Ukraine to seek NATO invitation in Brussels next week

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha is urging NATO leaders to invite Ukraine to join the Western military alliance during a meeting in Brussels next week, according to a letter sent to alliance leaders—reflecting the country’s frenzied push to gain membership in the alliance in the final days of Biden’s presidency. 

The letter, first reviewed by Reuters, comes as Ukraine has re-upped its request for NATO membership to help put an end to Russia’s war, including a recent uptick in attacks on its energy infrastructure. It also comes as the Biden administration has granted Ukraine new permissions to fight back against Russia in their final months in office. 

In the letter, Ukraine’s foreign minister acknowledged his country’s ongoing war with Russia prohibits Kyiv from joining NATO right now. But he argued that an invitation for membership in Brussels would be a powerful show of force—and a major symbolic blow—to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has long opposed the idea of their membership in NATO.

“We believe that the invitation should be extended at this stage,” Sybiha said in the letter. “It will become the Allies’ adequate response to Russia’s constant escalation of the war it has unleashed, the latest demonstration of which is the involvement of tens of thousands of North Korean troops and the use of Ukraine as a testing ground for new weapons,” he added.

Also on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used an interview on Sky News to up the public pressure for NATO leaders to extend his country a membership offer.

Speaking Friday to Sky News’s Stuart Ramsay, the Ukrainian president suggested that NATO could extend membership to the territory of Ukraine still under its control to help accelerate the NATO memberhsip process and wind down Russia’s war as quickly as possible.

“If we want to stop the hot phase of the war, we need to take under the NATO umbrella the territory of Ukraine that we have under our control,” he told Ramsay. NATO should “immediately” cover parts of the country that are under Ukrainian authority, he said, stressing that it it something Ukraine needs “very much otherwise he will come back,” in apparent reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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Ukraine would face…