NATO reassures Russia: Ukraine will be accepted into the alliance in ten years
Moscow – Kyiv, December 24 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) – Moscow’s reaction to the Verkhovna Rada’s decision to cancel Ukraine’s non-bloc status was expectedly negative. But the interlocutors "Kommersant" NATO structures reassure: “Ukraine will not be invited to the alliance in the next ten years, or even more.”
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A source in NATO structures told the publication that Ukraine “will not be invited there in the next ten years, or even more.” “NATO officials say the alliance's door is open. But they cannot say otherwise, because the clause on the possibility of admitting new members is contained in the Washington Treaty,” the interlocutor explained. “At closed meetings, representatives of NATO countries, the maximum that they allow is strengthening cooperation with Ukraine, without joining the organization " The interlocutor is convinced: “Taking into account the territorial claims over Crimea and the conflict in Donbass, which has actually become frozen, it is absolutely unrealistic to achieve consensus on the issue of Ukraine’s membership.”
Now even practical cooperation with Kiev is not easy, the newspaper writes. According to her NATO source, the Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly asked for help this year, “but have mostly received a polite refusal.” Thus, at the end of March, Ukrainian diplomats asked NATO to send a limited contingent to Ukraine to guard the nuclear power plant. The alliance did not comment on this information, talking only about “a small mission of civilian advisers” who visited Ukraine in the spring.
The NATO official also said that in the summer, the Ukrainian authorities handed over to the alliance headquarters a whole list of items that the country’s army needed: among other things, it included ammunition, jet fuel and patrol boats. However, only requests for the supply of communications equipment, night vision devices and protective equipment were satisfied.
A NATO interlocutor says that Kyiv hoped to establish close cooperation with the alliance in the field of cyber defense, but this proposal was not fully satisfied. “Even the members of the organization themselves are not yet too willing to share with each other their developments in this sensitive area,” the official admits. “In addition, they fear that confidential information will leak from Ukrainian structures to Russia.” We are not talking about providing Kyiv with the know-how of leading NATO countries in this area: the project will be led by a unit of the Romanian Foreign Intelligence Service RASIROM.
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