This piece originally appeared in The National Interest.

Significant progress has been made in improving the defense situation in the Baltic states since 2014, but NATO can take some relatively modest steps to further enhance its deterrence and defense posture in the region, according to a report by Michael O’Hanlon and Christopher Skaluba, which was based on an Atlantic Council study visit to Lithuania. The Atlantic Council was kind enough to include me on the trek, which began in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, and included visits to troops in the field and the port of Klaipeda. I largely concur with Mike and Chris’s comments and supplement them below with several additional observations.

First, one can understand the preoccupation of Lithuania’s senior political and military leadership with the country’s security situation. Lithuania has had a difficult history with the Soviet Union and Russia. Some in Vilnius believe that Moscow regards the Baltic states as “temporarily lost territory.”

A Russian military invasion of the Baltic states is not a high probability. However, the Lithuanians cannot ignore a small probability, especially in light of the Kremlin’s recent rhetoric, the Russian military’s ongoing modernization of its conventional forces and exercise pattern of the past five years, and Russia’s use of military force to seize Crimea and conduct a conflict in Donbas.

When the Lithuanian Ministry of National Defense (MNOD) looks around its neighborhood, it can see specific reasons for concern. Russia is upgrading its military presence in the Kaliningrad exclave on Lithuania’s southwestern border. The MNOD now counts Kaliningrad as hosting some twenty thousand Russian military personnel, including a naval infantry unit and substantial anti-access, area denial capabilities, such as advanced surface-to-air missiles. The Lithuanians assess that the Russian military could mount a large ground attack from Belarus, to the east of Lithuania (the border is less than twenty miles from downtown Vilnius). These forces are backed by an additional 120,000 personnel in Russia’s Western Military District, including a tank army. Russia has substantial air assets in the region as well as warships in the Baltic Sea.

For its part, Lithuania can muster fourteen thousand soldiers and sailors (four thousand of whom are conscripts serving just nine months). They are backed up by five thousand volunteers, similar to the U.S. National Guard. Under NATO’s enhanced forward presence program, a German-led NATO battlegroup adds 1,300 troops, mainly from Germany, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. In addition, NATO member air forces rotate small fighter squadrons into Lithuania to provide air policing for the Baltic states.

Second, Lithuania has a logical plan to enhance its defense capabilities. The MNOD is making good use of its defense dollars (Lithuania now meets NATO’s two percent of gross domestic product goal, having tripled its defense expenditures over the past six years). Eschewing shiny objects such as F-16 jets, the MNOD focuses on upgrading the capabilities of its two primary ground units, a mechanized brigade and a recently-established motorized brigade. The main procurement programs of the past three years have purchased infantry fighting vehicles, self propelled artillery and short-range surface-to-air missiles to equip the brigades.

In the event of war, the forces in Lithuania would likely fight a defensive holding action while awaiting NATO reinforcements. The MNOD and Ministry of Transport are working together to enhance the country’s ability to flow in NATO forces, including by upgrading the rollon/roll-off capacity at the port of Klaipeda and building a European standard gauge railroad line from Poland to the main base of Lithuania’s mechanized brigade. The railroad line, which o obviates the need to change the railroad gauge at the Polish-Lithuanian border, a cumbersome process involving changing out the wheels of railcars, ultimately will be extended north to Latvia and Estonia.

Third, the Lithuanians value NATO’s enhanced forward presence in the form of the NATO battlegroup. The battlegroup is fully integrated into Lithuania’s Iron Wolf Brigade, and in wartime would come under the tactical control of the brigade. The rotational NATO force is based with and trains side-by-side with major elements of that brigade.

One potential question is, if Russian forces were to cross the border and the Iron Wolf Brigade deployed, then how quickly would the NATO battlegroup take the field with it? The latter would need a NATO command to do so, and likely also national authorizations from Berlin, The Hague and Prague. Hopefully, those authorizations would be transmitted early as a crisis developed so that the NATO battlegroup could deploy immediately. It adds significantly to Lithuanian combat capabilities, including by providing the only armor unit in the country.

