2023 NATO Summit and matters arising

By Nana Sifa Tsum, Media and Communications Consultant

This week, Heads of member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), met in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, for its 2023 summit. The summit was held in the context of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s war in Ukraine topped the agenda when U.S. President Joe Biden and his NATO counterparts held the summit in Lithuania’s capital over two days. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has left tens of thousands of people dead, displaced millions, and created economic turmoil across the world. NATO is an organisation of countries that have agreed to provide military support to each other. It includes many European countries, as well as the U.S. and Canada. At the Vilnius Summit, NATO Leaders addressed a wide variety of issues facing the Alliance and ensured that NATO remained ready to respond to any challenge.

NATO summits are not regular meetings like the more frequent NATO ministerial meetings but rather important junctures in the alliance’s decision-making process at the highest level. Summits are often used to introduce new policies, invite new members into the alliance, launch major new initiatives, and build partnerships with non-NATO countries.

Since the founding of NATO in 1949, there have been a total of thirty-one NATO summits, the last being the Brussels summit held in June 2021. Only the traditional summits have received an official number, thereby excluding the exceptional summits of 2001 at NATO Headquarters and of March 2022 in Brussels.

Ukraine has expressed its desire to be formally invited to NATO at the Vilnius summit.

In his January 2023 address to the Lithuanian Parliament, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, described the summit as fateful. By July 8, 2023, there were 24-member states that had declared their support for Ukraine’s NATO membership. 

Before the summit, the former President of Lithuania, Dalia Grybauskaite, had criticised the Western leaders who failed to prevent Russian aggression and said that the refusal to invite Ukraine to NATO would also be a mistake. The group of nations faced perhaps the most complex and unpredictable security environment since the Cold War. The war has caused death on a level not seen in Europe, since World War Two.

From February 2022, when the war started, to May, 2023, this year alone, about 8,895 civilians have been recorded killed/dead and 15,117 injured, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who also said that it believes the actual figures were considerably higher. The meeting in Vilnius will therefore be an opportunity for Allied Heads of State and Governments to agree further on steps to strengthen deterrence and defence and review significant increases in defence spending, and continue support for Ukraine. In an era of increasing strategic competition, the Trans-Atlantic bond between Europe and North America in NATO continues to be essential to the security of its one billion citizens. Security analysts are of the opinion that Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine poses the gravest threat to Euro-Atlantic security in decades, shattering peace in Europe and reinforcing the need for NATO to ensure that its deterrence and defence posture remain credible and effective. In response, NATO has activated its defence plans, deployed elements of the NATO Response Force, and significantly increased the number of forces on its eastern flank. For instance, NATO Leaders have agreed to deploy four battalions in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia in addition to the four already present in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.

The authorities took no chances in respect of the security of participants and the people of Lithuania. To ensure their safety and security, Lithuania committed around 1,500 Police Officers, including the anti-terrorist unit and the Criminal Police Bureau, as well as over 3,000 troops of the Lithuanian Armed Forces. 

Additionally, Police Officers from Latvia and Poland aided security, and around 1,000 troops from NATO states joined. The Summit ended on a positive note for Ukraine when allies reaffirmed that Ukraine will become a member of NATO and agreed to remove the requirement for a Membership Action Plan. This is believed to change Ukraine’s membership path from a two-step process to a one-step process. What Ukraine is waiting for now is an invitation to join NATO.

The Summit has also put in place credible arrangements for Ukraine’s security. This is to provide and ensure that peace prevails, and for the rest of the world, this is more crucial now than ever.

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