NEW YORK, August 30. /TASS/. Western countries can no longer afford to integrate Ukraine into NATO, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in an interview with Tucker Carlson.

In the interview, which was published on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday, the Hungarian premier told the former Fox News host that there was a real chance to integrate Ukraine into the North Atlantic Alliance at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008. But "there was no agreement among the big Western countries to do so," so the idea was rejected, Orban said. "We missed the historical opportunity to do so (to integrate the Ukrainians into NATO - TASS). And this window of opportunity is not open any more, so we can’t do that. So, we can’t afford to have that long borderline between Russia and Ukraine which belongs to NATO - that would mean immediate war danger to all of us, even in Washington," Orban warned.

According to the Hungarian premier, the North Atlantic Alliance should "forget about" Ukraine’s integration into NATO and agree on a new security architecture with Moscow. "We should make a deal with the Russians on the new security architecture to provide security and sovereignty for Ukraine, but not membership in NATO," Orban maintained.

Ukraine first decided to join the alliance under President Leonid Kuchma in 2002. In 2008, when President Viktor Yushchenko came to power, Kiev applied to join a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP). However, the application was shelved over the position of Germany and France at the military bloc’s summit in 2008. In 2010, the then President Viktor Yanukovich vowed to drop Ukraine’s NATO integration bid. The country reversed course in 2014, when Pyotr Poroshenko was elected president and vowed to seek rapprochement with NATO. In 2017, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada (parliament) passed a bill making accession to NATO the country’s foreign policy priority.

Following NATO’s summit in Vilnius on July 11-12, the alliance’s chief Jens Stoltenberg announced that the allies had adopted a package of three elements bringing Ukraine closer to NATO. Leaders decided to remove the requirement for a Membership Action Plan, they also committed to offering multi-year military assistance to Kiev and agreed to establish the NATO-Ukraine Council. NATO said in the concluding statement that the alliance would issue an invitation for Ukraine to join it "when allies agree and conditions are met."