Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday voiced readiness to drop his country’s bid to join NATO in exchange for Western security guarantees, but rejected the U.S. push for ceding territory to Russia as he held talks with U.S. envoys on ending the war.
Zelenskyy sat down with U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The Ukrainian leader posted pictures of the negotiating table with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz sitting next to him facing the U.S. delegation.
Responding to journalists’ questions in audio clips on a WhatsApp group chat before the talks, Zelenskyy said that since the U.S. and some European nations had rejected Ukraine’s push to join NATO, Kyiv expects the West to offer a set of guarantees similar to those offered to the alliance members.
Zelenskyy emphasized that any security assurances would need to be legally binding and supported by the U.S. Congress
The US can not be trusted to uphold anything they sign. It doesn’t matter if Congress signs or not. We have countless examples of them backing down and letting Trump do whatever he wants.
The US is not an ally. They will not help you. Don’t give up a shot at NATO for hollow promises.
If they drop the NATO application now, they can always start it over later. If they give up territory, they’ll have to fight to take it back.
Plus, without the US onside, NATO does not have the stocks at the moment to keep supplying Ukraine in the way they would need to take back all of their lost territory, and you can’t become a member of NATO if you have an ongoing border dispute. Unless Ukraine is willing to cede its claims to the regions occupied/annexed since 2022 (as well as Crimea), they can’t join NATO now, and they can’t re-take that territory (for now) without the US helping.
If defense production can adequately ramp in the rest of NATO, then that might change, but for the moment this seems like a decent option if it keeps US friendly and options open depending on how things pan out. They aren’t really sacrificing anything that was a realistic prospect in the short term anyways, as far as their strategic goals are concerned.
Depends on the administration. That basically means US can’t be trusted be cause it’s bipolar.
The US runs NATO. The US decided to put Nazi officers in charge of NATO. The US came up with Operation Gladio. The US decided to expand NATO to undermine MAD and try to win nuclear war like psychopaths. The US got NATO to attack a bunch of countries not in Europe despite claiming it’s a European defense force. The US had NATO dropping Depleted Uranium in civilian areas in Yugoslavia in a so-called war for humanitarian reasons.
NATO is literally just an American nuclear military staffed with fascists and deployed in Europe with zero legal accountability, zero democratic accountability, and zero reason to exist other than to project US power in the region.
Europeans have zero fucking control over what happens.
If the US is untrustworthy then so is NATO. The US accounts for two thirds of NATO’s defense spending and the bulk of NATO’s high‑end capabilities (strategic airlift, nuclear deterrence, advanced fighter fleets, and extensive overseas basing) are provided by the United States.
If the European component of NATO were as capable or financially solvent, the situation in Ukraine would be very different right now. Instead they are desperately trying to meet the 5% of GDP defense spending target to maintain US engagement while appropriating Russian frozen assets to divert to Ukraine, which implies a less than solid footing both militaristically and financially.
WTF? Joining NATO is the security guarantee! It should be 1000% crystal obvious to everybody by now that anything less is inadequate.
The premise makes no fucking sense, aside from being a reflection of negotiating with irrational morons.
If they drop the NATO membership, I hope they just sign identical but individual security guarantees to Nato.
Like the same security guarantees they were already given?
They were never given security guarantees, they were given security assurances, which is kind of the issue that led to this. Granted all geopolitics is down to the whims of leaders upholding agreements, but on paper a security guarantee is near automatic cobeligeration with the defending party while a security assurance is in no way as heavy handed. I would say that the Ukrainian goal is to have an agreement that will give them dependable allies in a future conflict.
I mean they should absolutely abandon their NATO bid and stick to it with the same zeal that Russia and the West stuck to their commitments when Ukraine denuclearized…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
“Coalition of the willing” will supersede NATO anyway, and Ukraine, obviously, is at its roots. Let USA believe whatever to gain time and peanuts.