Fourth, as pleased as Vilnius is to have a NATO military presence, the Lithuanians very much would like to add a U.S. component to it. With a U.S. armored brigade combat team deployed in Poland on a rotational basis, the U.S. military has the assets to consider periodically rotating an armored company to Lithuania (and to Latvia and Estonia). These rotations would be useful military exercises in case there is a crisis that requires a reinforcement move from Poland to Lithuania through the Suwalki Gap.

Lithuania is moving in the right direction in bolstering its defense capabilities, with prudent steps taken over the past six years and sensible plans for the future. As Mike and Chris point out, modest steps by NATO and, I would argue, the United States could significantly add to the Alliance’s deterrence and defense posture in the Baltics.

This piece originally appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

As we witness the increasingly detrimental effects of global climate change, the role that nuclear power could play globally to mitigate its effects continues to be debated. The series of articles featured in the Bulletin in December 2016 aired a broad spectrum of opinions, ranging in assessment of the role of nuclear power from insignificant to mandatory. In this series, we present the perspective of a new crop of nuclear professionals who collectively represent two of the world leaders in nuclear power—the United States and Russia.

These young professionals work together to exchange views and ideas as part of the U.S.-Russia Young Professionals Nuclear Forum that we created in May 2016 to encourage dialogue on critical nuclear issues of concern to both countries. As most official avenues of US-Russia cooperation on nuclear issues were being shut down in pace with the deteriorating political relations between Washington and Moscow, our objective was to turn to the younger generation, because those in it will have to live with the consequences of a world in which their countries no longer cooperate to mitigate global nuclear dangers.

In the United States, our efforts are organized within the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, although we reach out to universities and other organizations across the country. In Russia, we were fortunate to find the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI), Russia’s flagship research university in nuclear engineering, to be an enthusiastic partner. Its rector, Professor Mikhail Strikhanov, has an unwavering international outlook that stresses the need for cooperation, especially in higher education and research. The young professionals are students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career professionals.

Hecker has previously written in the Bulletin about the remarkable period of post-Cold War nuclear cooperation between Russian and American nuclear weapon scientists and how the termination of that cooperation by our governments threatens our collective security. We viewed engaging young professionals from the two countries as one of the few avenues of continued cooperation. It has the potential of being particularly effective because at the forum meetings, the young Russians and Americans interact in an educational and non-adversarial environment.

The first three forum meetings focused primarily on issues of nuclear non-proliferation and countering nuclear terrorism. They featured exercises in which the young professionals worked in small groups side by side to explore solutions to vexing nuclear problems. One was a simulation conducted at Stanford in May 2018 just a few weeks before the historic Trump-Kim Singapore Summit. The other was an exercise in Moscow in October 2018 to advise their governments on a hypothetical crisis related to the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.

At the Moscow forum, we also asked the young professionals to explore what the two countries could do to promote the benefits of nuclear energy around the globe, while cooperating to mitigate the associated risks.

Preparation for the forum included online lectures by senior mentors as well as lectures and discussion sessions in Moscow by both Russian and American specialists. In the nuclear power exercise, we assigned eight key questions to 24 young professionals. We divided them into eight teams, each composed of Russian and American participants. The central question was whether or not an expansion of global nuclear power is necessary to help mitigate the danger of global climate change. Individual groups examined issues of supply and demand around the globe and some of the big challenges posed by an expansion of nuclear power—those of economics, safety and security, potential proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the disposition of nuclear waste.

The young professionals conducted research prior to the meeting, deliberated and debated within their teams during the meeting, and presented their findings to the larger group and the panel of senior mentors at the end of the exercise. During the past six months they have captured the essence of their findings in the eight articles featured in this special presentation in the Bulletin.

Their findings are generally pro-nuclear, which is not surprising considering that most of them have strong educational and research backgrounds in either nuclear technologies or nuclear security. But we found that their views were primarily driven by their serious concerns about the dangers of global climate change and the urgent need to confront these dangers.

Their articles are of interest not so much in that they break new ground in these areas, particularly since many other  established experts have tried to tackle these issues for decades. They are of interest because they represent the views of some of the younger generation of professionals working together across cultural and disciplinary divides. We were struck by the following comment in one of the papers  that reflects on the perceived urgency of the task at hand: “We are the first generation that is experiencing the dramatic effects of global climate change and likely the last that can do something about it to avoid catastrophic consequences for the Earth and its people.”

