Ukraine’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, said he sees no prospects for Ukraine joining NATO, although this course is enshrined in the Constitution. Instead, he considers it possible for Ukraine to join other security alliances, including a European military bloc and the JEF coalition.
Valerii Zaluzhnyi said this during a discussion on Euro-Atlantic integration at a general meeting of ambassadors in Kyiv, European Pravda reports.
During the discussion among senior diplomats, he was asked to comment on Ukraine’s possible participation in the Joint Expeditionary Force, or JEF. At the same time, Zaluzhnyi first focused on the prospects of joining the North Atlantic Alliance.
“I know NATO very well. For about 12 years, perhaps, I was personally involved in helping us master NATO standards, and every year I listened to fairy tales that we were just about to join NATO. Unfortunately, we will never join it,” he said.
In his opinion, one of the obstacles is the mismatch between the level of development of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the approaches of the Alliance itself. He said that “it is impossible to join an organization that possesses Second World War doctrines with the level of development currently found in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”
Zaluzhnyi also gave a critical assessment of NATO’s capabilities, despite the participation of the United Kingdom, the United States and other countries. In his view, NATO will not change significantly in the coming years, and the Alliance will need around 12 years to transition to standards that would allow it to reach at least half of Russia’s level.
At the same time, the diplomat acknowledged that Ukraine needs technologies currently possessed by NATO countries. Among them, he mentioned anti-ballistic and space capabilities.
Speaking about security guarantees, Zaluzhnyi described other alliances as more promising.
“Ukraine will become linked to blocs and alliances that will probably be formed. Most likely, we will be talking about a European military security bloc,” he said.
Zaluzhnyi also considers Ukraine’s membership in the JEF coalition to be one possible mechanism for security guarantees. According to him, the governing bodies of this association have been operating since 2015, but they remain insufficiently developed and do not yet fully meet Ukraine’s needs.
