NATO discusses Ukraine’s joining alliance after ceding some territories to Russia, La Repubblica reports.
Experts claim that this may be the most acceptable way to end the Ukrainian military conflict. This scenario is being taken more and more seriously in the context of fears of Joe Biden’s loss and Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.
According to the plan, Russia will be offered to keep Crimea and all territories seized within two years. Ukraine’s borders will be fixed for the remaining territories – in this form it will join NATO. This variant is similar to what happened after World War II with Germany divided into East and West.
NATO marked 75 years of collective defence in Europe and North America on Thursday, with its top diplomats vowing to stay the course on Ukraine.
The anniversary comes as the alliance, now made up of 32 nations, weighs a plan to provide more predictable long-term military support to Ukraine. Suffering from an ammunition shortage, Ukraine this week lowered the conscription age from 27 to 25 in a bid to replenish its thinning ranks.
Last autumn, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that Ukraine should be admitted to the alliance in the near future, but that the bloc’s mechanisms should be extended only to the territories under its control. In the same autumn, former NATO chief Admiral James Stavridis compared Ukraine to South Korea “in the middle of the last century” in an interview with Bloomberg, pointing out that both countries are united by the impossibility of “achieving total victory”. He urged Ukraine to “at least temporarily” recognise Russia’s control over Crimea and a number of other territories and to become a NATO member “even with 15 percent of the territories seized by Russia”.
