That is not her only grievance with the West. At a Nato summit in Bucharest in 2008, during her second term as prime minister, the alliance failed to provide Ukraine with an action plan for membership, stating only that Kyiv would be able join at an undefined date in the future. The decision is now widely seen as having encouraged Russia’s belief that western countries were not prepared to risk a conflict with Moscow to defend Kyiv.
The United States had wanted to admit both Ukraine and Georgia, another former Soviet state, to Nato’s membership action plan but France and Germany objected, fearing that it would anger the Kremlin. There was also opposition inside Ukraine, where an opinion poll just before the Bucharest summit showed that one in two voters opposed Nato membership, while just one in four were in favour. The rest were undecided.
. . . “For today’s war — for the lives lost and broken, for the destruction of Ukrainian cities and villages, for the suffering of millions — responsibility also lies with those [western] leaders who voted against granting Ukraine a Membership Action Plan,” she said.
Nato has still not offered Ukraine a path to membership and President Trump said this year that he sympathised with Russia’s claim that the alliance’s eastwards expansion was a threat to its national security. Ukraine joining Nato, he said in February, “is not going to happen”.
There was also opposition inside Ukraine, where an opinion poll just before the Bucharest summit showed that one in two voters opposed Nato membership, while just one in four were in favour. The rest were undecided.
Wouldn’t that alone have prevented Ukraine from joining? It wouldn’t have mattered if there was clear acceptance by every NATO nation, if the majority of Ukrainians themselves were not in favor.
If “an opinion poll” was the actual vote, yes.
Polls are evil and wrong. But then so is pretty much everything about creating, measuring, and maintaining public opinion.
The westerners, who include a senior official at the UK’s National Audit Office, are able to vote together to veto potential appointees and their votes carry more weight than the Ukrainian experts in the event of a tie. As a rule, there are six members in the commissions — three foreigners and three Ukrainians. Such international oversight, Tymoshenko said, may have been appropriate in countries such as Afghanistan, Liberia and Sierra Leone, but not in Ukraine.
“Ukraine is not a failed state, as the Kremlin tries to portray it. We are a sovereign European nation, heroically resisting full-scale aggression and defending the values of Europe with weapons in hand,” she said. “We are not Afghanistan.”
During a fiery speech in parliament last month, Tymoshenko described President Zelensky’s clampdown on the western-backed Nabu and Sapo anti-corruption agencies as a “bright day” for Ukraine.
But while Zelensky justified the move as necessary to combat alleged Russian infiltration, Tymoshenko hailed it as a long overdue step towards curbing western control over vital state institutions that she said was rapidly turning Ukraine into a “disenfranchised colony”. She and other Batkivshchyna MPs abstained during last week’s vote to restore independence to the agencies following rare nationwide protests.
