The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is not discussing inviting Ukraine to join, only arms supplies, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told a press conference ahead of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers.
"I would say we need to focus and we will be very focused in the next two days on what is necessary now. And what is necessary now is to make sure that military aid goes to Ukraine," Rutte said when asked whether NATO's top diplomats intended to invite Kiev to join the bloc.
Rutte reiterated that NATO allies have agreed that "Ukraine's future is in NATO". "During the Washington summit we agreed on an irreversible path to NATO," he noted, adding that the Alliance is working to build a bridge for Ukraine's membership. "It happens step by step," Rutte stressed.
https://twitter.com/SecGenNATO/status/1863915868595318842
Ukraine's aspirations to join NATO
The Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly stated that Kiev wants to become a NATO member in the near future. However, Volodymyr Zelensky said on 1 December that Ukraine would never accept a partial invitation, although he did not rule out that the "hot phase" of the conflict could end if the Kiev-controlled part of the country came under the NATO "umbrella". Still, Zelensky admitted that Ukraine had not received any proposals on the matter.
At the NATO summit in Vilnius in the summer of 2023, the G7 countries declared their intention to conclude security agreements with Kiev to compensate for the lack of an invitation to NATO membership. Since then, Ukraine has signed more than a dozen bilateral agreements. According to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, these documents do not contain any guarantees, but merely state what Kiev's allies are already doing and make no promises beyond that.
Earlier, Russian President Putin outlined his peace terms, which include the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the Donbas and Novorossiya, as well as the abandonment of any plans to join NATO. Moscow is also demanding the lifting of all Western sanctions against Russia and guarantees that Ukraine will have the status of a non-aligned country without nuclear weapons.
TASS/ gnews - RoZ_07
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