NATO countries will invite Ukraine to join the organisation when conditions are right, the alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, announced on Tuesday at the end of the first day of a summit of allied heads of state and government in Vilnius.
This is the "clearest message" ever sent by NATO on Ukraine’s membership of the organisation, Stoltenberg stressed at a press conference. “If you look at all the membership processes, there have not been timelines for those processes. They are conditions-based, have always been,” he added.
NATO has also already indicated that it will lift the requirement for Kyiv to go through the Membership Action Plan (MAP), a sort of antechamber to applying for membership of the Alliance, which sets a certain number of reform objectives.
“We are moving from a two-stage process to a one-stage process,” the General Secretary said.
