Kiev Regime’s NATO Membership – Reality or Fantasy?

Monday, October 3, 2022

Drago Bosnic, independent geopolitical and military analyst

On September 30, the Kiev regime announced it had formally requested an “accelerated accession” procedure to join NATO. Volodymyr Zelensky stated this decision was made in response to the referenda held in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions. The Neo-Nazi junta is accusing Russia of allegedly staging the plebiscites held in all four areas, although it’s unclear why Moscow would ever need to do that, given that the Kiev regime has been very convincing in antagonizing the people there through constant shelling, diversions and death squads.

During a video address, Zelensky stated that he was “taking this decisive step in order to protect the entire community” of Ukrainians. He claimed the application would “happen in an expedited manner,” although he failed to explain how this would be accomplished. “We trust each other, we help each other and we protect each other. This is what the Alliance is. De facto. Today, Ukraine is applying to make it de jure,” Zelensky concluded.

The statement is quite indicative of the alliance’s involvement in the Ukrainian tragedy for the past eight years. It also proves that Russia was right for accusing NATO of galvanizing the crisis by giving full support to the Neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine, which then took power and turned the country into a radicalized Russophobic plutocracy. And Zelensky is right for claiming that the Kiev regime has been a de facto NATO member for nearly a decade now. The imperialist alliance has been providing the Neo-Nazi junta with billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, logistics and ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) capabilities to fight a war with Russia.

However, it is precisely the de jure part of the geopolitical equation that is the problem for the embattled Kiev regime. After decades of empty membership promises, the US-led political West simply used the country as a bargaining chip in its (initially) low-level rivalry with Moscow. Using Ukraine as geopolitical leverage has always been a way in which NATO tried to force Russia to make concessions. This was an attempt to give the political West a clear strategic advantage over Moscow in its own post-Soviet backyard. It was precisely this aggressive approach that resulted in Russia’s counteroffensive on February 24. Ukraine and its people were simply used as cannon fodder.

Unfortunately, despite Russia’s nearly decade-long attempts to resolve the crisis peacefully, the political West made sure this was all futile. According to its own admission, the Kiev regime never planned on honoring the Minsk agreements and only used them to buy time in order to rearm and retrain its forces, which suffered a string of humiliating defeats at the hands of the then newly formed DNR and LNR militias. It took over half a decade to reconstitute the regime’s military power. In February, these forces attempted to take the Donbass republics by force, despite years of Russia’s warnings this would not be tolerated. As promised, Moscow intervened, but apart from “strong statements of moral support”, NATO was nowhere to be found and the Kiev regime was left to fend for itself against a military superpower next door.

Still, the Kiev regime could count on weapons and ammunition. “All” it had to do was send hundreds of thousands of forcibly conscripted Ukrainians into almost certain death for the interests of “freedom and democracy” and the “Euro-Atlantic values”. And indeed, after losing tens of thousands of soldiers, the Neo-Nazi junta is still compliant in following the orders of the belligerent alliance. However, there’s no indication that the request for “accelerated accession” would actually accelerate the Kiev regime’s membership plans. The same day Zelensky announced the request, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg stated the imperialist alliance is “open to new members”, but failed to directly support the Kiev regime’s bid.

“Every democracy in Europe has the right to apply for NATO membership and NATO allies respect that right, and we have stated again and again that NATO’s door remains open,” Stoltenberg said during a conference in Brussels.

He added that NATO “supports Ukraine’s right to choose its own path, to decide what kind of security arrangements it wants to be part of.” Obviously, the statement is (geo)politically inconsequential and void of any substance, which is precisely what the Kiev regime feared. Stoltenberg further shot down the Neo-Nazi junta’s high hopes by reiterating that “a decision on membership, of course, has to be taken by all 30 allies and we take these decisions by consensus.” With months of NATO’s failures to incorporate Sweden and Finland, the Kiev regime’s ambitions are merely a footnote in Brussels.

NATO has simply become too cumbersome, as some of its oldest and most prominent members, such as Turkey, have an increasingly diverging view on strategic security. If the alliance cannot come to a consensus on further expansion into Scandinavia, where there are no pressing security concerns, what hope can the Kiev regime have, given that it’s been pushed into a direct confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia?

The political elites in the US and NATO are well aware that countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Czechia, Slovakia, Germany or France are unwilling to be destroyed in a thermonuclear armageddon for the sake of the Kiev regime. However, NATO wants to keep pushing Ukraine against Russia and as long as the people of Ukraine keep tolerating the Neo-Nazi junta in power, they will continue being (ab)used as cannon fodder.

Source: InfoBrics