NEW YORK, December 3. /TASS/. Key NATO member states, including the US and Germany, are opposing Ukraine's entry into the alliance, fearing it could escalate tensions with Russia, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported, citing sources in Kiev and Brussels.
According to them, Vladimir Zelensky is currently seeking an official invitation to join the military bloc, "though he acknowledges that accession to NATO could only come after the war ends." The sources also noted that Kiev hopes to receive at least a recommendation from NATO foreign ministers to their country leaders to send Ukraine an invitation to join the alliance. However, even this scenario remains a vague prospect, the newspaper said.
On December 3, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte confirmed at a press conference before a meeting of the bloc's foreign policy chiefs in Brussels that NATO was not considering inviting Ukraine to join the alliance, but only supplying weapons to Kiev.
The Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly stated that Kiev wants to become a NATO member in the near future. Meanwhile, Zelensky has recently made a number of mutually exclusive statements. On December 1, he claimed that Ukraine would never accept a partial invitation to join the alliance, although he had previously admitted that the "hot phase" of the conflict would be stopped if the Kiev-controlled territories were brought "under the umbrella" of the military bloc. However, he acknowledged that Ukraine had not received any proposals on this matter.
At the NATO summit in Vilnius in the summer of 2023, G7 countries announced their intention to conclude security assurance agreements with Ukraine to "compensate" for its lack of an invitation to the alliance, which Kiev had sought. Since then, Ukraine has signed over 15 bilateral agreements. According to Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, these documents do not contain any guarantees but merely outline what is already being done by Kiev's allies, promising nothing beyond that.
Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier set forth the conditions for resolving the situation in Ukraine, which included Ukraine withdrawing troops from Donbass and Novorossiya and abandoning plans to join NATO. Moscow also believes that all Western sanctions on Russia must be removed and Ukraine’s non-bloc and non-nuclear status must be guaranteed.