We also note that the articles uniformly reveal that the young professionals across the board firmly believe that the benefits and risks of expanding nuclear power globally must be pursued and tackled in a concerted effort of major nuclear powers (especially the United States and Russia), other developed nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and all stakeholders. These younger voices stated: “The most important shift necessary to facilitate [nuclear power] expansion is an increase in international cooperation and multilateralization in the form of, for example, international reactor supply contracts, multinational enrichment conglomerates, nondiscriminatory fuel banks, and international waste repositories.”

We believe the readers will find the sentiments and opinions of the young Russian and American professionals interesting and encouraging. We certainly have found them eager and able to work together effectively—a lesson that the more senior professionals and the governments need to relearn.

Editor’s note: The Young Professionals Nuclear Forum cooperation is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Read the articles here:

• Nuclear Power and Global Climate Change
• What Countries Will Be the Most Important in Leading a Significant Expansion of Global Nuclear Power—Both From the Perspective of the Supplier and the User?
• Should Nuclear Power Be Expanded Significantly Into Developing Countries?
• What Will Be Required for a Significant Expansion of Global Nuclear Energy?
• Resolving Safety and Security Concerns About Nuclear Power
• Why Nuclear Power Plants Cost so Much—and What Can Be Done About It
• Will Nuclear Waste Disposal Challenges Limit a Significant Expansion of Global Nuclear Power? Part 1
• Will Nuclear Waste Disposal Challenges Limit a Significant Expansion of Global Nuclear Power? Part 2

In early May, CISAC convened the fifth Young Professional Nuclear Forum (YPNF), a program sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute (MEPhI). The program brought together a lively group of young Russians and Americans working on nuclear issues over three days.

Since 2016, the forum has alternated between Moscow and Stanford.  

By 2016, US and Russian governments closed almost every door on opportunities that previously allowed experienced nuclear professionals on both sides to cooperate with each other.  Stanford Professor Siegfried Hecker saw that at least one door - that of cooperation on the university level - was still open. He started the YPNF to foster interaction between the younger generation of Russians and Americans who study, do research, or start a career in the nuclear power or nonproliferation fields.

This year’s agenda focused on two major areas: US-Russian arms control and the future of nuclear power.

The American group included a new cohort of six incoming young professionals from Los Alamos National Laboratory, UC Berkeley, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, and Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non‑Proliferation. They were joined by CISAC research staff members Gaby Levikow and Elliot Serbin and current and former fellows Chantell Murphy, Kristin Ven Bruusgaard, and Cameron Tracy. The Russian group from MEPhI brought a team of 12 young professionals most of whom are pursuing their graduate degrees in nuclear physics and engineering and software engineering, along with junior professionals in international relations and nuclear fields.  The team of experts included Professor Hecker, Dr. James Toevs, Dr. Ning Li, Ambassador Steven Pifer, Professor David Holloway, Dr. Larry Brandt, Dr. Chaim Braun, Dr. Pavel Podvig, and Dr. Mona Dreicer, —all of whom provided advice and feedback during the exercise.

Participants come from loosely defined “technical” and “policy” fields, and the forum agenda has traditionally included one nuclear-power related and one policy-focused subject. Forum activities vary between lectures, expert briefings, discussions, and table-top exercises, but the small-group work during the exercises is the core form of interaction.

By design, this agenda exposes each participant to new fields, new counterparts, some fun interactive time off - and encourages a lot of cultural learning. Forum after forum, we hear back that the group work and social time are the most exciting aspects of the forum experience. Participants noted they learned, among other things, “general ideas and thoughts of American participants and their attitudes to the present American policy, new words and abbreviations … [and] a great deal about new reactor designs and their implications for nuclear energy and security policy.”  Still more participants enjoyed “learning to collaborate in groups of Americans and Russians but also between policy and technical experts on topics of both camps,” and some “got new friends.”

Encouragingly, participants requested more interaction between the bi-annual meetings and a variety of topics in yet untapped – or suspended - areas of cooperation between Russia and the US.

