NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed this Monday in Berlin that the summit that the allies will hold in July in Vilnius will not lead to a formal invitation for Ukraine to join the alliance. “At the Vilnius summit and in the preparations for the summit, we are not discussing the possibility of issuing a formal invitation“, declared the Norwegian after meeting with the chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Stoltenberg Clarity clashes with kyiv’s expectations that he and other Western leaders have fed from ambiguity and that the Secretary General himself continues to make with statements such as “in Vilnius we will talk about how to bring Ukraine closer to NATO”“Russia does not have the right of veto in NATO” or “our organization has its doors open as has been shown in the cases of Sweden and Finland”.
That Ukraine would not receive a formal invitation to join NATO was evidence that until now only the French president, Emmanuel Macron, he had dared to verbalize. “Let’s be frank about it. I don’t think the Vilnius Summit will reach a consensus among the allies on Ukraine’s full integration into the Alliance,” Macron said at the global security conference (GLOBSEC) held in Bratislava in May. .
For Macron, instead of belonging to NATO, one should talk about solid and global security guarantees, “something halfway between the Alliance and what we have given to Israel”. He explained that he was not referring to “something like the Budapest package, which clearly has not worked, but to tangible and credible security guarantees in a multilateral framework.”
With nothing to offer Ukraine beyond the military aid the partners are providing to kyiv, Stoltenberg reiterated his warning against accepting a frozen conflict in Ukraine in exchange for the end of the war. “We all want this war to end, but a just peace cannot mean freezing the conflict and accepting a deal dictated by Russia,” she said. Referring to the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive, he noted that “the more ground the Ukrainians are able to liberate, the stronger they will be at the negotiating table.”