NATO says it’s keeping door open to Ukraine
BUCHAREST, Romania — NATO doubled down Tuesday on its commitment to one day include Ukraine, a pledge that some officials and analysts believe helped prompt Russia’s invasion this year.
Russia can’t stop the alliance’s expansion, NATO leaders said.
“NATO’S door is open,” NATO Secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg said before the meeting in Bucharest, which included Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other NATO foreign ministers.
The world’s largest security alliance also pledged to send more aid to Ukrainian forces locked in battle with Russian troops.
For its part, the U.S. announced $53 million to buy electrical parts for Ukraine’s electrical grid. The network has been battered since early October by targeted Russian strikes, in what U.S. officials call a Russian campaign to weaponize the coming winter cold.
In another development, the Associated Press reported that at least nine rooms have been found in and around formerly occupied Kherson where Ukrainians allege that Russian soldiers confined, beat, shocked and interrogated them and threatened them with death.
When a dozen Russian soldiers came to Dmytro Bilyi’s home in August, the 24-year-old police officer said they gave him a chilling choice: Hand in his pistol or his mother and brother would disappear.
Bilyi turned his gun over to the soldiers, who carried machine guns and had their faces concealed. But it didn’t matter. They dragged him from his house in the southern village of
Chornobaivka to a prison in Kherson, where he said he was locked in a cell and tortured for days, his genitals and ears shocked with electricity.
“It was like hell all over my body,” Bilyi recalled. “It burns so bad it’s like the blood is boiling ... I just wanted it to stop,” he said.
Human rights experts warn that such accusations are likely only the beginning.
“For months we’ve received information about torture and other kinds of persecution of civilians,” said Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties, a local rights group. “I am afraid that horrible findings in Kherson still lie ahead.”
As for the NATO leaders’ talks, Stoltenberg highlighted that North Macedonia and Montenegro recently had joined NATO, and said Russian President Vladimir Putin “will get Finland and Sweden as NATO members” soon. The Nordic neighbors applied for membership in April, concerned that Russia might target them next.
“Russia does not have a veto” on countries joining, Stoltenberg said. “We stand by that, too, on membership for Ukraine.”
When NATO leaders met in Bucharest in 2008, they said Ukraine and Georgia would join the alliance one day.
Some officials and analysts believe that declaration — pressed on NATO allies by former President George W. Bush — was partly responsible for the war that Russia launched on Ukraine in February. In justifying his invasion Feb. 24, Putin cited threats to Russia’s security from Ukraine’s ambitions to join NATO.
Stoltenberg said NATO expansion wouldn’t be hindered.
“President Putin cannot deny sovereign nations to make their own sovereign decisions that are not a threat to Russia,” the former Norwegian prime minister said. “I think what he’s afraid of is democracy and freedom, and that’s the main challenge for him.”
Ukraine applied for “accelerated accession” to NATO on Sept. 30 but won’t join any time soon. With the Crimean Peninsula annexed, and Russian troops and pro-moscow separatists holding parts of the south and east, it’s not clear what Ukraine’s borders would even look like.
Many of NATO’S 30 members believe the focus now must solely be on defeating Russia, and Stoltenberg stressed that any attempt to move ahead on membership could divide them.
“We are in the midst of a war and therefore we should do nothing that can undermine the unity of allies to provide military, humanitarian, financial support to Ukraine, because we must prevent President Putin from winning,” he said.
Beyond Ukraine’s immediate needs, NATO wants to see how it can help the country longerterm, by upgrading its Sovietera equipment to the alliance’s modern standards and providing more military training.
Slovak Foreign Minister Rastislav Kacer said the allies must help Ukraine so “the transition to full membership will be very smooth and easy” once both NATO and Kyiv are ready for accession talks.
In a statement, the ministers vowed to help Ukraine rebuild once the war is over, saying: “we will continue to strengthen our partnership with Ukraine as it advances its Euro-atlantic aspirations.”
Ukraine, for its part, called for more weapons to defend itself with, and quickly.
“Faster, faster and faster,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said. “We appreciate what has been done, but the war goes on.”