July 9 () –
A NATO source has reported that Germany will use the organization’s annual summit in Vilnius, Lithuania this week to urge others to focus on security guarantees, rather than membership proposals, to help Ukraine defend itself in the absence of accession and thus delay the country’s entry.
“Berlin is distant at the prospect of offering immediate membership,” the source told British newspaper ‘The Telegraph’, adding that it “wants a process and time to develop guarantees to essentially block membership.”
“Berlin does not want to see Vladimir Putin potentially testing Article 5,” since under a clause of this article any NATO member state attacked by an external aggressor has the right to request the military intervention of the other allies.
A similar opinion is that of the president of the United States, Joe Biden, who said that he wanted to avoid a situation in which “we are all at war, in a war with Russia” to which he added that Ukraine “is not ready” to be member of NATO and that “it would take a while”.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has gradually intensified his campaign for Ukraine to join NATO after Russia invaded last year, seeking to drive an unmistakable wedge between kyiv and Moscow.
The leader has called on all 31 NATO member states to take concrete steps towards Ukraine’s membership so that his country can quickly join the transatlantic alliance after the war.
Germany and the United States have privately warned that the move could escalate the current conflict into an active war between NATO and Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has often claimed that NATO’s expansion into Russia’s borders over the past two decades was a key factor in his decision to invade Ukraine.
