NATO membership for Ukraine a non-starter

 

NATO membership for Ukraine a non-starter

Ihor Stelmach’s Sun Times letter posing 5 reasons why Ukraine membership would be advantageous for the US is bizarre in the extreme.

His first reason is preposterous. It would not facilitate the war’s end. It would inflame it to possible nuclear confrontation between Russia and the US.

The second reason is equally absurd. Displaying unwillingness to pursue NATO membership to Ukraine Putin will not embolden Putin. Just the opposite, it might create conditions for a negotiated end to the war

The third reason, claiming NATO membership will enhance Ukraine’s security, will guarantee the opposite. Its very possibility is what provoked Russia’s invasion. Even Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky begrudgingly admitted that truth.

Reason four claims that 3 years of war has “has transformed itself (Ukraine military) into a lean, mean fighting machine. The Ukrainian Armed Forces is vast in numbers, battle-hardened, skillful, well-trained and possesses unmatched experience in the realities of modern warfare.” Stelmach is apparently unaware the Ukraine military is nearly destroyed, with over 500,000 dead and 200,000 draftees fled from Ukraine’s impending loss.

Stelmach’s fifth reason concludes that inviting Ukraine into NATO will quench Russia’s imperialistic ambitions to recreate the former Soviet empire. No reasonable historian or political scientist would concur with that hyperbolic view.

US/NATO efforts to bring Ukraine into NATO, allowing US nukes on Russia’s borders, provoked a totally unnecessary war that has largely destroyed Ukraine as a viable state. Unless the US acknowledges that reality and pivots away from NATO membership for Ukraine, America’s Ukraine proxies will continue their downward spiral of death and destruction.