NATO Summit opening in Vilnius to determine Ukraine’s further path to Alliance

The NATO Summit, which is starting in Lithuania’s Vilnius today, is taking place in a critical time for the entire Euro-Atlantic security, as NATO leaders have repeatedly emphasized.

This forum can make important decisions that will determine Ukraine’s path to membership in the Alliance and the ‘modalities’ of security guarantees, which should become a safeguard against repeated Russian aggression in the future.

According to the Ukrinform correspondents, the atmosphere of the summit and all the discussions taking place among officials and mass media representatives indicate that the main issue and the main intrigue of the Vilnius Summit remains the question: how the allied countries will be able to respond to Ukraine’s determined desire for NATO membership, readiness to which the Armed Forces of Ukraine demonstrate every day on the battlefield, fighting against the cruel and treacherous Russian aggressor.

Without exaggeration, Vilnius has a blue and yellow palette these days. Large and small flags of Ukraine fly next to the buildings of government institutions, in the windows of residential buildings, on road poles, next to the national flags of Lithuania and NATO. Lithuanians took a creative approach to expressing their own beliefs. Ukrainian-themed posters can be seen at bus stops, on huge billboards and supermarket facades. Ukrainian flags are literally everywhere – on cars, in people’s hands, in art installations, – which gives this year’s NATO Summit a unique, unprecedented atmosphere.

The NATO Summit in Vilnius is expected to endorse three critical decisions regarding Ukraine.

Firstly, the adoption of a broad multi-year aid package for Ukraine, which, in particular, should ensure the high combat capability of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and their full interoperability with the troops of NATO countries, promote the wide reform of the entire security and defense sector of Ukraine, its transition from the post-Soviet doctrines and military equipment to modern equipment and concepts of the Alliance.

Secondly, bringing the political relations between NATO and Ukraine to a qualitatively new level, which will be achieved through the creation of a bilateral council. The fundamental difference between this entity and the NATO-Ukraine Commission (NUC), which existed before and was mainly a consultative body, is that the Council will meet in the format of 31 (soon – 32) + 1, i.e. NATO Allies plus Ukraine, at a round table, where each of the participating countries has an equal right to raise security issues and propose decisions that, upon approval, become binding for all the parties.

Thirdly, the most challenging and politically controversial decision. Despite the fact that Ukraine and NATO Allies have agreed that Ukraine’s membership in the Alliance can be considered at a practical level only after Ukraine’s victory in the war against Russian aggression, it is obvious that Ukraine is no longer satisfied with the assurance reached in Bucharest at the 2008 NATO Summit that “Ukraine will be a member of NATO”. Hence, heated discussions between NATO Allies about how the prospects of Ukraine’s membership in the Alliance should sound in the final document of the Summit continued to the last minute. And they will probably persist today, because tomorrow they should take the form of concrete decisions, during the first ever meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council at the highest level with the participation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.