President Volodymyr Zelensky is planning to travel to Vilnius for NATO’s summit in July, Petro Beshta, Ukraine’s ambassador to Lithuania, has told BNS in an interview.
“We are planning for that,” the diplomat said when asked if President Zelensky would attend the summit. “The first thing that we need is invitation, because Ukraine is not part of NATO.”
“We hope to get it and [by that time] we hope to change dramatically the situation in Ukraine regarding the war,” he added.
Since Russia launched its full-scale military invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Zelensky has visited the US, the UK, France, and Brussels.
According to Ambassador Beshta, these visits, which started in late 2022, were exceptional, because the president has to stay in Kyiv amid the second wave of Russia’s offensive.
Support for Ukraine will be one of the key topics at NATO’s Vilnius summit scheduled for July 11-12.
Ukraine’s biggest supporters in the alliance, including Lithuania, expect that the country will receive more concrete promises regarding its own membership in NATO.
“We believe that in the summit’s declaration, [...] a very clear formula should be found which will say that as soon as the war ends, Ukraine will become a NATO member,” said Beshta.
In the Bucharest summit in 2008, NATO leaders stated that Georgia and Ukraine would “become members of NATO”, but they made no detailed commitments.
Last September, Zelensky submitted Ukraine’s application for accelerated accession to NATO.
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