NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte yesterday sidestepped questions about Ukraine’s possible membership of the military alliance, saying that the priority now must be to strengthen the nation’s hand in any future peace talks with Russia by sending it more weapons.
Rutte’s remarks, ahead of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers, came days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that extending alliance membership to territory now under Kyiv’s control could end “the hot stage” of the almost three-year war in Ukraine, where Russian forces are pressing deeper into their western neighbor.
“The front is not moving eastwards. It is slowly moving westwards,” Rutte said. “So we have to make sure that Ukraine gets into a position of strength, and then it should be for the Ukrainian government to decide on the next steps, in terms of opening peace talks and how to conduct them.”
Photo: AFP
At their summit in Washington in July, leaders of the 32 NATO member nations insisted that Ukraine is on an “irreversible” path to membership, but some, led by the US, have balked at moving forward while the war rages and before the nation’s borders are clearly demarcated.
NATO was founded on the principle that an attack on any ally should be considered an attack on them all.
Ukrainian officials yesterday made it clear that they would not countenance any half measures or stopgap solutions on NATO membership.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a strongly worded statement saying that Ukraine “will not settle for any alternatives, surrogates or substitutes for Ukraine’s full membership in NATO,” citing its “bitter experience of the Budapest Memorandum.”
Under the international agreement signed in the Hungarian capital 30 years ago, Ukraine agreed to give up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons, which amounted to the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, in return for security guarantees from Russia, the US and the UK.
The ministry statement called the Budapest agreement a “monument to short-sightedness in making strategic security decisions.”
Reflecting on his meeting with US president-elect Donald Trump, Rutte said he had underlined that China, North Korea and Iran were weighing in on Russia’s side, putting the US and the Asia-Pacific region at risk.
“Whenever we get to a deal on Ukraine it has to be a good deal, because what we can never have is high-fiving [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-un and [Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] and whoever else,” Rutte said, adding that this would only encourage the leaders of North Korea and China to endorse the use of force elsewhere.
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