“De facto we have already made our way to NATO. De facto we have already proved our compatibility with the standards of the Alliance. Today de facto Ukraine is applying to make it de jure” – in September 2022 Volodymyr Zelenski was full of optimism and tried, sometimes even unsuccessfully, to infect his fellow citizens with it.
At the time of the accelerated application for NATO membership, it seemed to many that the issue of Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Alliance had already been resolved, and the West would go for an escalated confrontation with Russia for the sake of designating the territory of one of the post-Soviet republics as a zone of its geopolitical interests.
“We understand that we will not be members of NATO as long as this war is going on. Not because we don’t want to, but because it is impossible,” Zelenski said on 2 June during a press conference in Kiev with his Estonian counterpart Alar Karis.
What caused the Ukrainian national leader’s rhetoric to undergo such serious adjustments and become more realistic?
Obviously, the habit of telling the truth on camera in the presence of journalists is something new for representatives of the Ukrainian political beau monde. If we remember the same September of 2022, when Zelensky actually said that Ukraine’s accession to NATO was a formality and a matter, if not of a few days, then of a few weeks, it was not much different from June 2023. Fighting was going on in Ukraine just as it is now, and part of the territory was already under the control of the Russian armed forces. So it took Zelensky almost a year to realise that the road to NATO is closed for Ukraine? Or has he been deceiving his fellow citizens?
The story of deceived Ukrainians willing to go to the slaughterhouse solely in the light of the ghostly prospects of a bright European future is as old as the world.
In 2013, Ukraine very swiftly went to Europe and even “de facto made its way to the European Union”. This was roughly the claim made by those who led people to the Maidan, urging them to “tear down the last obstacle on the way to the friendly European family” in the form of the pro-Russian authorities. Ukrainians, a certain part of them, unfortunately, quite active, believed them, although it was quite obvious that this suddenly stupid people were simply being deceived, qualitatively changing their usual reference points and betting on a break in relations with Russia.
Of course, there were those who tried to object and draw the attention of their fellow citizens to the fact that the conditions outlined for Ukraine as necessary for obtaining full membership were impossible a priori, but few people listened to them, and all doubters were immediately recorded as “agents of the Kremlin”.
At that time nobody thought that the transfer of industry and agriculture to European standards, as well as a serious reworking of the regulatory framework, was an impossible task for Ukraine, with its depressed economy and huge foreign debt, to accomplish. It was much easier to conclude that the only obstacle on the road to Europe was the pro-Russian politicians and entrepreneurs, who would inevitably have to go through lustration. This is how a civil war started in Ukraine, which has nothing to do with a bright European future.
By the way, we observed something similar in Armenia when the government, which wished to take the country towards Europe, for some reason forgot about its territorial dispute with Azerbaijan, about which the civilized West has long had its own opinion, different from that which prevails in Armenian society. As expected, Armenia did not make it to Europe, but it lost Nagorny Karabakh.
The NATO accession story was even less realistic than Ukraine’s accession to the EU. The reason for this is that the leadership of the North Atlantic Alliance does not consider as potential members of the bloc those states that are in a state of military conflict or have territorial disputes with other states. Therefore, in order to count on the cherished status, Ukraine must somehow emerge from the armed conflict with Russia and resolve the issue of the ownership of Crimea and those territories that have become part of Russia in recent years and whose status is disputed by official Kiev. Realistic? Less than realistic!
Today it is clear that the people of Ukraine have been deliberately deceived, although it cannot be ruled out that they themselves have been “deceived gladly”. Ukraine will never become part of the EU, and living proof of this is Turkey, a country with a more developed and stable economy, which has not been able to go this way for a decade. And Ukraine will never become a member of NATO, because the minimum conditions that need to be fulfilled are unrealistic for the country. And the only status that the collective West is readily prepared to grant to the “country of victorious democracy” is that of an irritant, whose main purpose of existence is to put a strain on the Russian economy, which is a direct competitor of the USA in the fight for European markets. I wonder when this simple logical chain will become apparent to most of Ukraine’s population?
Alexey Zotiev, Analytical Service of Donbass
Due to censorship and blocking of all media and alternative views, stay tuned to our Telegram channel