The Homa Files

If he takes all of Ukraine, he’ll share a border with Poland and Romania … both NATO members!
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Last night, many pundits were saying that Biden (and Ukraine … and NATO) should just concede that that Ukraine will never be granted NATO membership.

Their logic: Putin has intimated that the potential of Ukraine joining NATO is his red lines.

Since there are no known intentions of Ukraine applying for NATO membership … nor of NATO granting membership if Ukraine does apply …  then it’s a moot issue … so why not concede the point and watch the Russian tanks roll back to Mother Russia?

Unfortunately, there are a couple of holes in that argument.

First, if shared borders with a NATO member is really Putin’s flashpoint issue, then taking all of Ukraine doesn’t solve his problem … if he succeeds, Russia will be sharing borders with Poland and Romania.

Both are NATO members!

Second, Putin has also been demanding that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, former USSR republics, currently in NATO, get booted out of NATO.

The consensus of pundits seems to be that’s a non-starter.

What a mess…

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For the record:

At present, NATO has 30 members. In 1949, there were 12 founding members of the Alliance: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States. The other member countries are: Greece and Turkey (1952), Germany (1955), Spain (1982), the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (1999), Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia (2004), Albania and Croatia (2009), Montenegro (2017) and North Macedonia (2020). Source

In its final years, the USSR consisted of 15 “republics”: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belorussia (now Belarus), Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kirgiziya (now Kyrgyzstan), Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia (now Moldova), Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

In 2004, three former Soviet republics — the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were admitted to NATO. Source

Also in 2004, three former Warsaw Pact countries — Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia — joined NATO. They were not part of the USSR, but were politically aligned with it, Source

Poland — a NATO member since 1999 — was an “Eastern Bloc satellite state in the Soviet sphere of interest”, but it was never a part of the Soviet Union.

This entry was posted on February 25, 2022 at 8:52 am and is filed under NATO, Russians - Putin, Ukraine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.