NATO summit: Political, security gains for Türkiye, no clear pathway for Ukraine Analysis by Mikhail Shereshevskiy

Ahead of the NATO summit in Vilnius, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hit out at the allies, accusing them of failing to set a timeline for his country's entry into the alliance.

However, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, speaking at the summit, responded by saying that admission to NATO is based on conditions, not deadlines. "If you look at all the processes of joining the alliance, they are not based on deadlines, they are based on conditions, as they have always been," he added. But what those conditions are remained unclear.

Meanwhile, John Bolton, former national security adviser to US President Donald Trump, called the debate a "waste of time."

According to Bolton, even the very discussion of Ukraine's future NATO membership is meaningless in such a situation. He explained that US President Biden aggravated the situation by saying that "Ukraine is not ready to join NATO." It would be enough for Biden to tell the truth that the US and its Alliance partners are unwilling to fight with Russia over Ukraine and to ask Kyiv "not to bring up this topic". There was no need to add anything else.

"This is a policy based on the Washington Treaty. Article 5 states that an attack on one is considered an attack on all. NATO will never recognise a country engaged in full-scale hostilities as a member of the alliance, because that inevitably means that the rest of the alliance is at war. I think that this whole story is a waste of time and a signal to Russia of disunity in the alliance," Bolton said.

The question today is not about NATO membership, but to what extent Western countries are willing to support Ukraine and what they are really trying to achieve. Perhaps they themselves do not fully realise this.

Their wavering position is probably due to the fact that they are balancing between the desire to surrender 20 per cent of Ukraine to the Kremlin, because they are afraid of nuclear weapons and do not want the Russian Federation to push the red button in case of its defeat, and the desire to secure Ukraine as an ally and to show China that it will be difficult for it to take Taiwan. They realise that if Russia wins or makes too many concessions to it, they will show China their weakness and it will eventually decide that it can take Taiwan and then something else, but at the same time, the collective Western countries are afraid of entering into direct conflict with Russia and its nuclear weapons.

They declare Putin a criminal and demand him "to stand trial in the Hague", but then increase pressure on Ukraine by demanding an offensive, i.e. sending Ukraine on the offensive without airpower so that it chokes on blood and then sits down with Russia at the negotiating table. They tell stories about defending national independence and democracy in Ukraine, but in response to requests to give them planes or missiles as soon as possible, they reply that they "don't have Amazon" - as Ben Wallace, the head of the UK defence ministry, said recently. The Koreisation of Ukraine, i.e. its division between the West and Russia along the existing firing lines, is openly discussed.

Judging by the latest Ukrainian reports from the front, two Russian armies are striking the Ukrainian armed forces in the area of Svatovo-Kremenna, and they have already made some advances in this direction. Against the backdrop of such military developments, during the conversation with Biden at the NATO summit, Zelenskyy did not receive a clear answer on whether Ukraine will get long-range ATACMS missiles. The debate about this is ongoing. On the other hand, since the West is constantly vibrating between the two poles mentioned above, it is providing cluster weapons for the AFU. Thus, the situation on the front is becoming less and less certain.

Meanwhile, we can say that Türkiye made real progress at the summit. It gave preliminary consent to the admission of Sweden to the Alliance, in return receiving an agreement from the United States to provide 120 F-16 aircraft in the ultra-modern version of the "Block 70". This means acquiring a powerful tool for gaining air dominance should Türkiye clash with its opponents.

They shaped the decision in the following way: President Erdogan sends a proposal to the Turkish Parliament to ratify Sweden's membership in NATO, while the US Congress is debating whether to provide Türkiye with combat aircraft; Ankara's positive decision will ensue from Congress'greenlighting the supply of F-16 to Türkiye.

All this, by the way, is an illustration of how countries actually achieve their goals (spoiler - by twisting each other's arms) to get the desired result. It's bad enough to be a state in such an environment that does not have a strong modern economy and other strategic advantages, relying entirely on the goodwill of other countries. Finance, high technology, a strong army and military-industrial complex, nuclear weapons, strategic position, and/or the ability to block critical projects of other countries are what matters. Everything else in nation-state relations means almost nothing.