NATO currently consists of 30 members. This includes three members of the former Soviet Union (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) and all former members of the Warsaw Pact except Russia (Poland, East Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania). Ukraine borders Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania.
Noticed in the news today that President Zelensky of Ukraine has urged NATO to speed up his country’s membership into the alliance: see: https://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-urges-nato-speed-membership-110245606.html
This has been a long drawn out process. Ukraine joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace program in February 1994. In 2002 the President of Ukraine Kuchma declared that Ukraine wanted to join NATO and in 2003 sent Ukrainian troop to Iraq. They were also part of the peacekeeping effort in Kosovo. Ukraine applied for the NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) in 2008. Viktor Yanukovich was elected president in 2010 (which was a free and fair election) and shelved plans to join NATO shortly thereafter. He nuzzled up to Russia, cancelling the attempts to get Ukraine to the join the European Union and instead decided to join Russia’s Eurasian Union. There were then massive protest against him that cost lives of over a hundred protestors and Yanukovich fled the county in February 1914. There was then multiple secessionist movements in Ukraine (Donets and Lugansk) and a Russian engineered seizure of Crimea and Sevastopol, which Russia has now annexed. So…..
Needless to say, Russia does oppose this.
P.S. The previous President of The Dupuy Institute, Major General Nicholas Krawciw (U.S. Army, ret.), also worked as the Secretary of Defense Senior Military Representative to Ukraine. MG Krawciw was born in Lvov in 1935. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_S._H._Krawciw