NATO cools invitation to Ukraine that Zelensky has included as a priority in his ‘victory plan’

Volodymyr Zelensky has presented to his EU and NATO allies a ‘Victory Plan’ which he presented to his country’s parliament this Wednesday. But the reaction I received in Brussels was lukewarm compared to other occasions. The Secretary General of the Atlantic Alliance, Mark Rutte, has cooled the invitation to Ukraine to join the club and this appears to be a priority of the plan presented by the President of that country, who has assured that, beyond support in the region fighting, such measures will be an encouragement to those who are approaching the third year of the war.

“Russia has taken advantage of the geopolitical uncertainty caused by Ukraine’s non-membership in NATO. Now, an immediate invitation to Ukraine to join NATO will be decisive,” Zelensky told EU leaders. “Of course, membership will come later,” the Ukrainian president clarified, knowing that the path to the Atlantic alliance is complicated at the moment by doubts about expansion to the east, but above all by the impossibility of involving a country in the war. .

NATO itself has accepted this proposal coldly. “The question is when, I can’t answer that right now,” Rutte admitted when arriving at the organization’s headquarters in Brussels before attending a meeting with defense ministers. What the new head of the alliance has assured is that “Ukraine’s path to NATO is irreversible.”

Thus, he reported that “ways” were being worked on for “Ukraine to one day become a member of NATO”, such as the distribution of bilateral aid or progress in interoperability.

“The first step towards world war”

In a press conference in which he was not accompanied by EU leaders Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen, as has been the case on other occasions, Zelensky warned that 10,000 North Korean troops are ready to join Vladimir Putin’s forces. Apart from citing the help Russia gets from Iran through drones, the Ukrainian President said about the involvement of another country in the attack, “This is the first step towards a world war.”

As part of his victory plan, Zelensky has offered the Ukrainian military to replace the troops that countries like the United States have in Europe: “After this war, we will have hundreds of thousands of soldiers with experience in modern warfare. Will be. Furnished. And we propose to support their forces with ours by replacing some American troops with our troops, particularly in Europe or wherever we agree, thereby allowing the United States to concentrate on its priority areas, the Indo-Pacific or Wherever it is, it allows me to do more. “But for this we must win,” he told EU leaders.

He has also asked them to approve “as quickly as possible” a loan of up to 35 billion euros, to which he has committed within the framework of the G7, but which Hungary has vetoed because it would extend the freeze on Russian assets. Opposites, which will serve to finance the loan.