Agency Report –
Munich – NATO must decide as a whole on Ukraine’s future membership, Friedrich Merz, the conservative front-runner in upcoming German elections, told the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.
“Since the last NATO summit, there has been consensus within NATO that Ukraine must have the prospect of membership,” Merz said. If this was to change, NATO had to do it jointly, he added.
Turning to US President Donald Trump’s negotiation strategy with Russia, Merz said he would not agree with anyone who took Ukraine’s potential NATO membership off the table before starting talks with Moscow.
“There is a status, there is an agreement, there is something that NATO has already decided,” the conservative bloc leader said.
The alliance assured Ukraine last year that it was on an “irreversible path” to membership, according to the concluding document of its summit in Washington in July last year.
Speaking in Brussels on Thursday, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that “the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.”
