Membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) will serve as a conduit for Ukraine to ensure a lasting and just peace, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told Interfax-Ukraine news agency on his penultimate day in office toward the end of September.
“Of course, the most reliable guarantee of security [for Ukraine] will be NATO membership under our collective defense clause, Article 5,” he said.
Stoltenberg said that “the war will indeed stop at that point.”
Only NATO allies will decide whether to invite Ukraine into the Alliance, even if part of its territory remains occupied by Russia – similar to what happened with West Germany in 1955.
Stoltenberg said that if the only way for Ukraine to become a member is to end the war and gain full control over all its territory, “then we are giving President [Vladimir] Putin every incentive to find a way to continue the war.”
“But my main message is that NATO’s security guarantees are the way to ensure a lasting and just peace for Ukraine,” he said.
Accession to NATO will serve as a guarantee that when an agreement is reached between Russia and Ukraine, “that will be the end of it [the war].”
“And again, Ukraine will decide what is acceptable,” he said.
The war “did not start in 2022, but in 2014, when Russia took Crimea, and then they moved east into Donbas shortly afterward”, he said.
Until now, there have been several agreements between Kyiv and Moscow on ceasefires, which the Kremlin has violated.
“So this time, we need to ensure that if we agree on something, it has to be the end; it has to stop. Therefore, we must equip Ukrainian forces so they can deter further Russian aggression,” the outgoing NATO secretary general said.
Stoltenberg’s successor is former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who officially assumed his duties on Oct. 1 and identified Ukraine as a priority for his work, according to Kyiv-based European Pravda.
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