2023-07-08 09:45:00
Ahead of the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, US President Biden told CNN that he did not believe Ukraine was “ready for NATO membership”. There is still no agreement among the NATO member states as to whether or not Ukraine should be included in the defense alliance “now, in the middle of the war”. If you do that, you are also obliged to defend every inch of NATO territory. If the war then continued, all NATO partners would be at war.
Shortly before, Biden’s national security adviser, Sullivan, had already dampened Ukraine’s hopes of joining NATO quickly. Ukraine will not join NATO as a result of the summit, he said.
Turkish President Erdogan, on the other hand, expressed his support for the Kievs’ wish. “Ukraine undoubtedly deserves NATO membership,” Erdogan said on Friday evening after his meeting with Zelenskyy.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan (back) comes with Volodymyr Zelenskyj to a joint press conference after their meeting in Istanbul.
Francisco Seco/AP/dpa
Within the alliance, there were discussions right up to the end about how the topic should be dealt with at the summit. According to information from alliance circles, countries such as Lithuania and Poland are demanding that the country should receive a commitment to be admitted immediately after a possible end of the war. Other countries like Germany don’t actually want to make such promises.
However, according to a survey by the opinion research institute YouGov on behalf of dpa, a majority of Germans are in favor of Ukraine being admitted to NATO sooner or later. In the survey, around 42 percent are in favor of the fact that this should only happen after the end of the Russian war of aggression against the country. 13 percent are in favor of immediate accession during the ongoing war. 29 are fundamentally opposed to Ukraine’s admission to the alliance. Its core is mutual military assistance in the event of an attack from outside.
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