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| NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg attends a NATO Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Bucharest, Romania, on November 29, 2022. |
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday (November 29) that Ukraine, which is currently resisting the Russian invasion, will one day join NATO, directly challenging Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Speaking at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Bucharest, Romania, Stoltenberg said: “NATO‘s door is open. He revived the promise to bring Ukraine into NATO, which was first proposed in 2008 but has stalled since. He noted that North Macedonia and Montenegro recently joined the main Western military alliance formed after World War II, and Sweden and Finland will soon join.
Stoltenberg said that on the issue of other countries accession to NATO, “Russia has no veto power” and that “we also support Ukraine’s accession to NATO.”
Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway, said: “President Putin cannot oppose sovereign countries making sovereign decisions that do not pose a threat to Russia. I think what he fears is democracy and freedom, which are the main challenges he faces. “
But Ukraine will not immediately join NATO. If Ukraine immediately becomes a member of NATO, under the terms of the NATO charter, it is likely to push the 30-member NATO forces directly into the battlefield against the Russian army, which will far exceed the current help that the United States and other allies are currently providing to Ukraine. The United States and its allies have provided billions of dollars in military and humanitarian aid to the Kiev government in resisting the Russian invasion.
Many NATO countries believe that the focus should continue to be on supporting the Ukrainian army, rather than possible internal political disputes between member states over Ukraine’s accession to NATO. Some war analysts say Ukraine’s possible accession to NATO was also one of the factors in Putin’s decision to invade.
“We are at war, so we should not do anything to weaken the unity between our allies to provide military, humanitarian and economic assistance to Ukraine, because we must prevent President Putin from winning,” Stoltenberg said.
In Bucharest, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the United States would provide Kiev with an additional $53 million in aid to purchase critical grid equipment in response to weeks-long Russian airstrikes on Ukraine’s infrastructure aimed at destroying electricity and water systems, where winter has already arrived.
Blinken, who is the top U.S. diplomat, said the equipment would be urgently shipped to Ukraine, including distribution transformers, circuit breakers, power surge protectors, current circuit breakers, vehicles, and other critical equipment.
Stoltenberg told reporters ahead of the two-day meeting that Ukraine faces the “difficult task” of rebuilding everything destroyed by Russian missile strikes.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, who will address his NATO counterpart, said Stoltenberg said he expected Kuleba to say Ukraine’s allies needed to do more to help rebuilding efforts.
Stoltenberg said that Prussia and Russia continue to fail militarily, and Putin’s response is to deprive Ukraine of water, electricity, and heating.
“We need to support Ukraine because we see that Putin is trying to use winter as a weapon of war, which is causing a lot of suffering to the Ukrainian population,” Stoltenberg said. Kuleba
welcomed the foreign ministers of the Nordic and Baltic countries to Kiev on Monday. These foreign ministers are from Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and Sweden.
Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu told Reuters: “The strongest message from this visit is: Ukraine needs to win this war, so,…… Western support should be stronger; More heavy weapons without political restrictions, including long-range missiles. Reinsaru
promised generators, winter clothes, and food to help Ukrainians get through the winter.
The seven Nordic and Baltic countries are the largest Russian missions to Ukraine after launching a full-scale war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that Russian forces were preparing for a new attack, and he met with senior government officials to discuss what needed to be done.
Ukraine had to implement regular nationwide emergency blackouts
Due to its failure to quickly repair energy infrastructure hit by Russian missiles, Zelensky said in a nightly video address on Monday that Russia had shelled Kherson and other communities in the region. In a week, he said, Russia “fired 258 times at 30 settlements in our Kherson region.”
He also noted that Russian troops destroyed pumping stations that supplied water to Nikolaev.
Zelensky said that the only skill of the Russian army is to cause harm to civilians and civilian facilities.
“It’s all they left behind,” he said, and that the Russians “retaliated because the Ukrainians resisted their invasion.”
(This article draws on reports from the Associated Press, Reuters, and AFP.)