NATO did not give Volodymyr Zelensky everything he wanted

Ahead of thIS NATONATO, NATO week’s summit in Vilnius, Ukraine and its closest allies, including Lithuania, the host, and its neighbours in eastern Europe, had hoped the allies would offer Ukraine a clear and credible post-war pathway into . They were haunted by the ghosts of a previous summit in Bucharest in 2008, which had declared that Ukraine “will” join without saying how or when. That provoked Russia without securing Ukraine, consigning it instead into a dangerous grey zone. “We understand that we cannot be a member of during the war,” acknowledged Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, last month, “but we need to be sure that after the war we will be.”