July 4. () –
The Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dimitro Kuleba, has ruled out that “in the near future” NATO will take “concrete” steps to ensure Ukraine’s entry into the Alliance, which, he stressed, “continues to live in the logic of before the war” with Russia.
“Ukraine is still on the path of Euro-Atlantic integration, but I do not see the potential for NATO to change its position as the European Union in the near future and start doing concrete things to ensure Ukraine’s entry into the Alliance,” Kuleba said. in an interview for the LB portal.
“Currently I don’t see the prerequisites for the Alliance to change its policy regarding Ukraine’s membership,” said Kuleba, for whom the European Union “has moved on to the second round” of relations with kyiv, after agreeing give him the status of a candidate to join the European bloc.
“NATO was in an advanced position in relation to the EU because it had at least decided that Ukraine would become a member of the Alliance, and the EU did not even have a European perspective for Ukraine”, however, “in the last four months, the European Union has advanced and has already passed to the second round, while NATO has remained in the same place,” he said.
In this sense, Kuleba has maintained that the Alliance has decided that “it will not play a leading role in supporting Ukraine” in an attempt that “Russia does not use the argument that it is at war with NATO.”
“The Alliance as a unit will play secondary roles,” said the head of Ukrainian diplomacy. A decision, he has explained, taken by an influential group of NATO member states. Instead, a kind of “coalition of the willing” has been created, with each country assisting Ukraine separately.
For Kuleba, the entry of Sweden and Finland into NATO has only highlighted the contradiction in the Alliance’s argument regarding its reluctance for Ukraine to join for fear of upsetting Russia. “Now they have 2,000 kilometers of common border,” she pointed out.
“The whole narrative, everything that the individual partners told us about why Ukraine should not join NATO, has been nullified with the membership of Sweden and Finland. They told us, ‘we can’t move towards the border, we will have a common border. with Russia’ (…), all arguments as to why it is impossible to bring Ukraine into the Alliance have been annulled,” he said.
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