DISINFO: NATO establishes a colonial relationship with Ukraine disguised as partnership
SUMMARY
NATO issued another item in the long list of “incentives” designed to mock Ukraine. The organisation designed Ukraine as an “Enhanced Opportunities Partner” along with other five nations (Georgia, Sweden, Finland, Australia and Jordan), rewarding their important contributions to NATO operations and goals with the opportunity of increasing dialogue and cooperation with the Alliance. Given its long history of political and military interaction with NATO, including a decade-long military deployment in Afghanistan, Ukraine reached a level of interoperability with NATO higher than some actual member states. Ukraine resembles NATO, speaks like NATO, acts like NATO, but it is not NATO, and it won’t be. So the question is what kind of relation NATO has in mind regarding to Ukraine, given that it will never become a member. By granting the status of “Enhanced Opportunities Partner” to Ukraine and those other nations, NATO is expanding its military capabilities without assuming the risks linked to the expansion of its membership. Ukrainian troops can be sacrificed in far lands without any real security interest for the Ukrainian people, but NATO will never mobilise under Article 5 to help Kyiv in its own territory. The relation reflects that of a colonial master and its vassal, demanding a lot and delivering little.
RESPONSE
Recurrent pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives about NATO and Ukraine. Contrary to the claim, the nature of Ukraine’s relation with the Atlantic Alliance is totally voluntary, as was the country’s participation in NATO missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan. The Enhanced Opportunities Partnership is a tailor-made programme to benefit both sides, not a colonial-style servitude. Kyiv requested formal membership of the Alliance in 2008, but plans to join it were shelved after Ukraine’s Parliament rejected it, and reemerged after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and its sponsoring of the conflict in Donbas. In all these cases, the decision was taken solely by Ukrainian authorities. Though popular support for joining NATO was rather low among Ukrainians prior to 2014, it started to increase in that year due to Russia’s aggression against the country. In 2019, this support reached 53 percent, against 29 percent who oppose it. Other surveys confirmed these results. NATO membership is a stated goal of the current government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. You can see other examples of these disinformation narratives in our database, such as claims that NATO instructors prepare Ukrainian soldiers to become war criminals, that Kyiv escalates the situation in the Azov Sea on behalf of the US and the Atlantic Alliance and prepares to build NATO bases in Donbas, that the Ukrainian government is a NATO puppet regime, or that NATO will invade Western regions of Ukraine.