Ukraine Should Follow Finland’s Path to NATO
Kyiv needs a clear membership track, but Washington and Berlin are blocking it.
In January 1940, thousands of Soviet soldiers died in the Battle of Raate Road in eastern Finland, a decisive clash during the Soviet-Finnish Winter War. Most of them came from Soviet Ukraine, which, along with Belarus, lost the highest share of its population among all Soviet regions during World War II, according to Yale University historian Timothy Snyder. Unequipped for the harsh winter conditions, the Soviet Ukrainians were smashed by the less numerous but highly motivated Finns defending their own soil and independence.
In January 1940, thousands of Soviet soldiers died in the Battle of Raate Road in eastern Finland, a decisive clash during the Soviet-Finnish Winter War. Most of them came from Soviet Ukraine, which, along with Belarus, lost the highest share of its population among all Soviet regions during World War II, according to Yale University historian Timothy Snyder. Unequipped for the harsh winter conditions, the Soviet Ukrainians were smashed by the less numerous but highly motivated Finns defending their own soil and independence.
Today, Raate Road leads toward the eastern border of the European Union and NATO, the two most important Western organizations Finland has joined in order to secure its freedom and democracy. Finland’s neutrality policy during the Cold War used to be seen by some Western commentators, including former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, as a possible model for Ukraine. However, it is today’s Finland—not that of the Cold War era—that provides the best possible model for Kyiv. Ukraine should be offered fast-track accession to NATO as soon as the war is over and full European Union membership as soon as it meets the conditions. Since fulfilling the EU’s extensive accession criteria requires countless legal and administrative changes and will unavoidably take years, it is all the more important for securing Ukraine’s European future to move swiftly and decisively on the NATO track.
Finland’s Cold War neutrality policy was a survival strategy to push back Soviet expansionism. After all, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had foreseen a similar fate for Finland as for the Baltic states—which were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940—or for Hungary and other Central and Eastern European countries that became Soviet-occupied satellite states after World War II. Constrained in its foreign-policy choices by the neighboring Soviet empire, Finland developed a virtue out of necessity, positioning itself as a neutral, democratic, Nordic country.
As soon as the constraints disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Finland applied for membership in the EU, which it gained in 1995. But with the Winter War a distant memory, military neutrality remained the popular consensus. It took the shock of Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, to turn Finnish public opinion in favor of NATO membership almost overnight, which led to the fastest-ever accession process in the alliance’s history. The country officially became the bloc’s 31st member on April 4. After Finland tried for decades to build a relationship with its former invader based on cooperation and trust, the war in Ukraine brought back historical memories of the Winter War and convinced Finns of the need for the strongest possible security guarantees, which could only be offered by NATO.
The sequence of joining the two organizations should be different for Ukraine, but the logic is the same. Just like Finland, Ukraine will need the strongest possible security guarantees and a firm anchor to the European political and economic order in order to be able to develop as a free and democratic country.
Apart from the ongoing war, there is one big obstacle in the way of Ukraine’s accession to NATO: the lack of agreement among member states. There is consensus only on the position that Ukraine cannot join as long as the fighting continues, since NATO does not wish to become a party in the war. The United States and Germany, the two main proponents of the “salami tactics” that have prolonged the war and increased the Ukrainian death toll by delivering only one small slice of military support at a time, are taking an overly cautious approach on Ukrainian NATO membership, too. Both governments have said they do not wish to commit to a clear timetable on Ukraine’s NATO accession at this stage.
Poland and the Baltic states, by contrast, are keen to offer Ukraine a clear path to membership and immediate closer relations with the alliance at the next NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July. In spite of numerous acknowledgements from Western leaders that they should have listened to Poland and the Baltic states earlier regarding the Russian threat, their views are once again being pushed aside as NATO debates Europe’s future security architecture and Ukraine’s place in it.
Supported by Hungary and a few others, the United States and Germany seem to fear that Russia would become more aggressive if Ukraine received a clear road map to NATO membership—as if Russia were not already doing as much as it can to destroy Ukraine and destabilize its supporters. These Western governments are holding on to the flawed logic that led to war in the first place: that security in Europe can be improved only if Russia is not provoked and its alleged security concerns are respected. Yet it was precisely this Western wish not to provoke Russia that made the Kremlin believe it could reimpose its sphere of influence by force on neighboring countries without any serious opposition from the West. It was NATO’s 2008 summit in Bucharest, Romania—where the alliance announced that Georgia and Ukraine could become members one day but refused to grant them a membership action plan—that paved the way to Russia’s invasion of Georgia a few months later and of Ukraine in 2014.
