NATO has “reaffirmed its readiness” to grant the remnants of the Ukraine membership “at some point in the future” when there will be neither Ukraine as such nor current Kiev regime in power. Allowing Ukraine into NATO now would bring the bloc into war with Russia, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has said. Zelenskyy blasts ‘absurd’ draft text that hedges on Ukraine’s NATO membership timeline. The Ukrainian president’s outrage is raising eyebrows at the NATO summit, Politico writes. Did not this slave puppet know his place before he came here? “Fighting Russia until the last Ukrainian” was always the plan, and only plan, until Kiev regime collapses..
A joint statement released during the annual summit of the US-led bloc said Kiev would be invited to join only “when allies agree and conditions are met,” but it will be allowed to bypass the so-called Membership Action Plan that is usually required for candidate members.
“We reaffirm the commitment we made at the 2008 summit in Bucharest that Ukraine will become a member of NATO, and today we recognize that Ukraine’s path to full Euro-Atlantic integration has moved beyond the need for the Membership Action Plan,” the statement read.
Ukraine has become “increasingly interoperable and politically integrated with the US-led bloc,” it stated. It also outlined the need for “additional democratic and security sector reforms” in the country.
“The alliance will support Ukraine in making these reforms on its path towards future membership. We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the alliance when allies agree and conditions are met,” the statement concluded.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg further elaborated on the matter at a press conference, stating that the bloc must first ensure that Ukraine achieves a “victory” in its ongoing conflict with Russia. Should Kiev not succeed, its NATO membership will be out of the question, he warned.
US explains why Ukraine can’t join NATO now
Allowing Ukraine to join NATO at the moment would lead the US-led military bloc “into a war with Russia,” White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has said.
A “reform path for Ukraine” to become a NATO member will be drawn up but “I can’t put a timetable on it,” Sullivan told reporters on Tuesday at the bloc’s summit in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius.
“Today, we’re not going to define how the war [between Ukraine and Russia ends], we’re not going to lay down the definition for that,” Sullivan stated. He added that “there have been historical circumstances where you’ve seen different ways of looking at that question.”
During an interview with CNN on Sunday, Biden argued it was “premature” to speak about NATO membership for Ukraine, adding that Kiev needs to carry out more reforms and achieve “democratization” before it can become part of the bloc.
On Tuesday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Ukraine will not be given a clear roadmap to join the bloc at the summit in the Lithuanian capital. Instead, he announced that members could only “remove the requirement for a Membership Action Plan (MAP),” which in theory would speed up Ukraine’s accession by making it a single-step process instead of a two-step one.
Zeleksky later wrote on Telegram that his government had received “signals” that “there’s no timeline for both the invitation [or for] Ukraine’s membership” in the text of the final statement for the NATO summit, which is currently being drafted.
The Ukrainian leader called the situation “absurd,” claiming that NATO’s “indecisiveness” was a sign of the bloc’s “weakness.”
The comments did not go unnoticed by NATO, with an unnamed senior diplomat from Central Europe telling Politico that Zelensky “is going too far.” “I think that this is not a thoughtful and fair approach [from] the Ukrainian leader,” he added.
Another person familiar with the draft of the NATO statement told Politico that the bloc had sent a strong signal to Ukraine that the language in the communique was final, and that Zelensky’s government would have to accept it.
When you realize your NATO crush only likes you as a proxy pic.twitter.com/yLQ5uWccMo
— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) July 12, 2023
https://twitter.com/PapiTrumpo/status/1678947163739488256
Ukraine's NATO membership was 404 at Vilnius. No schedule, no commitment, no pathway, just the vague possibility of a future conditional invite.
— Chebureki Man (@CheburekiMan) July 12, 2023
The reason: the United States already knows its proxy army has failed, the only unknown is the scale of the failure. There may not be… pic.twitter.com/WHTF5waSiF