Ukraine wants to join NATO after the war.
(Photo: IMAGO/ZUMA Wire)
Kyiv/Lviv/Berlin Ahead of the NATO summit, Ukraine continues to press for a clear commitment to join the alliance. “At the summit in Vilnius we expect a clear invitation and direction to join NATO,” said the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Oleksii Makeiev, the German Press Agency. Even if accession will not happen overnight, one expects that NATO will no longer allow any ambiguity.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the heads of state and government of the 31 NATO countries will meet in Vilnius, Lithuania, to discuss, among other things, Ukraine’s prospects for NATO membership.
Makeiev warned that the mistakes made at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest should not be repeated. At that time, Germany in particular, under the then Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU), had resisted Ukraine’s rapid admission to the alliance. “If Ukraine had already been a member of NATO in 2014, the annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbass and now the large-scale Russian war of aggression would certainly not have happened,” said the ambassador. Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Meanwhile, President Volodymyr Zelensky has brought home defenders of the port city of Mariupol from Turkey. Zelensky celebrated the 500th day of his country’s resistance against Russia with a commemorative event.
The political leadership of Ukraine ended the 500th day of defense against the Russian war of aggression with a large church service in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Zelenskiy said at the memorial event that thousands of Ukrainians had shown courage and strength in the fights for their homeland since the beginning of the war. Almost 50,000 were honored during this time, 298 of them with the country’s highest order as “Hero of Ukraine”.
One of them, Olexandr Piwnenko, was appointed the new head of the national guard by the president in the evening. He wished him victory, the liberation of the entire country and the return of all Ukrainians to their homeland, Zelensky told the new head of the National Guard.
Zelensky returns Azovstal defenders to Ukraine
At least five high-ranking officers involved in the defense of the Azovstal Steel Works in Mariupol were brought back to Lviv by the President himself from his visit to Turkey. “Home,” Zelensky captioned a photo on his Telegram channel on Saturday that showed him on the plane with three commanders of the Azov regiment, the chief of the 36th Marine Brigade Serhiy Volynsky and the commander of the 12th Brigade of the National Guard Denys Schlehu, shows.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky (fourth from right) aboard a plane among officers of the Azov regiment returning from Turkey. The photo was provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Office.
(Photo: AP)
The men were taken prisoner by the Russians after Azovstal was conquered, but were then extradited to Turkey. They have now been returned to their homeland “after negotiations with the Turkish side,” according to the Ukrainian presidential administration.
Shortly after Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine began, the port city of Mariupol became the epicenter of bitter fighting. The battles around the city surrounded by Russian troops lasted several months. In the end, several thousand Ukrainian soldiers, including fighters from the nationalist Azov regiment, were holed up in the Azovstal steelworks. The last defenders only surrendered in May.
Moscow sees the repatriation as a violation of the agreement
Russia actually wanted to put the Ukrainian fighters on trial. The nationalist Azov regiment in particular has repeatedly served Moscow as justification for the more than 16-month war of aggression and for the claim that it is allegedly “liberating” Ukraine from “fascists”. Nevertheless, she later deported several commanders of the regiment to Turkey.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has now criticized the return of the Ukrainian soldiers as a “direct violation of existing agreements” by both the Turkish and Ukrainian sides. The liberation of the Azov commanders from Russian captivity was conditional on their remaining in Turkey until the end of the war, he said. The Kremlin spokesman speculated that NATO had apparently put great pressure on Ankara so that Zelenskyy could be successful before the NATO summit and in view of the “defeats in the counter-offensive”.
Russia criticizes delivery of cluster munitions to Ukraine
At the same time, the Russian Foreign Ministry sharply criticized the USA for supplying cluster munitions to Ukraine. This is another “blatant revelation of the aggressive anti-Russian course of the USA, which aims at the maximum prolongation of the conflict in Ukraine and a war to the “last Ukrainian”, said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Saturday. More civilians would be killed by the cluster munitions.
Zakharova called the promise of the Kiev leadership that the ammunition would only be used against military targets worthless. “Washington becomes an accomplice in the mining of territories by supplying cluster munitions and thus fully shares responsibility for detonations, including those of Russian and Ukrainian children,” the spokeswoman said.
The cluster munitions are part of a new $800 million US military aid package. Washington had defended the decision as difficult but necessary despite the increased dangers to civilians. Russia itself used cluster bombs in its war against Ukraine.
Criticism of the decision in Washington also came from Western partners such as Great Britain, Spain and Germany.
Russian paramilitaries: plan further operations in the border area
According to a spokesman, the paramilitary Russian volunteer battalion “Legion Freedom of Russia” is planning further actions in the Russian border area. “There will be another surprise in the coming month or so,” Maximillian Andronnikov, who calls himself Caesar, told Britain’s Sunday newspaper The Observer.
“This will be our third mission,” he said. After that there will be a fourth and a fifth. “We have ambitious plans. We want to liberate our entire territory,” the spokesman continued. The “Legion of Freedom of Russia” consists of Russian nationalists who are currently fighting on the side of Ukraine.
Already in May and June, fighters of the “Legion” together with the “Russian Volunteer Corps” took part in attacks in the Russian border region of Belgorod near Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian secret service, such operations are intended, among other things, to “liberate the area from the so-called Putin regime”. The government in Kiev stressed that it had nothing to do with the attacks.
This is how the Handelsblatt reports on the Ukraine war:
What will be important on Sunday
Before the NATO summit in Vilnius, Ukrainian troops are trying to step up their offensive to liberate the areas occupied by Russia. So far, the Russian defenses have proven difficult to break through.
More: All developments in the Ukraine war in our news blog