Vilnius (EFE).- The Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, affirmed this Monday that the allies are studying reducing Ukraine’s accession process from two to a single step, on the occasion of the summit that will be held on Tuesday and Wednesday in Lithuania.
Stoltenberg stressed at a press conference prior to the Vilnius summit that one of the proposals being discussed by the allies to bring Ukraine closer to the organization is to suppress the accession action plan (MAP). for Kiev, so it would go “from a two-step process to a one-step process.”
Ukraine sees the end of NATO assistance to its reforms as a step towards membership
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba announced today that NATO countries have unanimously agreed to stop applying to Ukraine the Accession Action Plan, with which the Alliance helps candidate countries to make the necessary reforms to entry.
Kuleba said the decision, reached on the eve of the Alliance summit in Vilnius which begins tomorrow, removes an obstacle to Ukraine’s NATO aspirations.
“After intense negotiations, NATO allies have reached a consensus on the removal of the Accession Action Plan from Ukraine’s path to membership,” Kuleba wrote on his Twitter account.
The head of Ukrainian diplomacy has congratulated himself on this “long-awaited decision that shortens our path to NATO.”
Kuleba added that “it is also the best time to offer clarity on the invitation to Ukraine to become a member” of the Alliance.
Ukraine asks NATO to commit at the Vilnius summit to accept it as a member country once the war with Russia is over. The United States has cooled Ukrainian expectations, noting that there is currently no consensus on Ukraine’s entry in the post-war period.
Russia will react “clearly and firmly” to Ukraine’s eventual NATO entry
Russia will consider the possible entry of Ukraine into NATO as a danger and will react to it in a “sufficiently understandable and firm” manner, the Kremlin declared today on the eve of the Atlantic Alliance summit in Vilnius, to be held this 11 and 12 July.
“You are aware of Russia’s absolutely understandable and consistent position that Ukraine’s NATO membership will require a sufficiently understandable and firm response from us,” Russian Presidency spokesman Dmitri Peskov said at a press conference.
He pointed out that currently “quite intense discussions are taking place between the member countries of the Alliance, especially in view of the NATO summit, and there are different points of view on the matter”, of Ukraine’s entry into this organization.
Ukraine’s membership in NATO “will have extremely serious consequences for the entire security architecture in Europe, which is already deteriorating,” he added.
The Kremlin representative stated that “the Kiev regime tries to put pressure on everyone in various ways to get the greatest number of (NATO) countries to express their solidarity regarding” Ukraine’s entry into the Atlantic Alliance.
US President Joe Biden has acknowledged that there is not the necessary unanimity to invite Ukraine to join the Alliance when the war ends. Biden has also claimed that Ukraine is “not ready” for NATO membership and must continue to make reforms.
Faced with the prospect that the Vilnius summit will not give the desired results, the Ukrainian president, Volodímir Zelenski, continues without revealing whether or not he will attend the meeting in the Lithuanian capital.
“I don’t want to go to Vilnius to have a good time,” said the Ukrainian president, who demanded to know what decisions will be made during the summit to decide if it is worth attending to influence what is agreed on Ukraine.
Zelensky already declared in June that Ukraine’s presence at the summit is meaningless if NATO is not going to give it “some positive signal” in the sense that kyiv is asking for.