Ukraine’s dream of NATO membership is dead. It died, surprisingly, not on the battlefields of Ukraine nor at the negotiating table with Russia. It died in a document written in the White House to be sent to Congress to explain America’s national security vision.
The 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, dated November 2025, was released on December 4. Embedded unimposingly, without fanfare, in a section on The Regions called Promoting European Greatness, and not even in the section that discusses the war in Ukraine, the Security Strategy quietly states the priority policy of “Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” Those fourteen words seem to have pulled the plug on a dream that was already on life support.
That policy priority found expression in point 7 of Trump’s 28 point peace plan that states that “Ukraine agrees to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future.”
Since it was first promised at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO,” the dream has been an unrealistic one. It did not take into account the real wishes of Ukraine, NATO or Russia, and it did not take into account previous promises already made by NATO and Ukraine. At the time of the Bucharest summit, the U.S. may have wanted NATO membership for Ukraine, but only 20% of Ukrainians did.
In 1990 and 1991, at the end of the Cold War, NATO promised Gorbachev and the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand any further east. But it was not just NATO that promised to stay out of Ukraine, it was also Ukraine that promised to stay out of NATO. Article IX of the 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine, “External and Internal Security,” says that Ukraine “solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs…” That promise was later enshrined in Ukraine’s constitution, which committed Ukraine to neutrality and prohibited it from joining any military alliance: that included NATO. Moscow has recently reminded that Russia “recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine back in 1991, on the basis of the Declaration of Independence” and added that one of the main points for [Russia] in the declaration was that Ukraine would be a non-bloc, non-alliance country; it would not join any military alliances.”
Ukraine’s constitution was only amended to include a mandate for all future governments to seek NATO membership in 2019, five years after the U.S. supported coup. The amendment was made with neither vote nor referendum. At the time, public support in Ukraine for NATO membership hovered around a tepid 40%.
That that amendment could be reversed, and that Ukraine could be willing to do so, was signaled by Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, in the early days of the war. At the start of the war, Zelensky said he has “understood that NATO is not prepared to accept Ukraine.” In March 2022, he said “For years we have been hearing about how the door is supposedly open [to NATO membership] but now we hear that we cannot enter. And it is true, and it must be acknowledged.”
In April 2022, after the war had begun, polling indicates that only 24%-39% of Ukrainians wanted NATO membership. At that time, the tentative agreement arrived at in Istanbul included that “Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership…” The draft reportedly stipulated that “permanent neutrality” be enshrined in Ukraine’s constitution.
Ukraine was pushed off that path by the U.S. for their own policy reasons, including the “core principle” that Ukraine has the right to choose their alliances and that NATO has the right to expand.
On December 14, Zelensky seemed, again, to yield to the impossibility of Russia surrendering the demand that Ukraine never join NATO. He said that he is prepared to surrender Ukraine’s demand for NATO membership in exchange for NATO Article 5-like security guarantees. Zelensky called this “a compromise on our part.” But it is unlikely that Russia will agree to Article 5-like guarantees from NATO countries any more than it would agree to Article 5 guarantees.
The right that Ukraine has to choose its own alliances, which was never consistent with the NATO treaty’s statement that a state “may be invited to join by the unanimous agreement of all existing members,” has now been laid to rest by the new National Security Strategy. Neither Russia nor the United States will permit Ukraine to join NATO. So, it is time to stop Ukrainians from dying for that ghost. Neutrality is one concession that Ukraine should accept. It has accepted it before and has been willing to accept it since. And it no longer has the choice. To ask Ukrainians to go on fighting for something that the National Security Strategy of the United States of America suggests they can never have is unconscionable. For Ukraine’s European “partners” to insist upon it can serve no other purpose than to continue the war.
