NEW YORK, July 8. /TASS/. The people of Ukraine will not agree to any territorial concessions, President Vladimir Zelensky has said.
"Ukrainians are not ready to give away their land, to accept that these territories belong to Russia. This is our land," Zelensky told CNN in an interview aired on Thursday.
"We always talk about that, and we are intending to prove it," he added.
Zelensky also said he saw no other security guarantees for his country, other than NATO membership, and described the decision not to grant NATO membership to Ukraine as wrong.
During the Bucharest summit in April 2008, NATO announced that "Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members of the alliance. However, it refused to provide either state with a Membership Action Plan, which is the first step in the legal procedure for joining the organization. In February 2019, the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) approved constitutional amendments which reaffirmed Kiev’s willingness to join NATO. Ukraine also received the status of NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner.
On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a special military operation following a request for help from the leaders of the Donbass republics. He stressed that Moscow's plans did not include an occupation of Ukrainian territories, its goals being the demilitarization and denazification of the country. In response, the West began to gradually introduce sweeping sanctions against Moscow and to supply weapons and military equipment to Kiev estimated at billions of dollars.