Ukraine expects a green light to join the NATO alliance in 2008, Kiev’s Foreign Minister Boris Tarasyuk said Friday.

‘Ukraine’s strategic foreign policy objective – that is to join NATO – is irreversible,’ Tarasyuk told reporters after discussions with foreign ministers of the 26 NATO member states meeting in the Bulgarian capital.

Tarasyuk said he hoped NATO would launch a ‘membership action plan’ with Ukraine in September this year. Such a blueprint would be the first step in Kiev’s drive to join the Alliance. ~Monsters and Critics

This is not difficult to oppose. Ukraine has no business in NATO. Kiev should be told that we appreciate the interest, but that we are not taking any more members at this time, or indeed ever. For that matter, NATO should no longer exist, but if it is going to exist I see no reason to make security guarantees to a country whose territory has been subject to some Muscovite ruler or other for the better part of the last 500 years and whose population has a significant consciously ethnic Russian minority that distinguishes itself from the Ukrainians. Whether you accept the “clash of civilizations” business or not, in which Huntington identified the Ukraine as a fault-line between his artificial conceptions of Western and Orthodox civilisations (I consider that division arbitrary and mistaken, but there you have it), committing NATO to a war with Russia in the event that Moscow ever decides to fight with its smaller neighbour is a grave mistake and it serves no conceivable real American interest. What it does is further overextend the future commitments of our already overextended armed forces. Besides, what American is willing to run the slightest risk of nuclear or conventional war with the Russians to keep Dnepropetrovsk Ukrainian? Don’t let them do this to our country again.