Ukraine gives up joining NATO in bid to shift the dial in peace talks

Ukraine has said it’s willing to give up its aspirations to join NATO in return for security guarantees, as part of a peace deal to end the almost four-year war with Russia.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered to drop Kyiv’s NATO dreams during five hours of talks with U.S. officials Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Berlin over the weekend. Witkoff said “a lot of progress was made” during the talks, which are set to continue on Monday.

Ukraine’s offer marks a major policy shift. It has long coveted membership of the Western military alliance, whose members are obliged to consider an attack on one as an attack on all under Article 5 of the NATO treaty.

Zelenskyy said on Sunday that the offer to drop NATO membership in return for security guarantees was a compromise, amid resistance among some of its Western allies to its NATO bid.

“From the very beginning, Ukraine’s conditions – or perhaps more accurately, our ambition – was NATO membership. And that would have provided real security guarantees. Some partners from the United States and Europe did not support this direction,” he said in answer to questions from reporters in a WhatsApp chat on Sunday.

“That is why today the bilateral security guarantees between Ukraine and the United States, specifically Article 5–like guarantees from the United States for us, and the security guarantees from our European colleagues for us, as well as from other countries such as Canada and Japan – these security guarantees for us provide an opportunity to prevent another outbreak of Russian aggression,” Zelenskyy commented.

“And this already is a compromise on our part,” he said.

Despite Ukraine publicly abandoning its NATO bid, the chance of it joining the alliance was vanishingly thin. Several members were resistant to the idea, including Moscow-friendly Slovakia and Hungary. Even Ukraine’s allies within NATO worried about poking the Russian bear beyond Ukraine’s borders.

Moscow vehemently opposes Ukraine joining NATO, and Russia has claimed the alliance’s expansion in Eastern Europe was one of the reasons it launched its so-called “special military operation” against Ukraine in 2022.

Kyiv insists that security guarantees must be a part of a peace deal instead of NATO membership, and this remains a sticking point in negotiations with Moscow, which is refusing to allow Ukraine’s allies to be part of any peacekeeping force in the country.

Talks about a draft peace agreement are continuing on Monday. Zelenskyy aide Dmytro Lytvyn said that the president would comment on the talks once they were completed, Reuters reported.