New work continues to emerge from the forum. Eight short articles written by the young professionals to showcase the results of the projects from the Moscow meeting in November 2017 was published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in June 2019. The next meeting will be held in Moscow this November.

This article originally appeared at Brookings.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited Brussels on June 4 and 5, where he met with the leadership of the European Union and NATO. He reaffirmed Kyiv’s goal of integrating into both institutions—goals enshrined earlier this year as strategic objectives in Ukraine’s constitution.

At their April meeting to mark NATO’s 70th anniversary, NATO foreign ministers noted their commitment to the alliance’s “open door” policy for countries that aspire to membership. Russian aggression over the past five years has only solidified domestic support within Ukraine for membership, though the path to achieving that objective faces serious obstacles.

GROWING SUPPORT FOR NATO IN UKRAINE

When NATO leaders in July 1997 invited Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary to join the alliance, they also stated the “open door” policy. That reaffirmed Article 10 of the Washington Treaty that established NATO, which reads in part: “The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European state in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty.”

President Leonid Kuchma publicly declared Ukraine’s interest in NATO membership in May 2002. Washington expressed support while noting that Kyiv had to do its homework, that is, it had to adopt the kinds of democratic, economic, and military reforms that the alliance asked of other aspirants. During the remainder of Kuchma’s time in office, however, Ukraine made little tangible progress in those areas.

In 2006, President Victor Yushchenko attached high priority to securing a NATO membership action plan (MAP). By summer, Kyiv looked on course to attain a MAP when alliance foreign ministers met that December. Curiously, Moscow did not come out hard against the idea. The prospective MAP derailed, however, after Yushchenko appointed Victor Yanukovych as prime minister. During a September visit to Brussels, Yanukovych said he did not want a MAP. The proposal died given the divided position of Ukraine’s executive branch.

Yushchenko called for a MAP again in January 2008, this time with the support of Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko and Rada (parliament) Speaker Arseniy Yatseniuk. Moscow came out in full opposition. When Yushchenko visited the Russian capital that February, he had to stand alongside and listen to President Vladimir Putin threaten to target nuclear missiles on Ukraine. Instead of lobbying allies to support a MAP for Kyiv, Washington waited until the April Bucharest summit, where President George W. Bush attempted to persuade his counterparts to grant Ukraine (and Georgia) a MAP. However, a number of allied leaders by then had made up their minds and opposed the idea. Concern about Russian opposition undoubtedly played a role.

When Yanukovych became president in early 2010, he reiterated his lack of interest in NATO membership, and the issue went dormant. That changed after the 2014 Maidan Revolution, Yanukovych’s flight to Russia, Russia’s use of military force to seize Crimea, and Russian aggression in the eastern region of Donbas. President Petro Poroshenko increasingly stressed the importance of Ukraine joining the alliance.

In February 2019, the Rada overwhelmingly approved an amendment to the constitution that fixed membership in the European Union and NATO as strategic goals for Ukraine. While opinion polls prior to 2014 showed, at best, lukewarm public support for NATO membership, that has shifted with the continuing fighting in Donbas. Polls over the past four years have shown pluralities—in some cases, even a majority—favoring joining the alliance. For example, a January 2019 survey had 46 percent in favor as opposed to 32 percent against.

President Zelenskiy, who assumed office on May 20, also expresses support for NATO membership. In Brussels he stated that he would continue Kyiv’s “strategic course to achieve full-fledged membership in the EU and NATO.”

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: RUSSIA

Ukraine still has much to do to meet the criteria for NATO membership. MAPs are intended to serve as guides for prospective members to fulfill those criteria. Objectively, Ukraine is as far along as countries that received MAPs in 1999. What has blocked Ukraine’s MAP ambition is Russia and the deference that some NATO members give to Moscow’s views.

Another reason for the alliance’s reluctance to grant a MAP is that MAPs do not convey an Article 5 security guarantee. (Article 5, the heart of the NATO treaty, provides that an attack against one member will be considered as an attack against all.) NATO lacks a good response to the question: What does the alliance do if an aspirant receives a MAP and then—before it becomes a full member—comes under attack?

