MOSCOW, October 9. /TASS/. It looks like the West now finds permissible Ukraine’s loss of the territories it has already lost, hoping to pull Kiev into NATO in the foreseeable future, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has told a news briefing.
She drew attention to speculations by NATO’s former secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, who in an interview with The Financial Times admitted that in exchange for admission to NATO Ukraine might give up the territories lost in the conflict.
"Behind all these speculations we can see a tendency to discuss the possibility of granting the Kiev regime NATO membership in the foreseeable future," Zakharova said. "A similar idea was recently expressed by Britain’s former prime minister, Boris Johnson. Now it has been echoed by Stoltenberg, as we can see. Apparently, Washington, London and Brussels are skeptical about the potential of the Ukrainian armed forces and, in fact, are working on various scenarios to avoid the military and political collapse of the Zelensky regime, in which they have invested so much."
In the meantime, Zakharova recalled, "the West forgets that one of the main reasons for the start of the conflict was its obsessive wish to drag Ukraine into the alliance, to turn it into a springboard for confrontation with Russia." The same applies to "massive violations of the rights of the Russian-speaking population and the cultivation of aggressive nationalism, which has turned into neo-Nazism."
"Without eliminating these root causes of the crisis, it is simply impossible to achieve its fair settlement, as the Russian leadership has repeatedly said," Zakharova emphasized. "Achieving sustainable and long-term peace in Ukraine is unrealistic without establishing its neutral and non-aligned status, eradicating Nazism and chauvinism in that country, and abolishing all discriminatory laws.".