Leaders of NATO’s all 31 member states will convene in the Lithuanian capital this week, on July 11-12th, to discuss an array of challenges the Atlantic alliance faces in this seminal moment in Europe’s history, including strengthening the bloc’s eastern flank and providing security guarantees to Ukraine.
Under normal circumstances, such a high-level gathering is organized only once a year, but this week’s will be the fourth NATO Summit since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
The seriousness of the international situation and the significance of the event is further evidenced by the unprecedented scale of the security detail provided to the over two thousand attendees, as 8000 police officers and 4000 soldiers are expected to be deployed, complemented by constant fighter jet patrols in the sky and three German Patriot air defense systems on the ground.
With only a day before the kickoff of the year’s most important international military event, here are some of the things to look forward to in Vilnius.
Ukraine’s membership timeline
Ukraine’s NATO membership prospects will be among the top priorities discussed at the summit, where of course, President Zelensky will also be present. As officials stated, however, these will only be “preparatory talks,” as NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has made it clear that Ukraine cannot join the alliance as long as the war goes on, even stating last month that NATO will not issue a formal invitation during the Summit either.
Nonetheless, President Zelensky ramped up his lobbying in European capitals ahead of the meeting to receive a more concrete timeline. On Thursday, Zelensky visited Prague, where he noted that Ukraine is expecting a clear signal at the Summit that it can join NATO as soon as the war ends.
While Germany and other Western member states are reluctant to promise too much to Ukraine for fear of escalation with Russia, most Eastern European allies are taking Kyiv’s side, pushing for membership as soon as possible, and want NATO to provide a clear accession roadmap to the country during the Summit.
The United Kingdom even went one step further, proposing to allow Kyiv to skip joining NATO’s ‘waiting room,’ the Membership Action Plan (MAP)—a program that provides and tracks certain economic, political, and military criteria for candidate countries, which was completed by every new member since the end of the Cold War.
Realistically, the Summit will probably end with a joint resolution that won’t go much further than what the Secretary-General already said during his April visit to Kyiv, that Ukraine’s “rightful place” is in NATO. There could be a couple of strongly worded promises on top, but mostly without substance as far as a concrete timeline would go.
Security guarantees?
Even if Ukraine gets invited into NATO the minute the war ends, everyone knows it’s unrealistic to expect it to join overnight. So, to bridge the gap, several member states proposed extending certain security guarantees for post-war Ukraine until it becomes a full member, to deter a second wave of Russian aggression.
But an agreement on a joint resolution is unlikely to happen, as not every country is comfortable with a deterrence policy that could easily drag the entire West into war if it goes bad. Instead, a few members could make bilateral pledges, but the alliance itself will likely stop at promising continued military support as long as it takes.
A few member states were also pushing for similar guarantees at the EU level during the recent EU Council Summit, but since there are also neutral members in the Union (Austria, Ireland, and Cyprus), the proposal was doomed from the start.
The Swedish question
Ukraine’s is not the only membership bid the Summit will have to deal with. Sweden’s accession has already been ratified by all but two countries (Turkey and Hungary), and Stockholm is hoping to use the Summit to finally get them to lift their vetoes.
Although Budapest has stated that it won’t hold a parliamentary vote on the ratification until the autumn legislative session starts, it also signaled recently that if Ankara were to give a green light, it would not delay Sweden’s accession either.
Turkey, however, remains a mystery ahead of the Summit, as President Erdoğan is reluctant to let go of his dissatisfaction with the Swedish government over allowing pro-Kurdish demonstrations and refusing to extradite Kurdish activists who are wanted for terrorism back home.
Let’s talk money
As we reported last month, NATO is apparently running out of bullets. As Stoltenberg noted during a conference in Germany, the donations to Ukraine are depleting Western ammunition and weapon stocks quicker than our defense industry could replenish them, which needs to be addressed collectively.
During the Vilnius Summit, therefore, Stoltenberg expects all NATO heads of state to agree on a new Defense Investment Pledge, which will officially set the minimum defense spending at 2% of their annual GDP.
To comply with the famous 2% defense spending rule—formally agreed on during the Wales Summit in 2014—has always been an explicit expectation of NATO member states but not a binding one, so very few have actually spent that much before the war in Ukraine.
Even now, only eight out of the 31 NATO members spend over 2% of their GDP on defense: the U.S., the UK, Greece, Poland, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Only the U.S. and Greece are above 3%, with Athens spending 3.59% (or $8 billion) last year, and Washington 3.57%, or $811 billion.
It’s unclear if the new pledge adopted in Vilnius will be any different from the 2014 one—whether it will be a binding commitment or just the same old promise without any mechanism to enforce it.
Wargaming in the East
For the first time since the Cold War ended, NATO members will discuss detailed military action plans on how to respond in the event of a future attack from Russia. Of course, the documents will remain classified even after approval, but the public will at least be assured that they exist.
Ever since the Soviet Union fell, NATO had no need to draw up concrete strategies for a direct war with anyone, as the smaller and mostly localized conflicts in the Middle East required only U.S. leadership, and everyone else just kind of tagged along. But Ukraine reminded everyone of the harsh reality: war in Europe is still possible and NATO needs to be ready as a whole.
The thousands of pages worth of strategic plans, if agreed on, will set the collective defense mechanisms of NATO on its eastern flank, down to the smallest details of troop deployment, military upgrades, and cross-border logistics. “Allies will know exactly what forces and capabilities are needed, including where, what, and how to deploy,” Secretary-General Stoltenberg promised back in May.
