NATO's refusal to promise Ukraine membership will be huge blow to its reputation – Nausėda

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda believes that if NATO does not fulfill its promise regarding Ukraine's membership in the Alliance, it will be a serious reputational blow.

This is reported by LRT.

"We have very clearly reinforced the text on Ukraine’s NATO prospects at least at the last three NATO summits. Now to just take it and remove it all away, well, that would hurt NATO’s credibility very badly," he said.

Nausėda believes that Ukraine should be invited to the NATO summit in The Hague in June to have the opportunity to present its own position on these issues. Citing diplomatic sources, some foreign media outlets previously reported that the United States does not want Ukraine to be represented at the summit. And russia has consistently made Ukraine's non-admission to the Alliance a condition for peace.

Nausėda says that there are two ways for Ukraine to achieve Western security guarantees. One is to constantly strengthen its own army, and the other is to join NATO.

However, he believes that the latter option would be more effective for NATO countries.

"[Strong Ukrainian army] is even expressed in figures, standing at around 50 billion euros, maybe a bit more, per year. And the question is whether the Western world is actually prepared to spend such a really significant amount of money every year for this purpose,” Nausėda said.

He added: "If so, good, but we have a reason to believe that every year we have a certain difficult political process that often does not generate the necessary amount of money and often we do not know until the last minute whether we will be able to provide sufficient support to Ukraine or not. That is why NATO membership […] is probably the cheapest way to achieve security guarantees for Ukraine," the Lithuanian President said.

As the Ukrainian News agency earlier reported, the United States of America proposed to resume security talks within the framework of the russia-NATO Council, which ceased its activities after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the aggressor country russia in 2022.