As they await the initiatives that US president-elect Donald Trump has pledged to take to resolve the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Ukrainian authorities believe that the country's future depends on NATO. "An invitation for Ukraine to join Nato is a necessary thing for our survival," said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday, December 1, as he welcomed the new European foreign minister, Kaja Kallas, and the new president of the European Council, Antonio Costa, visiting Kyiv on the first day of their terms of office.

With NATO foreign ministers due to meet in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha sent a letter to each country urging them to "endorse the decision to invite Ukraine to join the [North Atlantic] Alliance."

In addition to this "invitation," Zelensky recently raised the idea of involving NATO forces in the supervision of a possible ceasefire. "If we want to stop the hot stage of the war, we should take under the NATO umbrella the territory of Ukraine that we have under our control," he suggested in an interview with British television channel Sky News. In exchange, Kyiv could consider "recovering the other part of its territory through diplomatic channels" at a later stage. Excluding any permanent territorial concessions to Russia, Zelensky reiterated that Ukraine must regain its 1991 borders. Moscow currently controls around 18% of its territory.

The new leadership of the European Union (EU) has made a point of showing its "support" for Ukraine, at a time when Europe fears a slowdown or cessation of American aid following Trump's entry into the White House on January 20. In particular, Kallas felt that "the strongest security guarantee is NATO membership," even if the EU must "not exclude anything" concerning the dispatch of European troops in the event of a ceasefire.

In Brussels, however, these hypotheses are not currently on the table. NATO membership "is an option that makes many allies very uneasy," a diplomat said, citing the objections of Germany and Hungary, not to mention those of the US. While some countries, such as France and the UK, are pushing for Kyiv to be invited to join NATO, US President Joe Biden has refused to authorize it, and his successor has never supported the idea. On the contrary, in a jointly signed report published in April, Trump's new special envoy for the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, General Keith Kellogg, suggested: "To convince Putin to join peace talks, President Biden and other NATO leaders should offer to put off NATO membership for Ukraine for an extended period in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal with security guarantees."

You have 37.88% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.