Russia demands NATO revoke Bucharest pledge on Ukraine's membership as condition for peace

Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko has said that one of the key elements to end the Russian-Ukrainian war is the cancellation of NATO's promise of Ukraine's future accession, made at the Bucharest summit in 2008.

According to the Russian news agency Interfax, Grushko said that Ukraine's potential membership in NATO "makes it impossible to achieve peace in Ukraine and, in a broader sense, to create at least some kind of security architecture".

"For us, this is one of the key elements of a possible [peace – ed.] agreement on the conflict in Ukraine, it is an element related to the elimination of the root causes of this conflict. And we will seek not only ironclad international legal guarantees that would make it impossible for Ukraine to become a member of NATO in any form, but we will also insist that this also becomes the policy of the alliance itself," he told the Rossiya-24 TV channel.

He called the decision of the Bucharest NATO summit, which confirmed at the highest level the Alliance's intention to accept Ukraine and Georgia, "catastrophic for European security".

"Failure to withdraw this wording will create ambiguity, which is absolutely unacceptable for us when we are talking about the need to achieve a viable, sustainable, ironclad settlement of the conflict in and around Ukraine," Grushko said.

At the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Ukraine and Georgia were denied the granting of the Membership Action Plan, but the summit declared that Ukraine and Georgia would one day become NATO members.

Meanwhile, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is confident that his US counterpart Donald Trump can influence whether Ukraine joins NATO.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, in an interview with European Pravda, emphasised that Ukraine will not abandon its NATO membership aspirations and will not accept alternatives to full membership.