"If there's one thing that NATO has agreed on from the very beginning, it's that it wasn't going to get involved in any war with Russia. It would provide arms, it would provide training, it would provide ammunition, it would provide intelligence, but it would not get directly involved," the Council's Ivo Daalder says on Al Jazeera English.
"If you put a timeline in that says 'by that date' or 'when the war is over' or 'when hostilities are over,' you are giving the Russians new leverage to continue the war, to continue the fighting in order to deny Ukraine NATO's membership.
"What NATO needs to do and what Ukraine needs to do is to find a pathway that leads to Ukrainian membership in NATO. Which NATO reaffirmed not only today but also said that Ukraine's rightful place is in NATO. It's just not the rightful place today."
How should NATO then placate Ukraine send the right message to Russia?
"One of the messages it should send is that NATO is bringing in Sweden and has just brought in Finland as members of NATO. 831 miles of Russian borderland that used to be with a neutral country is now with a NATO country as a direct result of the actions that Russia has been taking.
"NATO is also sending the signal that it is beefing up its defenses in a very significant way. It has agreed at this summit three new regional defense plans, the first since the end of the Cold War that will lay out in excruciating detail how every inch of NATO territory is going to be defended and what every NATO country is expected to do in order to accomplish that defense and thereby deter an attack. It has agreed that the two percent, that the spending two percent of GDP on defense is no longer a ceiling, it is now to be a floor. Those are now a direct result of Russian actions. And that is how you tell Russians that what is happening is unacceptable.
"And of course finally, and this will be announced tomorrow: major, major commitments by the United States, by other NATO countries, to continue to provide Ukraine with the defense capabilities, with the ammunition, with the training, with the intelligence, not only to win the war and fight it for as long as is necessary, but also to deter any future attack.
"So NATO is doing an incredible amount of things that makes Russia deeply unhappy. They are all a direct result of Russian actions."
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