Numb, Nebulous, NATO: Why Vilnius Summit Was A Disastrous Failure

For many, the essence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit held this week in Vilnius, Lithuania, was best captured by a picture of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky standing alone, and looking slightly lost, amidst a crowd of world leaders.

The fact that he was incongruously dressed in olive green combat fatigues, while the other heads of governments wore normal business suits, only added to the moment.

The press lapped it up, and used the image as a measure of just how distanced NATO had become from Zelensky, especially in recent months, after their proxy war against Russia went badly off course.

First, the Russians won the Battle of Bakhmut in May 2023, after a bitter, ten-month-long struggle, in which the Ukrainians suffered horrific losses to men and equipment.

Second, Ukraine’s much-vaunted counteroffensive, launched in June, has floundered and degenerated into messy positional warfare.

Instead of a dramatic breakthrough of Russian defences, and a victorious drive south towards Crimea, a la General Sagat Singh and his leap across the Meghna in 1971, the Ukrainians have been stopped in their tracks by the Russians.

A lengthy, robust, multi-layered line of defence has not been breached, and the Russians have turned the Ukrainians’ piecemeal assaults into kill-zones. Kiev’s losses are horrific again.

So, instead of good news, what the NATO leaders got at Vilnius was a surly proxy with a list of grouses as long as Chaminda Vaas’s full name.

While Zelensky was careful and obedient enough to not gripe too much in public, about critical shortages in vital equipment which he is facing (essentially, he needs a new army and an air force), he did express disgruntlement on the fundamental reason for Russia’s invasion last year – Ukraine’s membership of NATO.

For decades now, Moscow had steadfastly maintained that Western efforts to include Ukraine into NATO would be a red line; not least because the Cold War was ended on a categorical promise by America, that NATO would not expand ‘one inch’ eastwards.

That promise died a long time ago. Its place was taken by repeated, persistent efforts for a regime change in Kiev, with the latest edition being the Zelensky government.

But now that the proxy war NATO wanted is finally on, and not going their way, what else could NATO do but dissemble? No wonder the atmosphere at the summit was glacial. No wonder Zelensky looked lost in a crowd of leaders. They still need him, but don’t really want to have anything to do with him.

Thus, on the matter of ammunition, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg bluntly admitted that meeting Ukraine’s requirements were a challenge.

On Ukraine’s NATO membership, a ridiculously-legalistic clause was invoked to kick the can down the road: the membership would have to wait till the war ended because, Article 5 of NATO’s constitution says that an attack on one member is an attack on all. 

So, when and how was the war to end? No one at the summit had a clue. That really got Zelensky’s goat, because if he wasn’t going to get the ammunition and equipment, which he needed to conduct the war, he sure as anything wasn’t going to win it. If he wasn’t going to win, then where was the peace to end this madness? And what about NATO’s guarantees of Ukraine’s security if ever a peace came to pass?

The man from Kiev sullenly put it in a nutshell at his press conference in Vilnius: there were no guarantees!

Obviously not, because NATO is not in a position to provide security guarantees to a nation which lies within Russia’s sphere of influence.

Indeed, the very basis of the ongoing conflict is Russia’s refusal to allow Ukraine to be weaned away by NATO, and the war is a demonstration of the extent to which Russia will go to preserve its security.

As a result, boiled down, Zelensky returns to Kiev with no ammunition, no guarantees, no membership of NATO, no way of winning, and no plans for peace. Any objective analyst would term the NATO summit a disastrous failure, since the only real surety Ukraine can take away from Vilnius, is more death, defeat, misery and destruction until someone somewhere, somehow, brings an end to this war.

How did it come to this? How could ostensibly enlightened leaders of democracies gather to stage such a fruitless exercise in pointless absurdity, with no regard for those young Ukrainians who are being killed in battle every day?

The answer can be found in a jocular exchange between British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Australian counterpart, Anthony Albanese, on the summit’s side lines.

In jarring contrast to the grave reasons for their convening in Vilnius, both men sought, instead, to banter lightly about the Ashes test series currently underway in England. Albanese proudly held up a placard showing the series score: Australia lead 2-1.

Sunak countered that with a photograph of English cricketers celebrating after their fantastic victory in the third test match, at Edgbaston.

The callousness with which two heads of government could chuckle about cricket, at a summit conference seeking to prevent a world war, says more about the unfeeling manner in which NATO treats their proxy regime, and their proxy war in Ukraine. What is death compared to an Ashes series? Evidently, very little.

Perhaps, it is this macabre trivialisation of a gruesome war which will hasten NATO’s decline into irrelevance.

And the sooner the people of Ukraine realise that, the better, because they’ve been used in the worst possible ways, and thrown into a pit of despair for the most egregious of reasons, for simply too long. Use-and-throw cannot be valid foreign policy, and if it is, then it is immoral.