We should not forget that the 2022 invasion was preceded by Russian proposals to remake the European security order in Moscow’s image. In two documents presented in December 2021, the Kremlin was more explicit than ever about its aims to restore the Soviet sphere of influence and reduce NATO’s presence in Europe to pre-1997 levels. The new order was to be agreed on by the big powers over the heads of smaller ones. These documents were a more concrete expression of ideas laid out 12 years earlier by then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in his proposal for a new European security architecture, which was rather ambiguous but already hinted at veto power over NATO decisions. The Western response to Medvedev’s proposals was also ambiguous, but in January 2022, the United States and NATO made clear that it was inconceivable to even enter negotiations on the basis of Russia’s core demands, although Washington was open to talks on arms control, nuclear treaties, and transparency measures.
Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin has not given up on Moscow’s goals of regaining control over its neighbors, although Finland’s NATO accession is a major setback he has had to swallow. He still seems to believe that Russia will eventually outlast Western support to Ukraine and be victorious in the post-Soviet space.
Apart from the wish not to provoke Russia, at least three other arguments have been made in Western countries against Ukraine’s NATO accession. All of them had some relevance before February 2022, but they have been brushed aside by the war.
First, there used to be doubts about Ukraine’s readiness and ability to defend itself—and hence about NATO’s ability to defend Ukraine. Any such doubts should have vanished by now, as Ukraine has shown impressive resolve and capability to push back Russian aggression. The Ukrainian military has become the most combat-experienced army in Europe. Also, it has embarked on the path of becoming NATO-compatible through Western arms deliveries and deepening defense cooperation with NATO allies. (Developing compatibility with NATO requirements was a priority for the Finnish military ever since the end of the Cold War and became one of the preconditions for a smooth accession process.) This work has to be continued—for example, by providing Ukraine with Western fighter jets, a self-imposed red line yet to be crossed by Western countries that have already crossed many other ostensible red lines in their arms deliveries. Importantly, Ukraine would continue to carry the main responsibility for its own defense even after NATO accession; in fact, it would strengthen the bloc’s overall defense and deterrence.
Second, a majority of Ukrainians did not support NATO membership until 2014, when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea and started the war in eastern Ukraine. It was Moscow that ensured a considerable increase of NATO’s popularity in Ukraine. In 2018, to consolidate the country’s Euro-Atlantic course, the Ukrainian parliament introduced amendments to the constitution that defined EU and NATO membership as national goals. A further, radical change of public opinion was caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion: According to a poll conducted in January by the Kyiv-based Rating Group, 86 percent of Ukrainians would vote for NATO membership in a referendum, while support for EU membership stood at 87 percent. The sudden increase mirrors a similar jump in NATO support last year in Finland. At the same time, Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia drastically worsened, including in the traditionally Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine.
Third, there is the more elusive question of identity and perceptions rooted in history. Western elites and publics know little about Ukraine, but they tend to assume that the country is very similar and close to Russia. The more pluralistic, individualist, and freedom-loving identity of Ukrainians that has evolved over past centuries, much of it in a tense relationship with a centralized, top-down Russian or Soviet state, is something that Western history schoolbooks tell nothing about. The Holodomor—the famine deliberately caused by the Soviet leadership in Ukraine and Kazakhstan in 1932-33—as well as extensive Russification measures and mass deportations of Ukrainians, Balts, Tatars, and other minority nations of the Soviet Union to Siberia and Central Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, were all part of the Kremlin’s agenda to submerge national cultures and ethnicities under its firm control, including by means of genocide. Balts, Poles, and Finns share with the Ukrainians the historical experience of fighting against the Russian oppression—an important building block of a common identity.
In the 1990s, the old Hanseatic cities of Riga in Latvia and Tallinn in Estonia opened up to Western visitors, many of whom were astonished to see with their own eyes that these countries did indeed have a European history before they disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. The same goes for western Ukrainian cities such as Lviv, which has more in common with Prague than Moscow. A visitor of Kyiv, on the other hand, can witness Ukraine’s historical ties to Russia, which has made it somewhat harder for Ukraine to gain support for its European aspirations. Yet today, Ukraine is proving through its resilience, strong civil society, democratic leadership, and decentralized administration that it is truly different from Russia. The Balts and Poles have no doubt that Ukrainians are indeed dying for European values and European security—and therefore deserve to be seen as “one of us.” In Western Europe, this understanding has yet to sink in.
The war in Ukraine, Finnish NATO membership, and Ukraine’s aspiration to join the alliance all highlight that gray zones, or buffer zones, have failed to create stability in Europe. On the contrary, it is precisely those neighbors of Russia that were not firmly anchored to the West that have come under growing pressure from the Kremlin in recent years.
In the near future, the West’s focus in Ukraine needs to stay on further arms deliveries to make sure that Ukraine can succeed with its planned counteroffensives and liberate at least some of the occupied territories in the coming months. Yet it is also necessary to start building a sustainable peace. Following the example of Finland, Ukraine’s full integration to the Euro-Atlantic structures is necessary to make sure that the tragedies of Raate Road in 1940 or Bucha in 2022 will never be repeated—not in Finland, not in Ukraine, and not in any other neighbor of Russia.
Kristi Raik is the deputy director of the International Centre for Defence and Security in Tallinn, Estonia. Twitter: @KristiRaik
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