From my very limited understanding of recent news, Trump’s stance on the conflict is going to be decisive in how peace is going to be negotiated one he takes office. One of the probabilities is going to involve the outcome where Ukraine can’t join NATO, which would risk Russia trying to take more of Ukraine in the future.
So, this is where my totally-not-stupid-whatsoever question comes in. What if NATO were to occupy Ukraine similarly to how Russia is doing (that is, without Ukraine really doing anything to provoke it) but, unlike Russia, doesn’t do any actual war stuff. Just walk in, say “it’s ours now ;)”, and have Ukraine take it without there being a fight. Without there being any intention of actually changing anything. Just one day most of Ukraine’s taken by NATO, business going on as usual.
If American negotiations were to conclude that Russia can only keep what it captured and Ukraine cannot join NATO, then only all of Ukraine that didn’t get captured by Russia or NATO, say, 10km (just inventing numbers here) of land between the two’s occupied territory would be prevented from joining NATO. That way, future Russia would “only” be able to capture a remaining “10km” (which is not how area size works, but hope you get the point) at most. The majority of the country would effectively have the NATO protection it wants (or, if I’m mistaken, replace NATO with any other military alliance Ukraine would want to join).
Now, seeing as this clearly isn’t policy (it were, it could’ve been enacted during times where Ukraine was said to be gaining territory back rather than losing it again), I’m obviously missing something in this “analysis”. That’s where you come in, dear reader.
NATO isn’t an army, it’s a defense pact. Member countries can’t just launch an attack against a non-member country (especially to “protect” said non-member).
NATO is a defensive alliance made up of countries. It reacts to threats and protects themselves and their allies. It’s not an aggressive/attack first organization and even then calling it an organization is not really that accurate. It’s an agreement amongst countries. If a NATO aligned country were to invade Ukraine in an attempt to help them, it would be seen as instigating that attack and other NATO countries would have no obligation to join in. If Russia were to then attack that invading country, they would not have the protections of the other NATO countries. Fuck around find out basically.
So like in theory, you could have Canada, or another country, invade Ukraine to help them but Russia would scream endlessly about NATO and NATO would then be in hot water. They’d have to publicly disavvow the Canadian invasion and if Canada were attacked (even on home soil) due to the provocation, I don’t think any other country would be required to defend Canada.
This is the missing link in my idea. I suppose there to be a lot of reasons why Ukraine, if it wanted to enact this bottom of the barrel, shitpost-tier of international policy, couldn’t simply “stage” something that would force all of NATO to stand behind the invading country due to a technicality?
even then calling it an organization is not really that accurate
It is an organization, you can go work for the NATO directly. They are headquartered in Brussels.
That said, military intervention on behalf of NATO works as you described, but there would be an obligation to help Canada in your example if the war would spread to its home soil. That said, the help obligation is literally worded “as they deem necessary”, so they could pretend that no large-scale intervention is necessary.
It could be done, but it could even more easily be done to just say Ukrane is part of NATO, and NATO will intervene if necessary to prevent further territory loss. The result would be the same. Putin doesn’t care about the theatrics. He just wants the Ukrainian identity destroyed and the land to be considered Russian. It doesn’t matter to him how NATO is involved beyond how much of a threat they are.
At best you’d end up with the Cuban missile crisis in reverse.
or, if I’m mistaken, replace NATO with any other military alliance Ukraine would want to join
This is essentially what the Ukraine EU accession talks are about. The EU is the military alliance they want to join, and it is actually even more protective than the NATO.
So the question isn’t stupid, Ukraine actually wants this, the EU is of two minds about it so far.
