KIEV (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday asked the government of United States President Joe Biden to help convince members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to invite Ukraine to join the military alliance contrary to Russia.
Kiev wants NATO members to extend an invitation to an alliance meeting in Brussels this week, as the war in Ukraine approaches the three-year mark and Russia makes gains on the battlefield.
Zelensky spoke to journalists in Kiev alongside the new president of the European Union’s council of member states, Antonio Costa, who traveled to Ukraine on his first day in office to demonstrate support for Kiev against Russia.
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The Ukrainian leader, who has been calibrating Ukraine’s positions before Donald Trump succeeds Biden in January, acknowledged that some NATO allies are still wary of inviting Kiev to join the alliance.
“The current United States administration has two months to go,” he said. “They have influence over the few Europeans who are skeptical about our future (in NATO).”
Trump criticized the scale of US support for Ukraine and promised to end the war quickly, without saying how.
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Russian advance
Moscow’s troops have captured village after village in eastern Ukraine, part of an effort to seize the industrial region of Donbas, while Russian airstrikes target a Ukrainian power grid as winter approaches.
In November, the Biden administration granted Ukraine permission to use Western weapons to further attack Russian territory. Moscow responded by attacking Ukraine with a new intermediate-range ballistic missile and threatened further attacks on government facilities in Kiev.
Kiev has long demanded that Moscow withdraw all troops from its territory and says Ukraine must receive security guarantees comparable to NATO membership to prevent Russia from attacking again. Moscow, which controls almost a fifth of Ukrainian territory, demands recognition of its annexation of Ukrainian lands and Ukraine’s permanent neutrality.
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In an interview last week, Zelensky floated the idea that his country could become a member of NATO even while Russia occupies some captured territory, a solution he said could end the “hot phase” of the war.
This Sunday, Zelensky clarified that any invitation to join the alliance must extend to all Ukrainian territory, even though the alliance’s collective defense agreement may not operate in areas occupied by Russian forces.
“There can be no NATO invitation to (only) a part of Ukrainian territory,” he said, asserting that an invitation extended only to parts of Ukraine would amount to recognizing that other parts were no longer Ukrainian.
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Costa, who visited Ukraine along with the EU’s new foreign policy chief and the bloc’s enlargement chief on the day they all took office, said the EU “has been with you since the first day of this war of aggression, and you can count on us to continue to be with you.”
“These are not just words,” added Costa, the former Portuguese prime minister who replaced Charles Michel as president of the European Council and chairman of EU summits.
Costa said Ukraine’s EU accession process was marked by “a sense of urgency” and that the bloc could take steps to integrate Ukraine before its entry, such as coordinating mobile phone roaming rules and allowing some products enter the single market.
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“We cannot manage this process as if it were something normal, because it is a geopolitical choice,” he said.
