Following the second anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war, which had erupted out of the prospect of Ukraine joining the NATO military alliance, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Saturday proclaimed that the question of Ukraine joining was not a matter of "if," but "when."
"Ukraine will join NATO," Stoltenberg said, according to a report from The Financial Times. "It is not a question of if, but of when."
Stoltenberg added that Russian President Vladimir Putin "started this war because he wanted to close NATO's door ... but he has achieved the exact opposite: Ukraine is now closer to NATO than ever before."
Stoltenberg went on to mention that NATO was assisting Kyiv in making Ukraine "more and more interoperable" with the defense alliance and that NATO would establish a collaborative training and analysis center in Poland — a sign of establishing a protracted endeavor.
Notably, Stoltenberg's conviction that Ukraine will join NATO contrasts sharply with historical warnings from the Russian political elite regarding NATO's expansion.
On Feb. 1, 2008, William Burns, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, now CIA director, sent a diplomatic cable titled "Nyet means Nyet" to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO, the secretary of defense, and the secretary of state.
In that memo, Burns explained that the entire Russian political class, not just Putin, viewed NATO's eastward encroachment toward Russia's border as the brightest of red lines.
In the letter, under the subheading "RUSSIA'S NATO ENLARGEMENT REDLINES," Burns stated that upon meeting with Dmitriy Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, the member of the Russian think tank "expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership."
News of Stoltenberg's claim came as Congress wrestled with lining up more aid to Ukraine in a bill that would tie security to the U.S. southern border.
On Friday, President Joe Biden called on Republicans to approve the legislation "before it's too late" for Ukraine.
Amid the question of U.S. support, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated on X that the EU would back Ukraine financially, economically, militarily, and morally "until the country is finally free."
But chances of such a scenario seem unlikely, as the University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer put it, because for the Russians, they view NATO's eastward expansion as an existential threat.
Providing an example, Mearsheimer likens NATO's eastward expansion to how Americans reacted to the Cuban Missile Crisis when Russia was seeking to place nukes in Cuba.