Ukraine, Nato membership and the West Germany model

Welcome back. Ukraine has scaled back its war aims. Although it remains committed to recovering the lands seized by Russia over the past decade, it regrettably lacks the manpower, weaponry and western support to do it.

Ukraine’s new strategy — presented by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to US leaders last week — is to ask its allies to strengthen its hand, militarily and diplomatically, to bring Russia to the negotiating table. 

Western diplomats and increasingly Ukrainian officials have come round to the view that meaningful security guarantees could form the basis of a negotiated settlement in which Russian retains de facto, but not de jure, control of all or part of the Ukrainian territory it currently occupies. I’m at [email protected]

Land for Nato membership

To be clear, neither Kyiv nor its supporters are proposing to recognise Russia sovereignty over the one-fifth of Ukrainian territory it has illegally grabbed since 2014. To do so would encourage further Russian aggression and severely undermine the international legal order.

What is envisaged is tacit acceptance that those lands should be regained through diplomatic means in the future. Even that, understandably, is a sensitive issue for Ukrainians, especially when presented as the basis of a compromise with Moscow. Ceding land to gain Nato membership may be the “only game in town”, as a western diplomat told us, but for Ukrainians it remains a taboo, in public at least.

What is being more openly discussed is the nature and timing of the security guarantees Ukraine will need to underpin a settlement.

In Washington Zelenskyy restated his pitch for accelerated membership of Nato.

The problem is the US is against moving beyond the agreed position of the alliance that Ukraine’s “future is in Nato”, that its accession is on an “irreversible path” and that it will be invited to join “when allies agree and conditions are met”. It fears that offering a mutual defence guarantee under the Nato treaty’s Article 5 before the war is over would simply draw in the US and its allies. 

But some of Ukraine’s allies say this need not be the case. “There are ways of solving that,” Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian who stood down as Nato secretary-general this week, told my colleague Henry Foy in a farewell Lunch with the FT interview.

Stoltenberg pointed out that the security guarantees that the US provides to Japan do not cover the Kuril Islands, four of which Japan claims as its own but which are controlled by Russia after being seized by the Soviet Union in 1945.

He also cited Germany, which joined Nato in 1955, despite being divided. Only West Germany was covered by the Nato umbrella. 

“When there is a will, there are ways to find the solution. But you need a line which defines where Article 5 is invoked, and Ukraine has to control all the territory until that border,” he said.

From Bonn to Kyiv

The West German model for Ukraine has been discussed in foreign policy circles for more than 18 months. 

Dan Fried, a former US assistant secretary of state for Europe, was one of the first to make the argument in this piece for Just Security. Kurt Volker, a former US ambassador to Nato and Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, Stoltenberg’s predecessor Anders Fogh Rasmussen and FT contributing editor Ivan Krastev have made similar arguments.

The idea is also gaining traction in official circles. 

“I don’t think that full restoration of control over the entire territory is a prerequisite,” Petr Pavel, the Czech president and a former Nato general, told Novinky a Právo newspaper.

“If there is a demarcation, even an administrative border, then we can treat [that] as temporary and accept Ukraine into Nato in the territory it will control at that time,” Pavel said.

Most proponents acknowledge that Moscow would hate this idea. Sceptics fear it could provoke an escalation. Nato membership would guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty and allow it to pursue its western orientation, goals that Russian leader Vladimir Putin is determined to destroy.

Perhaps the most persuasive argument came from the US cold war historian Mary Sarotte in this piece for Foreign Affairs. 

Sarotte’s contention is that the terms of Nato membership can be adapted to suit individual circumstances. Norway pledged not to house a Nato base on its territory when it became a founding member. West Germany’s strategy was to make clear its borders were provisional. It had to tolerate division indefinitely but not accept it, and renounce the use of force to retake East Germany. 

Ukraine should, she wrote, define a military defensible border, agree to not permanently station troops or nuclear weapons on its territory unless threatened with attack, and renounce use of force beyond that border except in self-defence.

Nato membership under these terms would be presented to Moscow as a fait accompli, Sarotte added. But there would still be an implicit negotiation: “instead of a land-for-peace deal, the carrot would be no [Nato] infrastructure for peace”.

The bear does the poking

Other analysts argue West Germany is a bad parallel because its borders, though provisional, were recognised by both sides. In Ukraine they are being fought over every day.

Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, head of the German Council on Foreign Relations, told Foreign Policy’s Anchal Vohra last year “you have the potential of all kinds of problems emanating from the revisionism of both sides. For example, it will be up to Vladimir Putin to define Article 5, whether some of his poking falls below or above that threshold.’’ 

There is also the big question of whether the US, let alone its European allies, would be prepared to make the force commitments necessary to defend a Ukraine inside the alliance. While France has warmed to the idea of faster Ukraine Nato accession, German chancellor Olaf Scholz is firmly opposed, fearing his country could be drawn into another war against Russia.

In the US, the Biden administration has so far refused to budge on accelerating Kyiv’s membership. Would a Kamala Harris presidency treat it differently? Could Donald Trump imagine the West German model as part of his proposed “deal” to end the war? Could Zelenskyy sell it to his people?

There are many obstacles still on Kyiv’s Nato path. But the west patently lacks a strategy for Ukraine to prevail.

As Sarotte concludes, following the West German route “would be far preferable, for Ukraine and the alliance, than continuing to put off membership until Putin has given up his ambitions in Ukraine or until Russia has made a military breakthrough. This path would bring Ukraine closer to enduring security, freedom, and prosperity in the face of Russian isolation — in other words, towards victory.”

More on this topic

Russians do break: historical and cultural context for a prospective Ukrainian victory. For War on the Rocks, Ben Connable examines when and in what circumstances Russia might quit Ukraine

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