NATO membership for Ukraine is the only way to stop the country from waging war against Russia in the future, former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba has said. In a lengthy interview with the Kiev Independent published on Tuesday, Kuleba warned not to “underestimate” Kiev’s potential for “revanchist policies.”
Kuleba stepped down as Kiev’s chief diplomat earlier this year during a large-scale purge of senior officials by Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, and took up a position at a Harvard-based international relations research center. Before his resignation, he repeatedly warned that NATO’s unwillingness to accept Ukraine into its ranks significantly hinders the possibility of quickly finding a peaceful resolution to the conflict with Russia.
Moscow opposes Ukraine’s membership in the US-led bloc, considering it a fundamental threat to Russia’s national security. Kiev’s official refusal to seek NATO membership and its neutrality are among Moscow’s key conditions for starting peace negotiations.
In his latest interview, Kuleba noted that while in the short-term the sides could reach a ceasefire without NATO membership for Ukraine, it “will not mean the end of the war and will not prevent the next war.” By the “next war” he meant two possibilities, the first of which is Russia attacking the US-led bloc, the prospect of which Moscow has repeatedly refuted as nonsense.
“If whatever we know of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is true, he will attack NATO only if he defeats Ukraine. If Ukraine comes out of this fight as a winning power and joins NATO, the combined military force of the alliance against Russia will be invincible,” he stated.
The second possibility he outlined is Ukraine attacking Russia out of “revenge” for the current conflict and to seize back the former Ukrainian territories of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, Zaporozhye and Crimea that joined Russia.
“Ukraine’s potential for revanchist policies towards Russia in the medium term should not be underestimated and written off,” Kuleba warned.
“The next generation of Ukrainian politicians will be focused entirely on the recovery of Ukraine after the war, but the generation after them will come to power on the slogans of revenge, on revanchist slogans towards Russia [such as] ‘retake territories!,’ ‘make Russia finally pay!,’” he added. Kuleba noted that such policies would come into focus “the moment” Ukraine “gets on its feet economically.”
“Ukrainian membership in NATO is the only way to prevent the next war… to hold [Ukraine] back from waging a war on Russia… to make it bound by legal obligations to not expose its allies to the risk of war with Russia,” he claimed.
Moscow maintains that any peace settlement with Kiev must begin with Ukraine ceasing military operations and acknowledging the “territorial reality” that it will never regain control of its former regions.