Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that NATO forces could be directly involved in the conflict in Ukraine.
Earlier, current NATO President Jens Stoltenberg said that the issue of Ukraine’s security will come first at the summit in Vilnius, but full guarantees will be given only to full members of the alliance.
Rasmussen said that “a group of NATO countries may want to send troops to Ukraine if member states, including the United States, do not provide the Kyiv government with real security guarantees at the alliance’s summit in Vilnius.”
He added that if Ukraine does not get anything in Vilnius, the Baltic countries and Poland can form a “coalition of the willing” to send troops to help Kyiv.
And in September last year, Kyiv applied to join the military union as a matter of urgency. As US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan later pointed out, such action is not timely.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba indicated that Kyiv would not be satisfied with any decision of the NATO summit in Vilnius, scheduled for July 11-12, other than an invitation to join it.
For his part, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that Moscow is closely monitoring the situation and remembers that the desire of neighboring Ukraine to join NATO is one of the reasons for the start of the Russian special operation.
Source: News