the defense of Europe”, according to a researcher

NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a defensive alliance to which France belongs, is meeting on July 11 and 12 in Vilnius, Lithuania, to study Ukraine’s possible membership. According to Camille Grand, researcher at the European Council for International Relations and former Deputy Secretary General of NATO, guest of franceinfo on July 11, the war in Ukraine has refocused NATO on “its fundamentals“.

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franceinfo: Has the war in Ukraine had an impact on NATO?
Camille Grand : The Russian invasion of Ukraine put NATO back on its fundamentals, that is to say the collective defense of Europe, territorial defence, with a spectacular enlargement with the entry of Finland and Sweden. These two countries, even during the cold war did not wish to join NATO, and it is interesting to see how Vladimir Putin obtained the opposite effect of what he was looking for. He complained of having NATO too close to his borders and created a 1,400 km border with NATO by encouraging Finland to join the Atlantic Alliance and there is also the rapprochement with Ukraine .

Ukraine will not immediately be a member of NATO, but security guarantees are provided by the West. How is this going to happen?
It’s a package of decisions that seems to be taking shape and that includes three pillars. Long-term military assistance; a closer association with NATO which allows Ukrainians to participate in many debates within the Alliance; a clearer path to membership that can only happen once the conflict has stopped.

Currently, military support is mostly done outside of NATO. How do you explain that ?
The choice of the countries which support Ukraine was not to appeal to NATO so as not to give hold to the Russian narratives of a war between NATO and Ukraine. Therefore, NATO has remained on the sidelines of support mechanisms, in particular for everything related to weapons and equipment.

The United States wanted to deliver cluster bombs, banned in Europe. Why are they controversial?
They are indeed controversial weapons. There is an Oslo convention from 2008 which has been signed by many European countries, but not by all [pour les interdire]. They are extremely effective weapons on the battlefield, they are massively used by Russia. They are problematic because they tend to generate more land pollution, explosive remnants of war. We are in an area where thousands of shells are fired, anti-tank mines are laid by both parties. So the Ukrainians clamoring for these weapons pushed the Americans to bring them. Is it a necessary evil? I am not comfortable with the delivery of a weapon that has been deemed problematic from a humanitarian point of view by many countries.