NATO members are racing to complete a plan to provide long-term support to Ukraine, but are wrestling with how best to assure the country's security until it can join the military alliance, according to US and European officials
With four weeks to go until a NATO summit in Vilnius that is expected to approve the plan, there is agreement that Ukraine cannot join the alliance while fighting is still underway against Russian forces,by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy after months of pleading for speedy admission.
U.S. ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith told reporters on Wednesday that members are still discussing how to respond to the Kyiv government's membership aspirations.A senior alliance source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there is "a hard search on to find a mechanism that brings Ukraine closer to NATO without taking them into NATO."
Over that time, popular support for defending Ukraine in the West might fade and the 2024 U.S. election could yield an administration less willing to spend money on the war.Hanging over the deliberations is the question of whether alliance members can show unity by forging agreements ahead of the July 11-12 summit in the Lithuanian capital. Failing to do so would hand Putin a political and propaganda coup.
Others, particularly the United States and Germany, have been reluctant to embrace this idea, according to diplomats."We must ensure that when this war ends, there are credible arrangements in place for Ukraine's security, so that history cannot repeat itself," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Wednesday.
U.S. officials prefer the softer term "security commitments". They declined to define what those commitments would be, but said they were working on a mechanism that would allow individual countries to provide long-term military aid to Kyiv. Some suggested loosely basing this on U.S. arrangements with Israel, whereby NATO states would offer fixed bilateral military assistance for a long period of time.
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