Putin Told by Germany’s Chancellor before Feb 24 There Was No Prospect for Ukraine Joining NATO

"I said very clearly - you also know this - that Ukraine's accession to NATO is not on the agenda. I even told him once after a joint press conference with him: "In the next 30 years, this issue. (It) is not on the agenda," the head of government said, RIA Novosti reported.

Scholz did not specify exactly when his conversation with the Russian leader took place. Prior to the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, the German chancellor spoke with the Russian president on December 21, and on February 15 he arrived in Moscow to discuss the Ukrainian crisis.

The Verkhovna Rada in 2014 amended two laws, abandoning the non-bloc status of the country. In 2019, the Parliament adopted amendments to the Constitution, fixing the course towards joining the EU and NATO. Ukraine has become the sixth state to receive the status of a partner of the alliance with enhanced opportunities.

After the start of the war, the Ukrainian authorities increasingly began to talk about the loss of interest in the possibility of joining the North Atlantic Alliance.

So, in March, Volodymyr Zelensky said that he had "cooled off" to this issue and noted that Kiev would not "beg" Brussels on its knees for anything. At the same time, already in July, he called joining NATO the best guarantee of Ukraine's security and added that the country had not abandoned this path.

At the end of 2021, Russia published drafts of a treaty with the United States and an agreement with NATO on security assurances. Moscow, in particular, demanded from its Western partners legal guarantees of refusing further eastward expansion of NATO, Ukraine joining the bloc, and establishing military bases in post-Soviet countries.

The proposals also contained a clause on the non-deployment of NATO strike weapons near the borders of Russia and the withdrawal of alliance forces in Eastern Europe to the positions of 1997. In late January, the United States and NATO sent Moscow written responses to Russia's proposals for security guarantees, ignoring a number of key conditions.

Russia has repeatedly noted that the North Atlantic Alliance is aimed at confrontation. At the same time, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the accession of Finland and Sweden a formal step, which, nevertheless, could entail actual consequences.

He also stressed that NATO thus again approached the Russian borders, so the Ministry of Defense will analyze the current situation and will work to strengthen the western flanks.