Ukraine in NATO?

NATO currently consists of 30 members. This includes three members of the former Soviet Union (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) and all former members of the Warsaw Pact except Russia (Poland, East Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania). Ukraine borders Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania.

Noticed in the news today that President Zelensky of Ukraine has urged NATO to speed up his country’s membership into the alliance: see: https://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-urges-nato-speed-membership-110245606.html

This has been a long drawn out process. Ukraine joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace program in February 1994. In 2002 the President of Ukraine Kuchma declared that Ukraine wanted to join NATO and in 2003 sent Ukrainian troop to Iraq. They were also part of the peacekeeping effort in Kosovo. Ukraine applied for the NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) in 2008. Viktor Yanukovich was elected president in 2010 (which was a free and fair election) and shelved plans to join NATO shortly thereafter. He nuzzled up to Russia, cancelling the attempts to get Ukraine to the join the European Union and instead decided to join Russia’s Eurasian Union. There were then massive protest against him that cost lives of over a hundred protestors and Yanukovich fled the county in February 1914. There was then multiple secessionist movements in Ukraine (Donets and Lugansk) and a Russian engineered seizure of Crimea and Sevastopol, which Russia has now annexed. So…..

See: Ukraine-NATO Relations

Needless to say, Russia does oppose this.

 

P.S. The previous President of The Dupuy Institute, Major General Nicholas Krawciw (U.S. Army, ret.), also worked as the Secretary of Defense Senior Military Representative to Ukraine. MG Krawciw was born in Lvov in 1935. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_S._H._Krawciw

 

 

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.

Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.

His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) and The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019)

Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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