Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief and current ambassador to the United Kingdom, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, has said the country will never become a member of NATO.
Speaking at a meeting of Ukrainian ambassadors in Kyiv on August 3, Zaluzhnyi said: “I know NATO very well. For about 12 years I personally worked on making sure we met NATO standards, and every year I heard tales about how we would join NATO any day now. Unfortunately, we will never actually join.”
He argued that it was impossible to join, given the level of development of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, “an organisation guided by the doctrines of the Second World War”.
He added that NATO would most likely remain in its present form and would spend some 12 years, as Ukraine would, moving towards the standards needed to reach half the capability level of the Russian Federation.
Despite that assessment of membership prospects, Zaluzhnyi stressed that Ukraine still requires technologies currently held by NATO countries, particularly in ballistic-missile defence and space.
He suggested Kyiv should instead look towards future European military-political security arrangements that have yet to be formed, and expressed regret that Ukraine is not more actively pursuing membership of the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force.
Established in 2014, the force groups 10 northern European states under British leadership. Ukraine became the first non-member to be granted enhanced partnership status with it in November 2025, an arrangement covering training and joint development but carrying no mutual defence commitment.
NATO membership remains a formal strategic goal written into Ukraine’s constitution, and successive alliance summits had repeated that Ukraine’s future is inside the organisation.
The most recent declaration broke with that. The text agreed at the Ankara summit on July 8, 2026 made no mention of membership or of the “irreversible path” language adopted in Washington in July 2024, pledging instead €70 billion in equipment, assistance and training for 2026.
In practice, several key members, including the United States, have made clear that accession cannot occur while the war continues.
President Donald Trump has gone further. The 28-point peace plan drafted by his administration in November 2025 would have obliged Kyiv to write a permanent renunciation of membership into its constitution, and negotiations have since turned towards guarantees offered outside the alliance.
Zaluzhnyi, once Ukraine’s most senior military officer, was dismissed as commander-in-chief in February 2024 after public differences with President Volodymyr Zelensky over strategy. He remains one of the country’s most trusted public figures, with 73 per cent expressing trust in him against 61 per cent for Zelensky in a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey conducted between May 7 and June 3, 2026.
COMMENT: NATO faces its moment of decision over Iran and Ukraine, writes @ConradMBlack https://t.co/vumy3mAYG7
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) August 2, 2026
