NATO members have declined Kiev's aspirations: Zelensky's office
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NATO has dismissed Ukraine's applications and aspirations for accession to the alliance, and Kiev says it no longer wants anything in this regard.
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US President Joe Biden with NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg
Ukraine is not planning to do anything in terms of its NATO membership in the near future, Ihor Zhovka, the Deputy Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, told the Financial Times.
"Nato members have declined our aspirations. We will not do anything else in this regard," Zhovkva said.
Despite the impasse on Kiev's cooperation with the West within the framework of NATO, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's diplomatic advisor said Kiev wanted Brussels to remove any mentions of Russia as a partner from the military alliance's strategic concept.
Zhovkva said Kiev expected there to be more strict and severe warnings to Moscow within NATO's strategic concept. "Don't be shy - that's my appeal to NATO members - in formulating the provisions vis-a-vis Russia."
He further underlined that if the NATO member states do not "reveal" what is going on in Europe and Ukraine, then Brussels' outline of its policies and priorities for the next decade would be a mere document, "absolutely irrelevant".
NATO is set to hold a summit in Madrid, Spain, next week (June 28-30) where it is expected to adopt a new strategic concept outlining its policies and priorities for the next decade.
Kiev has been voicing its desire to join NATO for months now, and these calls for accession raised security concerns in Russia and prompted Moscow to launch what it called a special military operation in Ukraine.
The operation came with several objectives, such as curbing the spread of neo-Nazism within Ukraine, protecting the people of the Donbass republics from Ukrainian aggression, and preventing Kiev's accession to NATO.
Ukraine, however, has been backtracking on its calls for accession, with Zelensky saying in March that he did not want to be the president of a "country which is begging something on its knees".
Russia sees NATO expansion as a threat, especially since over the years, the Cold War-era alliance expanded eastward, jeopardizing Russian interests.
