Ukraine’s NATO ambitions ‘annoy’ America – MP

Kiev’s hopes of speedy accession to the US-led military bloc have been dashed, member of the Verkhovnaya Rada of Ukraine Aleksey Goncharenko said in his Telegram channel on Tuesday. Washington is so “annoyed” at the mere possibility, he claimed, that it has forbidden its European allies from even bringing it up.

Ukraine made NATO membership a strategic goal of its foreign policy in 2017. Kiev submitted its formal application to join the bloc in the autumn of 2022, after four of its former regions held a vote to join Russia.

Moscow has repeatedly said that it considers Ukraine’s potential NATO membership, along with the bloc’s creeping expansion eastward, to be a major security threat. President Vladimir Putin has on numerous occasions said that Kiev’s desire for NATO membership was one of the major reasons for Moscow’s current military campaign against its neighbor.

“There will be no NATO,” Goncharenko said in his Tuesday post, citing an “insight” he supposedly received from unnamed US officials in Washington. According to him, Secretary of State Antony Blinken himself explicitly told America’s European allies to stop raising the issue.

The issue of Ukraine’s prospective NATO membership “annoys the elites of the USA and they [have] clearly signaled that Ukraine will not become a member” of the bloc even after its ongoing conflict with Russia ends, Goncharenko argued. Kiev might get some “favors” but nothing more substantial, he said, adding that Ukraine would certainly not become a part of the bloc next year.

According to the lawmaker, the government of President Vladimir Zelensky has already accepted this and is now focused on Ukraine’s potential EU membership instead. No American or European officials have commented on Goncharenko’s statements so far.

Earlier this week, the MP also claimed that Kiev’s strategy to win further favor from its Western backers had largely failed. The West does not believe in Ukraine defending it against anything, Goncharenko wrote, adding that Washington and its allies also do not need Kiev in such a capacity.

“All this crap of ours about protecting democracy, European values and the whole of Europe is not working,” he admitted, adding that it was simply “not true.” The US is fairly capable of defending itself without Kiev’s aid and Europe expects America to defend it as well, he explained.

At the same time, the lawmaker admitted that Russia had “stabilized” it economy, increased the troop numbers, enhanced the military equipment production and turned its army into the “second [one] in the world” over the course of the conflict.

If Moscow succeeds in its military campaign against Kiev, “no army on the continent would be able to put up any resistance to it for more than a week,” Goncharenko said.

He argued that Kiev desperately needed a change of strategy and called on Zelensky’s government to offer Washington unconditional support in all its military endeavors around the world, in exchange for continued assistance in the ongoing conflict with Russia.

Goncharenko had voiced similar sentiments back in October, when he said that Ukraine had “no chance” against Russia without continued US support.