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An agreement reached Tuesday between NATO leaders does not include a timeline on expanding membership to include Ukraine, sparking criticism from Kyiv.

© AP

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg defended the decision to take a more cautious and slower approach to Ukraine's accession.

"What allies have agreed today is a strong, united and positive message to Ukraine about enduring support but also a positive message on the path forward for membership," he said at the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Ukraine sees the decision to not fast-track Ukraine into the alliance or provide a clear timetable as a rejection that emboldens Russia.

Even before the details were made clear, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his country "deserves respect."

“It's unprecedented and absurd when [a] time frame is not set neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine’s membership," he tweeted.

The agreement reached Tuesday, enshrined in a communiqué, includes multiyear assistance to Ukraine to increase interoperability with NATO, a new council to advance political ties and the removal of a membership action plan (MAP), which involves a series of political and military reforms to join the alliance.

NATO's Eastern European allies, known as the Bucharest Nine, support a faster-track for Ukraine into the alliance. But other allies are more cautious.

President Biden has advocated a slower approach, noting this month that Ukraine needs to meet anti-corruption and democratic reform standards.

The U.S. is also concerned about including Ukraine into NATO while a war is raging with Russia, since doing so would trigger a defense article that brings the allies into direct conflict with Moscow.

Alp Sevimlisoy, a NATO expert and Millennium Fellow with the Atlantic Council, argued that Russia would likely halt its war if Ukraine is included in NATO. He supported a 12-month or 16-month plan to get Kyiv into the alliance to deter Russia.

"What we've done militarily, is ensure that precedent hasn't been set that Russia is being put into its place," he told The Hill.

Still, there are concerns about nuclear war, as Russian President Vladimir Putin has used nuclear arms as blackmail during the conflict.

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The controversial weapons are banned by 123 countries because they have the potential to harm civilians decades after a war has ended.

© Anatolii Stepanov/Getty Images

President Biden's decision to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine sparked concern from human rights groups and some congressional lawmakers.

But the Pentagon asserts the munitions, to be fired from 155 millimeter Howitzer artillery guns, are vital to keeping Ukraine in the fight against dug-in Russian forces.

Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl described Ukraine's ongoing counter-offensive as "hard-sledding."

“We want to make sure that the Ukrainians have sufficient artillery to keep them in the fight in the context of the current counteroffensive, and because things are going a little slower than some had hoped," he told reporters on Friday.

Cluster munitions are dropped by aircraft or fired by ground-based weapons systems, spreading out a few dozen to hundreds of submunitions over a target area.

The weapons are valued due to their ability to strike multiple targets at once — but the bombs are imprecise, often fail to detonate and can linger for decades after, at which point they can harm civilians, including children.

Russia and Ukraine have already used cluster munitions in the war effort, with extremely high dud, or failure, rates. The dud rates from the U.S. munitions are not expected to exceed 2.35 percent, but human right groups say the U.S. lacks transparency and accuracy on data.

Sarah Yager, Washington director at Human Rights Watch, said there will be a $73 billion cleanup effort with the munitions already deployed and the U.S. should not be escalating the situation.

"Legislators, policymakers and the Biden administration will probably think twice when the pictures start coming back of children who have been harmed by American-made cluster munitions," she told The Hill.

Cluster munitions are banned by 123 countries through a 2008 treaty, including 18 members of the western security alliance NATO.

Russia, Ukraine and the U.S. are not party to that treaty. 

Congress passed a law in 2009 that prohibits the deployment or transfer of cluster munitions, but the president can sign a waiver to bypass the restriction.

U.S. officials on Friday said the decision was hard to make but noted they won assurances from Ukraine to keep track of the cluster munitions and minimize harm to civilians.

The decision was welcomed by Kyiv. Ukrainian presidential office adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said “the number of weapons matters” in the “great bloody war” with Russia.

“So, weapons, more weapons, and more weapons, including cluster munitions,” Podolyak tweeted.

Read the full report at TheHill.com.

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Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin was exiled to Belarus after he reached an agreement last month with Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop an armed rebellion.

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Prigozhin arrived in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Thursday, according to Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, who could not definitively say where the mercenary head was now.

"Maybe he went to Moscow, maybe somewhere else, but he is not on the territory of Belarus," Lukashenko said, according to Belarusian state media.

Russian security forces returned 10 billion rubles, or $110 million, five bars of gold and weapons to Prigozhin after seizing them from him in a raid, according to a local Russian outlet, Fontanka.

"His driver arrived with an official power of attorney to collect billions," Fontanka wrote on Telegram.

Russian state-run media channels on Wednesday began broadcasting what appears to have been a raid of Prigozhin's properties.

When asked about Prigozhin, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that Russia is "not tracking his whereabouts" and they "have no possibilities and desire to do so."

Prigozhin, whose mercenary fighters played a key role in the war in Ukraine, railed for months against what he called weak leadership from the Russian Ministry of Defense.

The Wagner boss seized the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don on June 24 before marching on Moscow with thousands of fighters behind his back.

The uprising was aborted the next day after Putin agreed to drop charges against Prigozhin, with the mercenary leader set to go to Belarus.

Although he granted Wagner fighters freedom, Putin has since railed against the "organizers" of the rebellion.

Last week, he said Moscow funded Wagner Group and Concord, a parent company, nearly $2 billion from May 2022 to May 2023. 

Putin hinted Concord would be investigated for potentially stealing from the government.

Concord's catering company has now lost contracts with the Kremlin and Prigozhin's media group, Patriot Media, has reportedly shut down.

Read the full report at TheHill.com.

Welcome to The Hill’s Defense & National Security newsletter, I'm Brad Dress — your guide to the latest developments at the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill and beyond.

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