Hosting Nato’s top brass, Montenegro said yesterday it was optimistic of being invited to join the Western military alliance in December, over the objections of Russia.
Ambassadors of Nato’s North Atlantic Council are meeting in Podgorica today in the latest signal of the alliance’s resolve to usher Montenegro into its ranks.
Bringing in the tiny Adriatic republic of 650,000 people would mark the first expansion of Nato ranks in ex-Communist eastern Europe since Montenegro’s neighbours Albania and Croatia joined in 2009, and the first since Russia-Western tensions flared over Ukraine’s 2014 revolution and the war that ensued.
“I am certain the conditions are there for the alliance member states in December to take the decision to invite Montenegro to join,” Montenegrin Foreign Minister Igor Luksic said in a statement yesterday.
Russia says Nato’s Balkan expansion is a provocation
The United States has signalled its support for the accession of the former Yugoslav republic. Washington’s Nato envoy, Douglas Lute, said yesterday there was an “emerging consensus” among Nato’s 28 members though an invitation would depend on Montenegro making further progress on reforms to tackle corruption and improve the rule of law, and ensuring public support in the country, where polls are mixed.
“So if those two conditions are met,” Mr Lute said, “then the US vote in December will be positive.”
Russia has described Nato’s extension into the Balkans, where Moscow enjoys historically close relations with fellow Orthodox Christians, as a “provocation”.
Western diplomats say Montenegro’s accession would send a message to Moscow that it cannot halt Nato’s expansion, though it is much less contentious than the its earlier overtures to the likes of formerly Soviet Georgia, whose own membership ambitions were quashed by its war with Russia in 2008.
Montenegro’s breathtaking Adriatic coastline has seen an influx of Russian private money, homebuyers and tourists since the country split from a state union with Serbia in 2006.
But Podgorica’s relations with Moscow have long been uneasy given the Montenegrin government’s pursuit of closer integration within the West largely since the end in 1995 of the wars over the break-up of old federal Yugoslavia.
Ties deteriorated further when Montenegro joined EU sanctions against Russia over its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and support for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Montenegro’s government points to opinion polls that suggest a narrow majority support entering Nato – 16 years after the alliance struck targets in the country during an air war to drive security forces under Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic from Serbia’s then-southern province of Kosovo.