Media reported on Sibiga's request to invite Ukraine to NATO at foreign ministers' meeting

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sibiga has written a letter in which he urged his colleagues from NATO countries to invite Kiev to join the alliance at the summit of the bloc's foreign ministers in Brussels. This was reported by Reuters on November 29.

"I urge you to endorse the decision to invite Ukraine to join the alliance as one of the results of the meeting of NATO foreign ministers on December 3-4, 2024," the agency quoted the text of the letter as saying.

Sibiga believes that now is the most appropriate moment to extend the invitation.

Reuters recalls that NATO integration is one of the points of the so-called "victory plan" of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose powers expired on May 20. The implementation of this item requires the consent of all 32 member states of the alliance. At the same time, Kiev's representatives admit that the actual accession of the state to the bloc is impossible until the Ukrainian conflict is resolved.

Earlier, on November 23, the Bloomberg news agency reported that the administration of the current US President Joe Biden considered the option of publicly urging NATO countries to invite Ukraine to the alliance after Republican Donald Trump won the US presidential election. However, this step was abandoned due to the low hope for success.

The director of the Center for European Information, Nikolay Topornin, told Izvestiya on 21 November that a number of NATO member states were wary of granting membership to Ukraine. In particular, Berlin, Washington and Paris do not support the idea of admitting Kiev to the bloc. The fact is that Ukraine does not fully meet the necessary Western standards, and the alliance countries, moreover, do not want to become parties to the conflict.

Before that, on November 14, the former head of the NATO Military Committee Harald Kuyat said that Ukraine would not be admitted to NATO because it does not meet the requirements of Article 10 of the bloc's treaty. Moreover, Kiev will not be able to strengthen the alliance with its membership.

Ukraine applied to join NATO on an accelerated basis on September 30, 2022. At the time, Zelenskyy said that in fact the country was already in the alliance and met its standards.