Ukraine's security chief offers explanation for lack of NATO invitation
Kiev still hasn’t been invited to join NATO because Western leaders learned their history via Russian textbooks, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council Aleksey Danilov has suggested.
“The thing is that the textbooks used by students, who graduate from respected Western universities, including American, British ones, were written by Russians,” Danilov said during a TV interview on Monday.
Those textbooks “were written based on the version of history that was written in Russia,” he added.
This is a “big problem” for Kiev because the present-day leaders of NATO countries, who graduated from those universities, “look at certain issues through Russian eyes,” the security chief pointed out.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has been calling on NATO to offer his country a concrete roadmap towards NATO accession during the bloc’s two-day summit, which kicked off in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius on Tuesday. He even warned that he may boycott the high-profile gathering if his demand isn’t fulfilled.
During his press-conference on Tuesday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made it clear that the summit won’t bring the breakthrough desired by Kiev. He said that members could only “remove the requirement for a Membership Action Plan (MAP)” for Ukraine, which would change the country’s accession path “from a two-step process to a one-step process.”
Later in the same day, Zelensky wrote on Telegram that Kiev had received “signals” that “there’s no timeline for both the invitation [or for] Ukraine’s membership” in the final statement of the NATO summit, which is currently being prepared, and without discussions with Ukraine.
Such a situation is “absurd,” he claimed, adding that NATO’s “indecisiveness” on the issue of Ukraine’s membership was a sign of the bloc’s “weakness.”
The Ukrainian leader also said that despite earlier threats he’ll eventually be coming to Vilnius to raise these issues with NATO members.
The US, Germany and some other countries have opposed Poland and the Baltic states, which pushed for a roadmap on joining NATO, after the end of the conflict with Russia, to be provided to Kiev. US President Joe Biden told CNN on Sunday that it was “premature” to speak about Ukraine’s membership as the country needed more reforms and “democratization.”
Russia, which sees NATO as a hostile bloc and vigorously opposes its eastward expansion, highlighted Kiev’s push to join the alliance as among the main reasons for launching its military operation in Ukraine in February 2022.
