Biden and Zelensky will meet tomorrow at the Vilnius NATO Summit
US President Joe Biden will meet personally with Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky during the NATO Summit in Vilnius (Lithuania). Both Politico and CNN have reported on this meeting.
This meeting is part of the US bilateral agenda at the NATO Summit and will send a strong message of unity towards Russia at a time when the Atlantic Alliance will decide what relationship it wants to have with Ukraine and, above all, if it is in a position to to offer it a temporary framework for its accession.
Zelenski will attend a NATO Summit in person for the first time – at the Madrid Summit he did so by video call – and will thus inaugurate the newly created NATO-Ukraine Council (tomorrow from 12 to 2 p.m. on the Spanish peninsula), which will have to raise pending issues for a future Ukrainian accession to the Alliance or to work on that “long-term commitment” that NATO has already promised to Kiev. Zelensky is expected to give a speech at Lukiskes Square in the center of Vilnius later today, where he will carry a Bakhmut flag.
A joint press conference between the Ukrainian president and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is also scheduled. As well as a speech by Joe Biden himself in an exclusively Ukrainian key.
It must be remembered that the allied countries arrive at the Vilnius Summit with divisions regarding the terms that should be offered to Ukraine so that this country, at war due to the Russian invasion, becomes the 33rd country of the Atlantic Alliance. Poland and the Baltic countries, on the one hand, are in favor of offering Ukraine a scheduled roadmap for Ukrainian accession and that, for example, it can be present at the North Atlantic Council; For their part, the US and Germany lead the group of countries most favorable to waiting for the end of the war.
Before his arrival in Vilnius, the US president wanted to distance himself from the possibility that the Vilnius Summit would approve Ukraine’s candidacy for NATOa decision that must be made unanimously by all allies: “I don’t think there is unanimity in NATO on whether or not to include Ukraine in the NATO family now, at this time, in the middle of a war,” Biden said. in an interview on CNN.
For his part, Zelensky calls for greater speed: «It would be an important message to say that NATO is not afraid of Russia. Ukraine should get clear security guarantees while it is not in NATO. Only under these conditions would our meeting make sense, otherwise it’s just another policy,” he said in an interview.
Biden and Zelensky have had multiple high-profile meetings in recent months. The Ukrainian president’s first trip outside Ukraine since the February 24, 2022, start of the Russian invasion, was to Washington just before Christmas, where Biden feted him in the Oval Office before addressing Congress.
