FOREIGN ministers of the US-led NATO military alliance have met to discuss offering future security guarantees to Ukraine amid Kiev’s push to join the increasingly hawkish bloc.
The ministers of NATO’s 31 member countries discussed the issue in the Norwegian capital of Oslo for a second and final day of informal talks that seek to unify positions ahead of a NATO leaders’ summit on July 11-12 in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, backed by some NATO countries in Eastern Europe, is demanding a ‘clear message’ at the July summit that Kiev will join the military alliance once its war with Russia ends amid very little prospect for the conflict’s conclusion.
‘It is for Ukraine and NATO allies to decide when Ukraine becomes a NATO member, it’s not up to Moscow to decide,’ Norwegian Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt declared in a press briefing on the eve of the two-day meeting.
Last week, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Ukraine would not be able to join while the war with Russia raged but said that would be different when the conflict was over.
‘The most urgent and important task now is to ensure that Ukraine prevails,’ Stoltenberg said.
Stoltenberg is further pushing for a decade-long programme worth 500 million Euros ($530 million) per year to help Ukraine’s military switch to Western standards.
That would be on top of the tens of billions of dollars in arms that allies have already sent.
During the meeting, Estonia’s Foreign Minister, Margus Tsahkna, claimed that giving ‘strong defence guarantees to Ukraine’, sends a clear message to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and to Russia.
Joining NATO would mean Ukraine would benefit from a collective security guarantee — so-called Article 5 of the organisation’s founding Washington Treaty — which ensures that an attack on any one of their number would be considered an attack on them all.
Henry Kissinger has said the NATO membership offer to Ukraine was a ‘grave mistake’ that led to the war of the combined West against Russia.
The NATO Secretary-General had said in April: ‘All NATO allies have agreed that Ukraine will become a member, Ukraine’s future is in NATO.’
However, Ukrainians have been waiting for NATO membership for the past two decades.
In 2008, the US-led alliance promised to eventually let Ukraine in, but it first concluded that admitting the country was not worth the damage to Western-Russian relations.
In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, NATO decided that Ukraine’s membership would demand too much of the alliance, and for too little in return.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin, has repeatedly claimed that preventing Ukraine from joining NATO has been a key goal of its ‘special military operation’, arguing that Kiev’s membership would pose an existential threat to Russia.
The conference also seeks a way to bring Sweden into NATO after the Turkish leader Tayyip Erdogan’s re-election victory this week.
Turkey has been blocking Sweden’s attempts to join the NATO alliance for months. Sweden applied to join the alliance in May 2022, alongside its traditionally neutral neighbour Finland but its membership is blocked by Turkey and Hungary.
NATO’s yearly summit will also discuss how to boost its funds. NATO’s current target is for each member to spend at least two percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) on defence.
Last year only seven members hit that figure, and the allies agree on the need to make the 2% goal ‘a floor, not a ceiling’. Eastern European members, which have already boosted defence spending beyond 2% are disappointed by the lack of ambition shown by some allies.
Finding a successor to Stoltenberg as NATO secretary-general will also be on the agenda. The former Norwegian premier has held the post since 2014 and his tenure was extended to September this year.
- Meanwhile Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has lashed out at claims by the US envoy to South Africa about arms shipments from the country to Russia, telling him to stop meddling in relations between Moscow and Pretoria.
‘If an American or any other foreign ambassador from across the ocean suspects something, he or she had better mind their own business,’ Lavrov emphasised on Wednesday during a press conference in Mozambique in response to the allegations made by the US diplomat.
He insisted that Washington should focus on repairing its tarnished global image rather that meddling in ties between Russia and South Africa.
Lavrov underlined that Moscow ‘never violates international norms, unlike our Western counterparts who do so while declaring their neutrality on the developments in Ukraine, as they pump that country with large amounts of the latest long-range and generally unsafe weapons.’
The top Russian diplomat also called on US diplomats around the world to ‘take care of their own image in the eyes of foreign public.’
The US ambassador to South Africa, Reuben Brigety, has accused the host country of covertly shipping arms to Russia and alleging that weapons and ammunition had been loaded on the Russian cargo ship Lady R that docked at Simon’s Town naval base near Cape Town in December.
The charges drew an angry rebuke from Pretoria with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa slamming the allegations as ‘unfounded’.
His office also reacted strongly to the US allegations in a statement, slamming it as ‘disappointing’ and insisting that the US envoy had ‘adopted a counter-productive public posture’.
It further reiterated that there had been ‘no evidence’ indicating the loading of weapons on the Russian cargo vessel.
South Africa’s foreign ministry summoned Brigety after the unsubstantiated claims, emphasising that there was ‘no record of an approved arms sale by the state to Russia related to the period/incident in question.’
The ministry later declared that Brigety had ‘admitted that he crossed the line’ with his remarks.
- Moscow and Pretoria maintain close ties since the days of the Soviet Union. South African has so far refused to join a campaign of Western sanctions against Russia over its ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine that began in February last year.
Instead, Pretoria has time and again stressed on peace negotiations to end the conflict.
In May, Ramaphosa reiterated South Africa’s neutrality between the two warring sides, explaining that Pretoria does not want to be ‘drawn into a contest between global powers.’
Since the onset of the war, the US and its European allies have unleashed an array of unprecedented sanctions against Russia and poured numerous batches of advanced weapons into Ukraine to help its military fend off the Russian troops, despite repeated warnings by the Kremlin that such measures will only prolong the war.