Former Zelenskyy Press Secretary Explains How Keeping NATO Membership On The Table For Ukraine Will Prolong The War.

Iuliia Mendel Explained How Keeping NATO Membership For Ukraine On The Table Will Prolong The War.

Iuliia Mendel, the former press secretary for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky from 2019-2021 recently explained how continuing to promise NATO membership for Ukraine will prolong the proxy war in Ukraine.

As she put it:

Ukrainians are being asked to die today for the mere idea that they might — just might — be protected in 20 or 30 years.

That is the honest translation of what “standing for Ukraine’s NATO membership” actually means.
Let me explain.

For Russia, preventing Ukraine’s NATO membership is the most fundamental red line — the one true “principle” they are willing to fight and die for. The harder Ukraine pushes toward NATO, the longer and bloodier Russia’s aggression will continue. Even if a peace deal is signed tomorrow, the mere prospect of future NATO membership will remain Moscow’s justification for breaking the peace and attacking again. In other words, NATO membership as a goal directly fuels the war today and guarantees instability tomorrow.

She went to say:

Uncompromising stance on “NATO membership” means we are knowingly sacrificing tens or hundreds of thousands of lives right now for a theoretical promise of security sometime in the distant future… a promise that may never actually be kept, because the political will in key NATO capitals simply isn’t there and may never be.

Try explaining that to a father who has just buried his wife and children.

Try explaining it to the millions who have lost loved ones, homes, limbs, sanity — everything — in this meat grinder.

Tell them their sacrifice is necessary so that, perhaps in 2045 or 2055, their grandchildren might live under Article 5.

She noted, “We can love our country and honor our fallen without pretending that an unattainable geopolitical symbol is worth endless slaughter. Peace with security, even if imperfect, is not betrayal. Continuing a war for a mirage while calling any compromise ‘treason’— that is what risks betraying the very people who have already given everything.”

Previously, Mendel pointed out that, “Every subsequent deal for Ukraine will only be worse — because we are losing. We are losing people, territory, and the economy” adding, “War is not a Hollywood movie. I will never abandon the values that God and democracy both place at the very foundation of human existence: human life is the highest good, and people — living, breathing people — are the ones who must be saved.”

She added, “I would not write this if I were not sure that really a lot of Ukrainians share this. A lot of people wrote me ‘thank you’ and not to back away.”

Indeed, in 2008, when NATO first announced that Ukraine and Georgia would be invited to become NATO members, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, William Burns, warned :

Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests

Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face

Former Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, wrote in his recent memoir that some NATO member states thought, “granting Ukraine membership would provoke Moscow, leading to an increased risk of crisis and conflict in Europe”.

David Arakhamia, the lead Ukrainian negotiator at the Istanbul peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in April of 2022, revealed that Russia was willing to end the war if Ukraine gave up NATO membership, but the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson blocked the deal in order to continue the war, saying “Russia’s goal was to put pressure on us so that we would take (NATO) neutrality. This was the main thing for them: they were ready to end the war if we accepted neutrality, as Finland once did. And we will give a commitment that we will not join NATO. This is the main thing:” adding, “Boris Johnson then came to Kyiv and said that he did not want to sign anything with the Russians and ‘let’s just fight’”.

Similarly, NATO could have prevented the war in the first place by taking NATO membership for Ukraine off the table, something they refused to do.

Jens Stoltenberg in his aforementioned memoir, admitted that the “(Russian) demand that NATO’s doors be closed to new member nations broke with the principle that every country shall be able to choose its own security arrangements”, adding that the “demand was therefore impossible to agree to”.

He admitted in the book that the war in Ukraine started because, “Vladimir Putin wanted less NATO close to Russia’s borders,” and admitted that, “In Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, the Russians had begun military operations in order to ward off NATO membership.”

As Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson pointed out in their book “The Myth of American Idealism”, “The United States ... declined to push for a settlement. It refused to consider revoking the commitment to admit Ukraine into NATO. In fact, in December 2021, NATO reaffirmed that it was ultimately planning to integrate. Even as the U.S. warned of an impending invasion, it made no diplomatic efforts to influence Russia’s behavior,” noting that “there are parallels here with the U.S. attitude toward the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s”, a reference to the “Afghan Trap,” the U.S. policy of arming the Mujahadeen in 1979 in order to “induce a Soviet military intervention” in Afghanistan and give the “USSR its Vietnam war”.

As the Ukrainian outlet Strauna noted, “Biden and his key advisers, Nuland and Blinken, apparently imagined themselves to be great ‘geopolitical combinators’ and decided to play a ‘cunning game’, actually pushing Putin to invade, hoping that it would lead to his collapse. Therefore, on the one hand, they did not make any compromises with the Russian Federation regarding the neutral status of Ukraine. And on the other hand, almost daily they repeated like a mantra that ‘the United States will not enter the war.’”

Similar to Afghanistan, this was done to draw Russia into the “Ukraine trap” in order to use the war to weaken Russia, as the former U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin put it.

This is underscored by the influential economist and Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, who said before the war he had, “an hour-long call with [National Security Advisor] Jake Sullivan in the White House, begging, ‘Jake, avoid the war. You can avoid the war. All the US has to do is say, NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine,’” adding, “And he said to me, ‘Oh, NATO’s not going to enlarge to Ukraine. Don’t worry about it.’ I said, ‘Jake, say it publicly.’ (he said) ‘No. No. No. We can’t say it publicly’”.

Similarly, despite knowing-as Iuliia Mendel explained- continuing to promise NATO membership for Ukraine will cross “the most fundamental red line” of Russia and “fuel the war today and guarantees instability tomorrow”, NATO, Germany, the UK, France, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio continue to push for NATO membership in Ukraine to prolong the war even further.

As Politico reported, “Russia has no veto over Kyiv’s bid to join NATO, alliance chief Mark Rutte said on Wednesday — rebuffing a peace deal proposal floated by Moscow and Washington that would block Ukraine from the alliance.”

Furthermore, as Responsible Statecraft’s Eldar Mamedov noted, the original American draft proposal for a peace deal in Ukraine stated that “Ukraine agrees to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO,” but the European initial counter-proposal, written by the UK, France and Germany, “excised these clauses entirely. It removed the principle of no further NATO expansion and, regarding Ukraine, merely noted that a consensus for membership does not currently exist, while deliberately leaving the door open for a theoretical future accession.”

He noted, “For Moscow, which launched a war largely to prevent this exact scenario, agreeing to a ceasefire that leaves that door ajar is an unequivocal surrender of its stated war aims. By insisting on keeping the 2008 Bucharest Summit promise to keep the door open to NATO membership for Ukraine alive, Europe is ensuring the Kremlin will dismiss the entire proposal outright.”

Finally, the current neo-con U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly “appeared to have wrestled back control of the negotiations” when he went to “Geneva to meet with Ukrainian and European officials” where he “excised — for now — sections that would forever bar Ukraine from joining NATO and that banned NATO member states from forming a security force inside Ukraine”.

Just like before the war began, and just like at the Istanbul peace talks in April of 2022, the “collective West” is refusing to take NATO membership for Ukraine off the table, despite having no intentions of actually making Ukraine a NATO member, in order to prolong the war to “weaken Russia”.

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