After Russian President Vladimir Putin signed treaties to annex four Ukraine territories, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday requested accelerated membership of NATO. Zelensky said Ukraine would not negotiate with Russia as long as Putin was in power, AFP reported.
Zelensky released a video of him signing what he said was a formal NATO membership request.
“We have already proven our compatibility with Alliance standards… We are taking a decisive step by signing Ukraine’s application for accelerated accession to NATO,” Zelensky said in a video posted by the Ukrainian presidency on social media.
“We trust each other, we help each other, and we protect each other. This is the alliance,” he said.
Zelensky also said that Kyiv would not negotiate with Russia, which sent troops into Ukraine on February 24 in a war that has killed and wounded tens of thousands of people.
“Ukraine will not hold any negotiations with Russia as long as Putin is the president of the Russian Federation. We will negotiate with the new president,” Zelensky said.
On several occassions, Putin has made clear that any prospect of Ukraine joining NATO, the world’s largest military alliance, was one of his red lines and it was among the justifications he cited for his invasion.
Zelensky made the remarks hours after Putin signed treaties to annex four Moscow-occupied Ukrainian regions — Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk and Zaporizhzhia — at a grand ceremony in the Kremlin.
In his address at the signing ceremony, Putin vowed to protect the newly annexed regions of Ukraine by “all available means”, seen as a veiled nuclear threat to the West.
Putin said he was ready for peace talks with Ukraine but insisted he won’t discuss handing back the occupied regions. The Russian President accused the West of fueling the hostilities as part of what he said was a plan to turn Russia into a “colony” and a “crowds of slaves”, AP reported.
The United States of America responded to Putin’s latest move by imposing sanctions on more than 1,000 people and firms connected to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including its Central Bank governor and families of Security Council members.
US President Joe Biden condemned Russia’s ‘fraudulent’ Ukraine annexation declaration and said, “Make no mistake, these actions have no legitimacy.”
The European Union said they would never recognise the illegal referendums that Russia organised “as a pretext for this further violation of Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity”.
(With inputs from agencies)