- Says NATO membership might not protect Ukraine from Russia after Trump win
Ukraine does not have the means to “turn the tables” in the war and will lose if it carries on like it is now, former Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba has said.
Kuleba acknowledged in an interview with the Financial Times that things “look bad” on the battlefield.
“Do we today have the means and tools to turn the tables and change the trajectory of how things are happening? No, we don’t. And if it continues like this, we will lose the war,” he said.
But the former minister, who resigned in September amid a wide-ranging reshuffle of the Ukrainian cabinet, noted that things “looked worse” on the battlefield in the first few months of the conflict.
“Everyone is asking what Ukraine is ready to do, what Ukraine is ready to accept. And I say, guys, first find the answer to the question [of] what Putin is ready to accept. Because this is the place where the war comes from.”
Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an exclusive interview with Sky News’ Stuart Ramsay on Friday that an offer of NATO membership to territory under Kyiv’s control could end “the hot stage of the war” in Ukraine.
But Kuleba said he believes NATO no longer provides the security guarantees it once did – and added that it essentially relies on a willingness from the US to act to defend it.
He pointed to Article 5, which sees members agree that an armed attack against one or more nations be considered an attack against them all.
“In reality it is based on one sentence – ‘the United States will defend every inch of the territory of our allies’. And this sentence belongs to Biden. What if you have a president who says he’s not going to defend every inch of your territory?… If Trump says anything like that, the NATO shield is gone and Putin will feel free to do whatever he wants,” he said.
Meanwhile, Russian forces have been fighting behind “established Ukrainian defences”, the UK’s defence ministry has said.
According to The Telegraph, it said Russian troops had captured swathes of territory in “less well-defended” sectors of the southern Donbas region.
“Russian forces have made rapid advances towards the eastern flank of Velyka Novosilka… a lynchpin of Ukraine’s defensive line,” the ministry said.
It added that the fall of Vuhledar in October had broken Ukrainian defences in the area.
“This enabled increased Russian advances into less well-defended areas,” the newspaper reported it as saying during a weekend briefing.
Velyka Novosilka is a rural settlement that lies on the border of the Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
The US-based thinktank the Institute for the Study of War recently said the Russian military was planning to advance west from the settlement and then turn north to take on Ukrainian forces in the town of Pokrovsk.
Written with reports from Sky News