Ask a Ukrainian soldier what he is fighting for, and NATO membership would certainly be on that list. But ask NATO, and the answer is far less straightforward and gets complicated quickly.
This complication got a public airing last month when Ukraine’s former army chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi , told a meeting room full of Ukrainian ambassadors that he no longer sees NATO membership as a realistic option. After 12 years of rigorous training to reach NATO’s military standards, he said, membership seems like a faraway dream. He also took aim at NATO itself, arguing that the alliance’s own doctrine is still fighting the last war.
Zuluzhnyi’s words hold weight because he is not a fringe voice. He is a likely candidate for the country’s future presidency. Moreover, he built Ukraine’s army into a force that was capable of holding off Russian forces in 2022. Therefore, he is one of the most trusted figures in the country.
Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership has indeed stalled. NATO made a promise to Ukraine at the 2008 Bucharest Summit and again at the Vilnius Summit in 2023, but it provided no definite timeline for membership. The reasons seem to be less about political goodwill and more about the basic structural realities of the membership.
Article 5 of NATO provides its members with a collective defense guarantee; an attack on one member is considered an attack on all. Officially bringing Ukraine into NATO while it is in an active war could pull several of NATO members into an unwanted war with Russia. Although this clause acts as the existential foundation of NATO, it is also the single biggest hurdle in Ukraine’s path to NATO membership. To overcome this, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has suggested a workaround that excludes Russian-occupied territories from NATO’s security clause so that Ukraine could join the alliance. But that would only dodge the problem by leaving aside the larger question of how the alliance could protect Ukraine without triggering a widespread regional war.
War is not the only obstacle; NATO decisions have to be unanimous. Hungary and Slovakia have made their opposing positions clear , while some other members like Belgium, Spain, and Slovenia have been less than enthusiastic. Furthermore, Washington’s views are far more weighty, as the Biden administration never actually pushed for an invitation for Ukraine, while Trump outright stated on record that Ukraine should forget about membership. Trump also went on to say that the possibility of joining the alliance was one of the reasons for triggering the Russian invasion in the first place. Russia’s objections have made Western governments cautious, therefore creating a gap between what NATO says in principle and what its members are prepared to do.
Zaluzhnyi made another argument that no one else has made previously. The popular question until now has been whether Ukraine is ready for NATO, but he turned this question on its head and asked if NATO is ready for the kind of war Ukraine has been fighting, which is dominated by drones, electronic, and trench warfare. He views the alliance’s operational doctrine as lagging behind, claiming that it is still following Cold War-era rules and closing that gap could take the alliance itself the better part of a decade.
Independent defense researchers have basically come up with the same findings. According to a CEPA assessment of lessons for NATO from Ukraine, the alliance currently has too few drones for a high-intensity war against a similar adversary and would not be able to integrate its existing drones into a war under contested conditions. The magnitude of the change is impossible to overestimate: today, cheap first-person-view drones account for most of Russian battlefield losses. NATO forces have not yet incorporated this new paradigm of ground warfare into their force structures. Recently, Ukraine’s soldiers participated in a joint exercise with NATO and were observed fighting like soldiers “shaped by years of fighting with drones,” while their NATO counterparts had not been pushed to the same “extreme” by hostile forces. The alliance would need to modernize before it could properly integrate Ukraine.
NATO is not averse to welcoming new members, as the cases of Sweden and Finland demonstrate. Sweden abandoned over 200 years of neutrality in 2022 when it applied for membership after Russia invaded Ukraine. Finland similarly left behind its Cold War-era neutrality and joined NATO in 2023; Sweden joined soon after in 2024. Although their paths to NATO membership were complicated by political objections from Hungary and Turkey, the disagreements were mainly political in nature and not those that could risk triggering war the moment the ink dried. There lies the difference, as both Sweden and Finland applied to join the alliance during peacetime, while Ukraine’s request mid-conflict is far riskier.
This leaves a bigger question that is becoming harder to avoid: if NATO membership is off the table, then what does Ukraine get instead? The alternatives discussed range from bilateral security guarantees to some form of neutrality where Western governments offer Ukraine binding commitments.
But this is not the same as the definitive collective defense guarantee that NATO’s Article 5 offers. Other forms of commitments would still leave room for governments to decide how far they are willing to go. That is the standard against which any alternative commitment option that Ukraine gets will be compared. Zaluzhnyi, for one, has already stopped waiting for a membership that, for now, is not coming.
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What’s Blocking Ukraine from NATO?
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at FPIP.