Ukraine counted this Wednesday 350 civilian deaths since the beginning of the Russian invasion, a week ago. In addition, some 874,000 refugees have fled the country since the start of the operation, a number that is rising rapidly.
For its part, the Kremlin indicated that there is a delegation of Russian negotiators ready to continue the dialogue with Ukraine, after the failure of a first cycle of talks on Monday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has explained that the invasion is aimed at the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine, which seeks to join the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
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Fear of NATO
The possible joining of Ukraine to NATO is Putin’s main fear, which is why he now demands that it be guaranteed that Ukraine will not join this Transatlantic Alliance, which is already made up of its neighbors Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (three Baltic countries that were part of the former Soviet Union), Poland and Slovakia.
Last December, the Russian government spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, indicated that they saw the “expansion of NATO to Ukraine” as a “question of life and death for Russia.”
“The expansion of NATO to countries like Ukraine and probably to other countries that were part of the Soviet Union is already a matter of, well, life and death for us,” Peskov said in a television interview.
While Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, declared in early February with one voice their opposition to what they perceive as NATO’s expansion maneuver in Eastern Europe and its attempts to “undermine the stability of other countries”.
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far from entering
NATO is a defensive alliance with an open door policy to new members.
During the 2014 Crimean crisis, then-President Petro Poroshenko pushed for NATO membership if the population approved it through a referendum.
In June 2017, the Ukrainian Parliament established NATO membership as the country’s foreign policy goal, and in February 2019 the goal of joining NATO and the European Union (EU) was even included in the Constitution.
In 2018, NATO officially granted Ukraine the status of a candidate country. In a statement it was announced: “NATO’s door is open to any European country capable of fulfilling the involvement and commitments of membership and contributing to security in the Euro-Atlantic area.”
In any case, Ukraine is still a long way from joining NATO. In addition, the Transatlantic Alliance does not accept new members if they are in an active conflict situation, a point that Putin would take advantage of to keep the country out of NATO. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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