The Kremlin clearly wants to return Ukraine to Russia’s orbit, though its actions over the past five years have had the opposite effect. Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and its ongoing aggression in Donbas, which has taken more than 13,000 lives, have persuaded Ukraine’s political elite and much of its population of the need to anchor Ukraine solidly in European and trans-Atlantic institutions and reduce relations with Moscow.

If the Kremlin cannot return Ukraine to its orbit, Plan B apparently is to break it. That would explain Russia’s hybrid war and economic sanctions against Kyiv as well as continued fueling of the fighting in Donbas. Moscow aims to pressure, distract, and destabilize the Ukrainian government in order to hinder its efforts to adopt a full set of reforms that would spur economic growth; to frustrate Ukraine’s ability to implement the provisions of the Ukraine-EU association agreement; and to make Ukraine appear an unattractive partner for the West.

Russia pursues this course despite its professed adherence to the principles of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act. Those principles include “the right to belong or not to belong to international organizations, to be or not to be party to bilateral or multilateral treaties including the right to be or not to be a party to treaties of alliance.” Moscow plainly does not want to allow Kyiv the right to choose whether or not to be a party to NATO.

Moscow plainly does not want to allow Kyiv the right to choose whether or not to be a party to NATO.

The Kremlin’s backing away from this (and other principles) of the Helsinki Final Act reflects a conclusion in Moscow that the post-Cold War European security order has evolved in ways that disadvantage Russia’s interests. The Russian leadership thus has set out to disrupt that order (Crimea has its antecedents in Transnistria, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia). Russian officials may well have taken note of NATO’s September 1995 study of the how and why of enlargement. That study said: “Resolution of [ethnic disputes or external territorial disputes] would be a factor in determining whether to invite a state to join the Alliance.” The Kremlin has sought to create territorial disputes in the post-Soviet space, and some NATO members fear that giving Ukraine membership now would confront the alliance with an immediate Article 5 contingency against Russia.

It may well be that Moscow requires some idea of what a future European security order might look like, including the relationship between Ukraine and NATO, before it moves to resolve the conflict in Donbas. At this point, however, it does not appear that any Track I channels are discussing that question. Nothing suggests that it has come up in the Normandy configuration involving officials from Ukraine, Russia, Germany, and France.

This is an extraordinarily difficult question. In thinking about a European security order, how can one reconcile the view of Kyiv—and of most of the West—that Ukraine, a sovereign and independent state, should have the right to choose its own foreign policy course, with Russia’s demand for a sphere of influence that includes Ukraine?

Some have offered solutions to this dilemma. My Brookings colleague, Michael O’Hanlon, has proposed establishing a zone of permanently neutral states running from Sweden and Finland in the north down to the Black Sea and the Caucasus, with their security guaranteed by both NATO and Russia. Russia would withdraw its forces from Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, and the West would lift economic sanctions on Russia. NATO would abandon further enlargement, though states in the neutral zone could join the European Union.

This is an interesting “outside-the-box” idea, but it would not work. Many of those states (not just Ukraine and Georgia, but also Sweden and Finland) would not agree to be consigned to such a zone. And Moscow opposes EU membership for post-Soviet states; the Russians pressed Yanukovych not to sign the association agreement with the European Union when he had made clear his lack of interest in deepening relations with NATO.

The best idea that I have been able to come up with is that Ukraine, Russia, and NATO agree that Ukrainian membership in the alliance is a matter of not now, but not never. That would likely please neither Kyiv nor Moscow, but it could offer a way to kick a difficult can down the road.

NATO membership for Ukraine is unlikely in the near term. For the foreseeable future, Ukraine should continue to deepen its practical cooperation with the alliance. Much, if not all, of a MAP can be put into Kyiv’s annual action plans. Moscow’s principal objection appears to be to the name of the plan, not the content. The focus then should be on implementation. Ukraine should seek to prepare itself as much as possible—not just in terms of defense and security reforms, but also in solidifying its embrace of the democratic and market economy values of the alliance. That will put Ukraine in position to take advantage if/when an opportunity emerges and NATO is ready to consider membership.