Biden and Zelensky clash over Ukraine's bid to join NATO

Joe Biden told in an exclusive interview with CNN that he doesn’t think that Ukraine is ready to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, better known as NATO, at the present moment.

The US President reiterated that the United States and its allies would continue to support the government of Volodymyr Zelensky against invading Russian troops.

“I don’t think there is unanimity in NATO about whether or not to bring Ukraine into the NATO family now, at this moment, in the middle of a war,” Biden told to CNN.

The US President highlighted that Ukraine needs to meet certain standards before being a candidate for the alliance.

To make matters worse, the Biden interview occurred on the eve of NATO’s annual summit, which in 2023 took place in Vilnius, Lithuania.

According to The Washington Post, Zelensky lambasted the members of NATO for not providing a timeframe for his country to join in and deemed the whole process as “absurd”.

Although the Ukrainian President managed to secure weaponry and commitment from Western nations, he failed to make any successful advancements in his country's NATO candidacy.

Ultimately, experts agree Zelensky and Ukraine were the biggest losers of the 2023 NATO summit, failing to get a timeframe for its membership bid.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization released a statement where it declared that “we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine when allies agree and conditions are met.”

It's not secret that NATO has been the center of tension between Russia and the Western nations.

In the buildup of the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin explicitly demanded that the Kyiv government would not be part of the alliance.

Founded in 1949, NATO was established as a collective security alliance between the United States and Canada and several Western European nations such as France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

Over the decades, other nations such as Western Germany, Spain, Greece, and Turkey would eventually join in.

As a response, the Soviet Union established the Warsaw Pact among nations behind the so-called iron curtain in 1955. Both coalitions defined the two major factions engaged in the Cold War.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Warsaw Pact was void.

Since then, the Kremlin has been pushing for the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which is formed by six former Soviet nations: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan.

Throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, NATO expanded, adding former Warsaw Pact members such as Poland and Hungary, the Baltic States, and the successors of the dissolved nations of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

Unsurprisingly, the Russian Federation was not happy to see how the West expanded into territory that not too long ago was under the Kremlin’s sphere of influence.

NATO’s expansion into so-called historically Russian territory was part of the reasoning behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

However, with traditionally neutral Sweden and Finland joining the treaty, it seems that Putin’s special military operation has accelerated the very thing he didn’t want.

Now the question is how long will it take for Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, if it happens at all.

Image: Artem Kniaz / Unsplash