On July 8, three Dartmouth government professors — Jennifer Lind, Daryl Press and William Wohlforth — cosigned an open letter in The Guardian titled, “The NATO Alliance Should Not Invite Ukraine to Become a Member.” We, as members of the Dartmouth Student Alliance for Ukraine, express strong condemnation of the arguments the letter propagates. We fear Dartmouth faculty members may be echoing Russian propaganda talking points. Alarmingly, the letter has recently been translated and republished in multiple Russian news sources, from Komsomolskaya Pravda to Izvestia. We believe this demonstrates the palpability of the letter’s arguments to the Russian public.
Even more concerning to us is the timing of the letter. In a seeming effort to release it before the NATO summit in Washington, D.C. on July 9 through July 11, The Guardian published the piece hours after a Russian X-101 missile struck Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital, Okhmatdyt, which annually treats up to 20,000 patients and performs close to 10,000 surgeries — a disheartening display of either callousness or ignorance from the authors. The internet was flooded with pictures of children, mothers, nurses and frontline workers covered in blood at the very center of the Ukrainian capital, and the article was still published.
In our column, we will respond to some of the key points that the government professors supported — and explain why, contrary to the cosigned letter, NATO should offer Ukraine membership.
First, we object most strongly to the following claim: “Since Russia began invading Ukraine in 2014, NATO Allies have demonstrated through their actions that they do not believe the stakes of the conflict, while significant, justify the price of war. If Ukraine were to join NATO, Russia would have reason to doubt the credibility of NATO’s security guarantee ...”
This point diminishes the fact that the stakes of the conflict have, in fact, risen dramatically since 2014. The world has witnessed the carpet bombings of Mariupol — formerly the home of more than 431,000 Ukrainian citizens — indiscriminate killing of civilians in Bucha and Izium and the repeated threats of nuclear weapons as a tool of coercion by Russia to claim Ukraine’s occupied territory. These new realities call for a definitive response from NATO. Otherwise, the 2014 policy of appeasement that did not stop Putin in 2022 will fail the West yet again in the future.
Besides, there are far more pressing reasons than prior reluctance to fight over Ukraine for Russia to doubt the credibility of NATO’s security guarantees to its members. This includes U.S. leaders such as former President Donald Trump publicly questioning America’s commitment to collective defense, along with the ‘trojan horses’ within the alliance pursuing business as usual with Putin — like Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyp Erdogan. If anything, inviting Ukraine would be a display of unity and resolve which NATO has not seen since 2014.
We also object to the claim that “dangling NATO membership for Ukraine does a disservice to Ukrainians who are bravely fighting for their independence.” We find this statement presumptuous, condescending and paternalistic. Unfortunately, Americans and others speaking over the voices of Ukrainians has been a long-standing characteristic of this war. Ukraine, its leadership, its military and its civilians have supported Ukraine’s accession to NATO; recent polling shows 77% of Ukrainians supporting NATO accession. So how would NATO considering our voices do a disservice to our fighters?
The defense of this argument — the statement that “the closer NATO comes to promising that Ukraine will join the alliance, … the greater the incentive for Russia to keep … killing Ukranians” — holds ground only if one believes rational calculations caused thousands of Ukranians to lose their lives to Russian aggression in the past decade. This is not the case. In 2022, potential Ukrainian membership in NATO was wholly undecided despite all the “open door” rhetoric — a formal refusal to deny a potential Ukraine membership — yet Russia invaded. In 2014, Ukraine already had a track record of requests for a NATO plan of action that were turned down, such as at the 2008 Bucharest summit — yet Russia invaded Crimea. In the 1930s, NATO wasn’t even around — yet Russia committed wide-scale genocide of Ukrainians through artificial famine.
NATO membership or not, Russia has shown that it will attack Ukraine — if not for what it sees as security guarantees, then for alternate resource-based geopolitical reasons, or in the name of the Russian myth of Eastern European Slavs’ shared historical legacy. Russia doesn’t believe in the existence of a sovereign Ukrainian state nor of a distinct Ukrainian people, and it has more than demonstrated its willingness to shed blood to make this vision a reality.
Moreover, the letter’s analysis betrays an infantilization of the Ukrainian leadership’s capabilities. The government in Kyiv no doubt understands the realities of the war. The alleged “disservice to Ukrainians” implies that the thousands of casualties were merely an incidental factor in their political calculus. We wager that Ukrainians understand — better than Western academics — the risks of more casualties and would do anything to prevent them. After all, it is our family members, our spouses and our friends risking their lives on the front line. The stakes to us are much higher than those to ivory tower academics.
The professors also argue that “moving Ukraine toward membership in the alliance could make the problem worse, turning Ukraine into the site of a prolonged showdown between the world’s two leading nuclear powers and playing into Vladimir Putin’s narrative that he is fighting the West in Ukraine rather than the people of Ukraine.” Putin and his government — as the above statement acknowledges — already tells everyone and anyone who will listen that he is fighting the West. Putin’s government already paints themselves as victims of a global Western conspiracy. To what extent would “playing into” that narrative alter the front line realities of the war?
We must also address one final claim: that “admitting Ukraine would reduce the security of the United States and NATO allies, at considerable risk to all.” This closing sentence of the letter belies what we see as its true purpose, to assert that Ukraine joining NATO may be more beneficial to Ukraine than to NATO. We posit that admitting an army of nearly 900,000 active duty personnel — tested in modern combat and most experienced in fighting the Russian Forces — would be an asset to NATO and an insurance of Western investment in Ukraine. Aside from combat, Ukrainian Forces have a commendable reputation in peacekeeping, which spans from the 2021 rescue of 96 Afghans from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan all the way back to the evacuation of almost 5,000 Bosnians from encircled Zepa in 1995. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s commitment to NATO is imparted in its constitution and proven in two revolutions against a pro-Russian leadership — the 2014 Revolution of Dignity and the 2004 Orange Revolution. It is misleading and disingenuous to express apprehension about commitment to Ukraine’s security under the guise of concern for Ukraine’s future — it seems to not be the preoccupation of these authors.
We believe that The Guardian letter hinges on one assumption we fundamentally reject — that Russia began this war for rational reasons, that Ukraine truly posed a threat to Russian security and that to maintain hegemonic power, Russia needs Ukraine. Yet, we believe this is a war of irrationality, miscalculations of the Ukrainians’ attitudes toward Russia and the domestic challenges of maintaining an authoritarian grip on power. We seek to remind the reader the conclusions this letter spotlights are not the only ones, nor are they definitive. So, we encourage you to engage in a conversation with Ukrainian students and faculty at Dartmouth who will be more than willing to share their perspectives and lived experiences of the war.
Signed,
Anna Timchenko ’26
Kyrylo Fomin ’26
Marta Hulievska ’25
Polly Chesnokova ’24
Zhenia Dubrova ’24
Daryna Gladun GR’24
Karina Madzari GR’24
Anna Timchenko ’26 and Kyrylo Fomin ’26 are members of the Dartmouth Student Alliance for Ukraine. Fomin is a current co-president of the organization and Timchenko is the former treasurer and current secretary. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
Update Appended (July 31, 6:29 p.m.): This article has been updated to include an additional signatory.
