US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that Ukraine “can forget about” joining NATO.
Trump was responding to a journalist’s question about Russia‘s war of aggression and Ukraine‘s accession to the Western military alliance at a cabinet meeting.
The debate about joining NATO was “probably the reason the whole thing started,” Trump said, presumably referring to the war in Ukraine.
Ukraine, which has been defending itself against Russia‘s full-scale invasion for three years with Western support, has long sought to join the military alliance.
Russia has repeatedly claimed that NATO threatens its security and justified its invasion of the neighbouring country on the grounds of preventing Ukraine from joining the alliance.
US Vice President JD Vance, who was also at the table, intervened and said Trump was “preemptively accused” of making concessions to Russia every time he engaged in diplomacy.
“He hasn’t conceded anything to anyone,” Vance said.
At a meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group in Brussels two weeks ago, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the Trump administration does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated end to the war.
The alliance assured Ukraine last year that it was on an “irreversible path” to membership, according to the concluding document of a NATO summit in Washington in July.