Ahead of the NATO summit.. Zelensky hopes it will yield “the best possible results”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed, on Sunday, his hope that the NATO summit, scheduled to be held in Vilnius next week, would yield “the best possible results”, in a meeting that Kiev hopes will It translates its aspirations to join the coalition.

This summit is being held more than a month after the start of a counter-offensive by Ukrainian forces on the front, but it has so far achieved only modest gains against solid Russian defensive lines and due to a shortage of air force and artillery shells.

After receiving his Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda, in the city of Lutsk (western Ukraine), Zelensky indicated that the two men agreed to “work together to achieve the best possible results” for Kyi.Q at the summit scheduled for July 11-12 in Lithuania.

Duda, who is one of my biggest supporters, said Kyiv in NATO “We are stronger together.”

Talks in Kiev last April between Zelensky and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (archive)

It is expected that during the summit Kiev will get “security guarantees” from the West, without committing to a timetable related to accession.

Zelensky and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg had previously acknowledged that Ukraine’s accession to the bloc was unlikely before the end of the war with Russia.

For his part, US President Joe Biden, who left Sunday for the United Kingdom in preparation for the summit, was strict on this issue.

Regarding Ukraine, Biden said in an interview with an American television station: “I do not feel that it is ready to join NATO,” noting that there is no consensus about the possibility of annexing Kiev “in the midst of a war. He continued:” If that happens, we will be at war with Russia. “.