It is too early to say when this will happen: Stoltenberg on Ukraine's NATO membership
Kyiv • UNN
NATO members agree that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance, but the exact timing is still uncertain, as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg emphasized.
All members of the Alliance agree that Ukraine will become a member, but it is too early to say when exactly this will happen. This was emphasized by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, UNN reports.
"...to have a new Ally, to invite a new Ally, we need a consensus. And all Allies agree that Ukraine will become a member, but it's too early to say when exactly that will happen. I can say that we are moving closer and closer to NATO membership together with Ukraine, and we are doing it with concrete actions. Because Ukraine's membership, of course, depends partly on the language, the wording that we will agree on later today and the NATO declaration on Ukraine's membership, but it also has a lot to do with the concrete actions that we are taking to bring Ukraine closer to membership," Stoltenberg said.
According to him, the fact that we will now have a 700-person NATO command based in Germany under NATO command there, as well as in centers in the eastern part of the Alliance to facilitate training and security assistance to Ukraine.
"It will give us a stronger NATO structure for what we do, and it will also help bring Ukraine closer to our membership. The long-term financial pledge, everything we do in terms of interoperability... when NATO members supply, for example, F16s to Ukraine, we also provide training doctrines, and all these are examples of how we bring Ukraine closer to NATO and make it easier for them to become members when the time comes," he summarized.
