NATO meeting to discuss aid to Ukraine, not its Alliance membership – NATO Secretary General

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stressed that the partners hear Ukraine's calls for membership and are not backing down from their plans, but they have a different goal at the December meeting of the Alliance.

The NATO Secretary General confirmed the Alliance's unwavering position on Ukraine's membership prospects. "Allies agree that the future of Ukraine is NATO," Mark Rutte said at a press conference in Brussels ahead of NATO ministerial meeting, adding that in line with the decision of the Washington Summit, NATO partners have been "building a bridge" to membership in their relations with Ukraine.

However, the NATO Secretary General does not expect a discussion on this issue in the coming days. Instead, the Alliance will focus on providing military aid to Ukraine.

"We will concentrate over these next two days very much on what is necessary now… And what is necessary now is to make sure that military aid will go to Ukraine because that is now crucial for them; if they decide to do so and are into talks with Russians one day, they will do this on the position of strength," Rutte said.

Mark Rutte says Ukraine needs "more military aid and less discussions on what the peace process would look like."

On the eve of the Brussels meeting, Ukraine said it was refusing to accept the guarantees that are substitutes for NATO membership.

Earlier, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said for the first time that Ukraine could join NATO with Article 5 partially in force, but this idea has not yet been detailed.

It should be noted that this week, the US denied the possibility of Ukraine returning nuclear weapons to its arsenal.