Consultations on the terms of Ukraine’s path to NATO membership are still ongoing, he said Monday in Vilnius after a meeting with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda.
Stoltenberg went on to stress that he was certain, however, that the allies would have a good, strong and positive message at the NATO summit. The two-day top meeting begins on Tuesday in Vilnius. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba had previously tweeted an alleged agreement among NATO members that would allow Ukraine to join the military alliance in a simplified way similar to Finland’s before. Accordingly, the NATO allies had reached a consensus on abandoning the membership action plan.
When asked, Stoltenberg only said that the 31 allies were still discussing and negotiating the exact wording. So he won’t go into detail about it.
“Very substantial announcements”
According to information from German government circles, NATO will not invite Ukraine to join the alliance. There will be “very substantial” announcements there, government circles in Berlin said on Monday. No further details were given. The Taurus cruise missiles with a range of 500 kilometers, the delivery of which Ukraine had requested in May, are still not to be delivered. “There is no news to report as far as Taurus is concerned,” it said. Germany is already the second most important arms supplier to Ukraine after the USA.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to his Ukrainian counterpart Kuleba on the phone. He had an important conversation with Kuleba in the run-up to the NATO summit this week, Blinken wrote on Twitter late Sunday evening (local time). Kuleba also said on Twitter that the call with Blinken was “productive”.
At the weekend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi made his participation in the summit conditional on the decision on Ukraine’s accession prospects being made there. “We want all decisions to be made during the summit. In that case, it’s clear that I will be there,” he said in an interview with US broadcaster ABC published on Sunday. “I don’t want to go to Vilnius for fun if the decision has already been made.”
“Ukrainians in NATO are the cornerstone of security in Europe,” Presidential Advisor Mykhailo Podoliak wrote on Twitter on Monday. Kiev will become a NATO member without “buts” or bureaucratic hurdles. “Until then: more technology, more grenades, more weapons,” Podoljak demanded.
Russia threatens countermeasures
The Kremlin has threatened Russia to take countermeasures if Ukraine joins NATO. Ukraine’s NATO accession will “have very negative consequences for the entire and already half-destroyed security architecture of Europe and pose an absolute danger and threat to our country,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday in Moscow, according to Russian news agencies. Such a move would require a “rather tough and understandable reaction” from the Russian side, Peskov added.
The Kremlin knows that before the NATO summit on Tuesday and Wednesday in Lithuania there is currently a lively debate among NATO members about Ukraine’s accession and “that there are different positions on this,” Peskov said. The “Kiev regime” is using various means to “put pressure on everyone involved so that as many countries as possible demonstrate their solidarity on this issue in the run-up to this summit”.
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