2023-06-18 10:40:41
17/06/2023
Ukraine will not benefit from any special treatment to join the NATO military alliance, US President Joe Biden has said.
“They have to meet the same standards. That is we are not going to make it easy”, Biden said when asked by journalists regarding whether the Atlantic alliance would facilitate Ukraine’s entry.
Biden described this Saturday as “totally irresponsible” the deployment of the first Russian nuclear warheads in Belarus.
This move by Moscow was the result of an agreement announced in March between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko, who he ceded his country’s territory to Russia to attack Ukraine.
Biden’s comments come ahead of the upcoming annual NATO summit, which will take place on July 11 and 12 in Vilnius, Lithuania.
In that meeting, Ukraine will not be invited to join NATO, announced on Friday its secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, although he noted that kyiv may be a “member at any given time”.
The invitation is the first step in the membership process.
Also read: Russia will respond to Finland’s accession to NATO with a strong military deployment
In any case, the Alliance intends to hold the first meeting of the new NATO-Ukraine council with Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky during the summit.
last April 4 Finland became the 31st partner of the alliance, while Sweden has not yet obtained the necessary green light from two members, Turkey and Hungary, and still remains at the gates of NATO.
After decades of neutrality, following a military alignment since the end of the Cold War, the two Nordic countries announced their candidacy for NATO last May, as a direct consequence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the demand of Moscow to freeze any expansion of the alliance.
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