The Ukraine Compact, a security framework that was signed by 32 allied countries at the NATO summit in July 2024, is "a bit of window dressing" and falls short of a real membership plan, said former Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren at the Globsec conference in Prague on Aug. 31.
While it is a useful overarching framework, many countries had already signed bilateral security agreements, Ollongren said.
Ollongren's comments were echoed by Kurt Volker, the former U.S. ambassador to NATO, who said the "reason that Ukraine is happy with the compact, is because the U.S. has told Ukrainians, 'you better go out and say you're happy with the compact.'"
Volker added that the compact is "not legally binding and is not a treaty," and also has no "operational clause." He compared it to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which stipulated that Ukraine transfer its stockpile of nuclear weapons to Russia in exchange for security guarantees from the U.S., the U.K., and Russia.
"We know how that worked out," Volker quipped.
At the same time, Ukrainian lawmaker Olena Khomenko, who was also speaking on the same panel as Volker and Ollongren, said that "we (Ukrainians) are happy with the compact."
"But this doesn't mean that we need to postpone, to think about membership in NATO as a future perspective," she added.
Martin Fornusek
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