Ndani ya NATO kuna kinga, taifa lako likiwa ndani ya NATO, yaani Urusi hupita mbali na haiwezi ikakosea njia na kwa namna Urusi imedhihirisha udhaifu wake baada ya kushindwa kuparamia Ukraine licha ya kutumia nguvu nyingi sana, ni dhahiri kwa mataifa ya huko yakitaka amani ya kudumu yajiunge NATO.......
In a speech filmed outside his presidential office in Kyiv, Zelenskiy said he was taking this “decisive step” in order to protect “the entire community” of Ukrainians. He promised the application would happen in an “expedited manner”.
“De facto, we have already made our way to Nato. De facto, we have already proven compatibility with alliance standards. They are real for Ukraine – real on the battlefield and in all aspects of our interaction,” he said. “We trust each other, we help each other, and we protect each other. This is the alliance. De facto. Today, Ukraine is applying to make it de jure.”
The president signed the application form, as did the speaker of parliament, Ruslan Stefanchuk, and the prime minister, Denys Shmyhal.
The alliance is unlikely to accept Ukraine’s imminent Nato entry while it is in a state of war. As a Nato member, fellow members would be compelled to actively defend it against Russia – a commitment that goes well beyond the supply of weapons.
Zelenskiy acknowledged this soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion. “It is clear that Ukraine is not a member of Nato, we understand this,” he said in March. “For years we heard about the apparently open door, but have already also heard that we will not enter there, and these are truths and must be acknowledged.”
In his address on Friday, shared on Telegram, Zelenskiy dismissed the ceremony in Moscow as a meaningless “farce”. He said no peace talks with Russia would be possible while Putin was president. “Putin doesn’t know what dignity and honesty is. We are ready for dialogue with Russia but only with a different Russian president,” he said.
Zelenskiy promised that Ukraine’s armed forces would continue to free territory from Russian occupation, regardless of Putin’s insinuation that Moscow might use nuclear weapons to defend land it has seized. “The whole of Ukraine will be liberated from this enemy,” he said. Moscow was against “life, the law, humanity and truth,” he added.
The president’s office let it be known that they did not watch Putin’s speech. Instead, Zelenskiy convened his national security council and met the commander in chief of his armed forces, Gen Valeriy Zaluzhnyi. He said they discussed progress on the battlefield and weapons deliveries. Zelenskiy added: “Everything will be Ukraine.”
Zelenskiy said Putin’s willingness to kill and torture in order to expand his “zone of control” was madness. Ukrainian commentators agreed. They dismissed Russia’s president as delusional and said his new “treaty” incorporating four regions of Ukraine into Russia would make no difference to the situation on the ground, where Ukrainian troops are on the brink of securing a major victory.
The Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Honcharenko described Putin as an “insane, inadequate person” and said Russia under his two-decade leadership had become a “constant danger to the world”. The ceremony inside the Kremlin’s St George’s hall was full of “strange people” who “look absolutely awful”, he said.
Speaking to the BBC, he pointed out that the four supposed leaders of the provinces formally annexed by Russia – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – had no democratic mandate. “Who elected these people? Who are they?” he said, describing them as puppets.
The prominent defence correspondent for the Kyiv Independent newspaper, Illia Ponomarenko, called Putin “absolutely mad”. He said the speech was the “most imperialistic” since Adolf Hitler. The Kyiv Post tweeted a question of the day asking: “On scale from 1,000 to 1,001, how mentally deranged is he?”
Zelenskiy has made clear that annexation means negotiations with the Kremlin are at an end. His senior aides pointed to the fact that as Putin was speaking, thousands of his troops faced annihilation in the city of Lyman, in the Donetsk region – an area Moscow says is Russia’s “for ever”.
Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, tweeted a picture of a cauldron, a reference to the fact Russian soldiers were apparently trapped in Lyman. Another senior aide, Mykhailo Podolyak, said Moscow would have to ask Kyiv for their safe exit. He added: “If, of course, those in Kremlin are concerned with their soldiers.”