No word juggling on Ukraine expected at NATO summit - Kuleba

At the Washington NATO summit in July, the Allies will not be inventing new wording regarding Ukraine's future membership. Instead, they will focus on creating mechanisms to bring Ukraine as close as possible to the Alliance based on objective indicators.

The opinion was expressed by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, who spoke at a Q&A session during the presentation of the book "War and New Horizons. Opinion leaders on the present and future of Ukraine and the world," reports an Ukrinform correspondent.

The head of Ukrainian diplomacy noted that since the decisions on Ukraine's accession to the EU and NATO are essentially made by the same people, the Allies also considers Ukraine "theirs", but they have not yet decided when it should become legally bound on paper.

Commenting on this, Kuleba noted that, according to the logic of Ukraine’s partners, while a country at war can, in principle, become a member of the European Union, and this would not be perceived as a declaration of war against Russia, some members of NATO fear that this is precisely how Russia would see not only Ukraine’s accession to NATO but even the very invitation.

"That’s a long, long path. But, I think that NATO has also decided on a conceptual level that we are ‘theirs’, but due to the fact that they cannot take a step toward formalizing this recognition, in July (at the Washington NATO Summit, - ed.) there will not be so much word juggling because they believe that enough was said in Vilnius (at the NATO summit in 2023, - ed.) but efforts toward creating mechanisms to bring us as close as possible to NATO in line with objective indicators, so that our membership in the future became a mere formality – as was with Sweden and Finland. No one reformed anyone, everyone signed things off, and that was it," said Kuleba.

As Ukrinform reported earlier, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia James O'Brien said on May 25 that the United States does not expect any decisions at the Washington NATO summit in July on inviting Ukraine to join NATO, but significant support will be expressed to Kyiv along the path.

On July 9-10, Washington will host a NATO summit dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Alliance. It is expected that the situation around the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be on top agenda.