Majority Of Ukrainians Not Embracing NATO Membership For Kiev

Russia is demanding ironclad guarantees that Ukraine (and other ex-USSR states) will not join NATO and that NATO would not use the territory of these states for military expansion.

Photo Insert: US President Joe Biden in a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg

The typical answer from Western officials and observers so far has been that it is for NATO and Ukraine to decide, not for Russia. Not so many are interested in what Ukrainians think about all this.

Do Ukrainians actually want to join NATO? Volodymyr Ishchenko, a research associate at the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, stressed in an analysis for Truthout.

Ukraine’s neutral status, which excludes it from entering any military blocs, was inscribed into the foundational documents of the modern Ukrainian state: the Declaration of Sovereignty (adopted July 16, 1990) and the Constitution of Ukraine (June 28, 1996). In December 2007, on the eve of the infamous Bucharest summit that settled that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO,” less than 20 percent of Ukrainian citizens supported joining NATO.

The majority of Ukrainians were split between support for a military alliance with Russia or retaining the non-bloc neutral status. Ukrainians are far from unified in support of NATO membership. NATO membership remained a cause of only a small minority within Ukrainian society until the tumultuous events of 2014.

As a result of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas, support for NATO membership jumped up to about 40 percent. However, it was still not embraced by a majority of Ukrainians.

Two things contributed to this shift in public opinion. Some previously skeptical Ukrainians started to see NATO membership as a protection against further hostile actions from Russia.

But no less important reason for the hike in support was that the surveys no longer included the most pro-Russian Ukrainian citizens from the territories not under Ukrainian government control — Crimea and Donbas. Millions of Ukrainian citizens have been effectively excluded from the Ukrainian public sphere.

In the rest of Ukraine, support for a military alliance with Russia sharply dropped since 2014. However, most of the former supporters of Russia did not turn into supporters of NATO but switched to support for a neutral status, “plague on both of your houses” position.

If you think about the seven years of military conflict, which is predominantly (mis)represented as the war with Russia, the reluctance to embrace NATO by a very large part of Ukrainians is amazing.

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