Under what circumstances should Ukraine be integrated into NATO? The 31 member states will discuss this from Tuesday. In the run-up, Ukraine is stepping up pressure and demanding “expulsions”.
In the run-up to the NATO summit, Ukraine continues to push for a clear commitment to join the alliance. “At the summit in Vilnius, we expect a clear invitation and direction to join NATO,” Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Oleksii Makeiev, told the German news agency (dpa). Even if accession does not happen overnight, it is expected that NATO will no longer allow ambiguity.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the heads of state and government of the 31 NATO countries will meet in Vilnius, Lithuania, to discuss, among other things, the prospects for Ukraine’s accession to NATO. Makeiev warned that the mistakes made at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest should not be repeated.
Ukraine: With NATO status there would be no war
At the time, Germany in particular, under then Chancellor Angela Merkel, had opposed the rapid admission of Ukraine into the alliance. “If Ukraine had already been a member of NATO in 2014, the annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbass and now Russia’s large-scale offensive war certainly would not have happened,” said the ambassador.
Makeiev pointed out that according to a recent survey, more than half of Germans are in favor of Ukraine joining NATO sooner or later. “If more than half of the respondents in Germany are in favor of Ukraine in NATO, then you understand that our membership is not an escalation, but the path to peace,” he said. “The only way to end Russian aggression against Europe is to send a strong signal from the 2023 NATO summit, which has every chance to go down in the history of cohesion.”
Many Germans for admission
In a YouGov poll released Saturday, 42 percent of respondents said they want Ukraine to join NATO after the end of Russia’s offensive war. 13 percent even called for immediate accession during the ongoing war. Only 29 percent are fundamentally against Ukraine’s entry into the alliance, the core of which is mutual military assistance in the event of an outside attack.
Source: Krone
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