ORone of the politicians Russian-Ukrainian conflict who commented on this North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)an alliance playing a key role in the military operation undertaken by the Russian government to demilitarize territory of Ukraine.
What is NATO?
NATO (in French) Organization du trait de l’Atlantique Nord, NATO) is also known as the North Atlantic Alliance and is an intergovernmental military alliance consisting of 30 nations28 from Europe and two from North America.
Why NATO?
NATO is a collective security system of its member states that will intervene if one of them is attacked by an outside party, which it will do in two ways: political and military.
The first instance of NATO’s action is diplomatic, but if this is not enough and conflicts prevail, the organization will carry out peacekeeping missions to end armed war.
Which countries are members of NATO?
NATO was founded on April 4, 1949, when only 12 countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty, but 18 other countries have since joined.
The original members of NATO are the US, UK, France, Belgium, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Luxembourg.
Since then Greece and Turkey (1952), Germany (1955), Spain (1982), Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (1999), Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia and Slovakia (2004), Albania and Croatia. (2009), Montenegro (2017) and North Macedonia (2020) have joined the organization.
What role does NATO play in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict?
Russian President Vladimir Putin has long pushed for Ukraine’s exclusion from NATO, a fear that has plagued Russians since the rule of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s.
Putin disagrees with other Eastern European countries joining NATO, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999, followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004.
In addition, Putin said that NATO expansion is “threatening”, so the fact that Ukraine could join the European Union and join NATO worries the Russian president.
In December 2021, Russia demanded guarantees that Ukraine would never join NATO and that NATO would order the troops of other Eastern European countries to retreat, but this did not happen. In addition, in recent years, the United States has sold hundreds of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, and Turkey has supplied combat drones to the Ukrainian military.