defensive alliance
Biden: Ukraine not yet ready for NATO membership
The NATO summit will take place next week in Vilnius, Lithuania. photo
© Olivier Matthys/AP/dpa
The NATO summit will take place in Lithuania next week. The US President is dampening expectations of Ukraine’s rapid accession. On the other hand, there is support from Turkey.
US President Joe Biden considers a speedy accession to the Ukraine to NATO for unrealistic. “I don’t think she’s ready for NATO membership,” Biden said in an interview excerpt published by US broadcaster CNN on Friday (local time). He believes that there is still no agreement among the NATO member states as to whether or not Ukraine should be admitted to the alliance “now, in the middle of the war”. If you do that, you are also obliged to defend every inch of NATO territory. If the war then continued, all NATO partners would be at war.
Ukraine has been defending itself against the Russian war of aggression for more than 16 months.
Sullivan: Summit result will not be NATO membership
Shortly before, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, had dampened Ukraine’s hopes of rapid accession to the western alliance. Ukraine will not join NATO as a result of the summit, he said. The United States explicitly supports an “open-door policy,” which means that NATO members decide together with Ukraine whether to join the alliance. However, the country must implement further reforms before it can become a member of NATO. The NATO summit is an important milestone on this path.
The NATO summit will take place next week in Vilnius, Lithuania. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj is also expected there on Wednesday. With a view to the summit meeting, he had repeatedly called for a concrete invitation for his country to join.
There are discussions within NATO about how exactly the summit should address Ukraine’s hopes for membership. According to information from alliance circles, countries such as Lithuania and Poland demanded that the country should be accepted immediately after a possible end of the war.
Erdogan: Ukraine “undoubtedly deserves” NATO membership
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also recently expressed his support for NATO membership. “Ukraine undoubtedly deserves NATO membership,” Erdogan said on Friday evening after meeting Zelenskyy in Istanbul.
However, other countries like Germany do not want to make such promises. Among other things, they point out that joining NATO should continue to be linked to the fulfillment of conditions. For example, the military must be subject to civilian and democratic control.
However, the majority of Germans are in favor of Ukraine being admitted to NATO sooner or later. In a survey by the opinion research institute YouGov on behalf of the German Press Agency, 42 percent are in favor of the fact that this should only happen after the end of the Russian war of aggression against the country. 13 percent are in favor of immediate accession during the ongoing war. 29 are fundamentally opposed to Ukraine’s admission to the alliance.