition for peace that Ukraine does not join the US-led military alliance.
The final communique of the NATO summit in Vilnius in 2023 stated that “Ukraine will become a NATO member when the allies agree and conditions are met”.
NATO first promised to eventually admit Ukraine to the alliance in 2008 at the Bucharest summit, but did not specify the conditions under which this would happen.
Nausėda says there are two ways for Ukraine to achieve Western security guarantees. One is the permanent reinforcement of Ukraine’s own army and the second is NATO membership.
However, he believes that the latter option would be more effective for NATO countries.
“[Strong Ukrainian army] is even expressed in figures, standing at around 50 billion euros, maybe a bit more, per year. And the question is whether the Western world is actually prepared to spend such a really significant amount of money every year for this purpose,” Nausėda said.
“If so, good, but we have a reason to believe that every year we have a certain difficult political process that often does not generate the necessary amount of money and often we do not know until the last minute whether we will be able to provide sufficient support to Ukraine or not,” the Lithuanian president said.
“That is why NATO membership […] is probably the cheapest way to achieve security guarantees for Ukraine,” Nausėda said.
US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the situation in Ukraine on Monday. Nausėda says Putin will do everything possible to avoid a direct dialogue on peace with the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky.
“I am convinced that he is not interested in peace at all,” Nausėda said, adding that only the US political leadership's decision to take the “hard road” can change this position.
“It must be made clearly stated that if we are convinced that the peace negotiation process is being undermined by Russia, all sanctions will fall heavily on Russia. We all pretty much know whose to blame in here and why these talks cannot start,” the president said.
In his words, if the EU sees real progress in the Ukraine-Russia peace talks, it would consider reviewing its sanction policy towards Russia, but no such progress has been made so far.
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