“That’s what we need to do first, and then Ukraine can get back the other parts of its territory in a diplomatic way,” the Ukrainian leader said.
Zelenskyy suggested that such an arrangement could be the basis for a cease-fire deal with Moscow. But he stressed that NATO membership needs to be offered to the whole of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.
“You can’t give [an] invitation to just one part of a country,” Zelenskyy said. “Why? Because [if you did that] you would recognize that Ukraine is only that territory of Ukraine, and the other one is Russia.”
The war in Ukraine, which is approaching the three-year mark, has escalated recently. Moscow earlier this week threatened to strike government buildings in Kyiv as it continued to launch massive aerial attacks on Ukraine’s energy sector, which the Kremlin said were in response to Kyiv’s use of advanced weapons provided by the U.S. and the U.K. against Russian territory.
Zelenskyy admitted that his suggestion is speculative. “Ukraine has never considered such a proposal, because no one has officially offered it to us,” he said. NATO has yet to comment on the suggestion.
There have been many proposals for stopping the fighting in Ukraine, Zelenskyy said, but without a mechanism to prevent Russia from attacking again, cease-fires were simply too dangerous. Only NATO membership, he said, could offer that kind of guarantee.