Extra funds are intended to compensate for the lack of an accession plan, diplomats have told the newspaper
NATO members could offer Ukraine an additional €250 million ($273 million) a year in an effort to quell discontent about the lack of a specific timeframe for it to join the US-led military bloc, the Financial Times has reported.
The foreign ministers of member states are gathering at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday for a two-day summit. Among the proposals they will discuss is the doubling of aid through the Comprehensive Assistance Package for Ukraine, a NATO fund launched in 2016, several diplomatic sources told the British newspaper.
“Those financial pledges are aimed at mollifying irritation in Kiev at widespread unwillingness within the alliance to discuss a concrete timeline for the country to join NATO,” the FT explained.
Ukraine enshrined its intention to become part of the alliance in its constitution in 2019, and formally applied for membership last September. NATO pledged back in 2008 that it would eventually accept Ukraine, but has refused to set any deadline. The government in Kiev is aggrieved at the situation, especially when compared to how its bid to join the EU was treated, the FT claimed.
“We don’t want just a declaration about open-door policies,” a senior official in the office of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said of this week’s NATO ministerial meeting. “We want to get something with concrete guarantees.”
One NATO diplomat who spoke to the FT on condition of anonymity complained that the bloc was “just ignoring” the Ukrainian application. Another stated that “we won’t be able to offer them membership anytime soon. But we can talk about closer relations between NATO and Ukraine.”
The reluctance is partially due to concerns among some members that a formal roadmap on accession for Ukraine would “help [Russian President Vladimir Putin] depict the war as a conflict between Moscow and NATO,” the article claimed.
Moscow cited NATO’s creeping expansion into Ukraine and the growing threat to Russia’s national security as one of the key reasons for launching its military operation in February 2022.
Senior NATO officials have argued that supporting Ukraine in the current conflict has taken priority over Kiev’s membership aspirations.
“Without Ukraine prevailing as a sovereign independent nation… the whole issue of membership will not be relevant,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg remarked at a press conference on Monday.
