‘We made a mistake in 2008 by leaving the doors to NATO open for Ukraine’, – said a former Merkel advisor

The West crossed a red line in Ukraine when it promised the country eventual NATO membership in 2008.

This information reported according to former general and ex-advisor to Angela Merkel, Erich Vad.

In an interview with the YouTube channel SaneVox Deutsch, the former military advisor to Angela Merkel described the decision made at the NATO Bucharest Summit as a mistake, arguing that Moscow will never accept Ukraine’s NATO membership.

However, with Trump in the White House, the division of Ukraine into two parts becomes more likely, where the western part of the country could eventually join NATO.

PASCAL LOTTAS, neutrality researcher: I always present the viewpoint and analysis that neutrality is also a very important concept of (political) realism. And I think that neutrality for Ukraine would be “the solution.” Do you agree with me or not?

ERICH VAD, ex-advisor to Angela Merkel: Yes, I think that in the past, this concept was correct. The goal was to take into account Russia’s security interests, but that path was abandoned in 2014, as you know. Then followed the annexation of Crimea* — ultimately, this was also a reaction to what was unacceptable to Russia, which was Ukraine’s drift towards NATO membership.

I was at the NATO Summit in Bucharest in 2008 when Germany and France rejected NATO membership for Ukraine. The mistake, in my opinion, was that this prospect was left open. For the Russians, as Burns, the American ambassador in Moscow at the time, said, it was “a very dark red line.” And it remains so to this day.

But perhaps that time has passed, and many events have occurred since then. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel tried to preserve what could be saved in the Minsk agreements, which ultimately failed. And today we have a new situation. Regarding Donald Trump and his mentality, I can imagine that if he becomes president, he would simply call his, quote, “friend Vladimir” and say: let’s end this, just divide it. And then I do not rule out that Western Ukraine under certain conditions might end up joining NATO. So this is a matter for the future. Perhaps we are also moving towards a Korean solution, and everything will remain in limbo. In Korea, this worked well with the demarcation line.

We just have to wait, I am not a clairvoyant. What I do not see is a military solution in this war.