Ukraine urges clear membership commitment at NATO summit

Ukraine continued to press shortly before the NATO summit this week in Vilnius for an unequivocal commitment that it will be admitted to the Western defence alliance.

"At the summit in Vilnius, we expect a clear and unequivocal invitation and direction to join NATO," Ukraine's ambassador to Germany, Oleksii Makeiev, told dpa. Even if accession would not happen overnight, he said, he expected NATO to allow no more ambiguity.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the leaders of the 31 NATO states are scheduled to meet in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, with NATO membership prospects for Ukraine one of the items to be discussed.

Makeiev warned that the mistakes made at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008 should not be repeated. At that time, Germany in particular, under then-chancellor Angela Merkel, opposed Ukraine's rapid admission to the alliance.

"If Ukraine had already been a NATO member in 2014, the Crimean annexation, the war in the Donbass and now the Russian large-scale war of aggression would certainly not have taken place," the ambassador said.

Makeiev pointed out that according to a recent poll, more than half of all Germans are in favour of Ukraine joining NATO sooner or later. "If already more than half of the respondents in Germany are in favour of Ukraine joining NATO, then it is understood that our membership does not mean escalation, but the path to peace," he said.

"The only way to put an end to Russian aggression against Europe is to send a strong signal from the 2023 NATO summit, which has every opportunity of going down in the history of cohesion."

In a poll by YouGov published on Saturday, 42% of respondents in Germany said they favoured Ukraine joining NATO after Russia's invasion ended.

As many as 13% even advocated immediate accession during the current war. Only 29% are fundamentally opposed to Ukraine joining the alliance. The core of the alliance is mutual military assistance in the event of an external attack.