KJust ahead of the NATO summit, Ukraine continues to press for a clear commitment to join the alliance. “At the Vilnius summit, we expect a clear invitation and direction to join NATO,” said the Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany, Oleksii Makeiev, the German Press Agency. Even if accession will not happen overnight, one expects that NATO will no longer allow any ambiguity.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the heads of state and government of the 31 NATO countries will meet in Vilnius, Lithuania, to discuss, among other things, the prospects of Ukraine joining NATO. Makeiev warned that the mistakes made at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest should not be repeated. At that time, Germany in particular, under the then Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU), had resisted Ukraine’s rapid admission to the alliance. “If Ukraine had already been a member of NATO in 2014, the annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbass and now the Russian large-scale war of aggression would certainly not have happened,” the ambassador said. Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Meanwhile, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has brought home defenders of the port city of Mariupol from Turkey. Zelenskyy celebrated the 500th day of his country’s resistance against Russia with a memorial event.
Zelenskyy brings defenders from Azovstal back to Ukraine
At least five high-ranking officers involved in the defense of the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol were brought back to Lviv by the President himself from his visit to Turkey. “Home,” Zelenskyy captioned a photo on his Telegram channel on Saturday that showed him on the plane with three commanders of the Azov regiment, the chief of the 36th Marine Brigade Serhiy Volynskyy and the commander of the 12th Brigade of the National Guard Denys Schlehu, shows. The men were taken prisoner by the Russians after Azovstal was conquered, but were then extradited to Turkey. They have now been returned to their homeland “after negotiations with the Turkish side,” according to the Ukrainian presidential administration.
Shortly after Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine began, the port city of Mariupol became the epicenter of bitter fighting. The battles around the city surrounded by Russian troops lasted several months. In the end, several thousand Ukrainian soldiers, including fighters from the nationalist Azov regiment, were holed up in the Azovstal steelworks. The last defenders only surrendered in May.
Moscow sees the repatriation as a violation of the agreement
Russia actually wanted to put the Ukrainian fighters on trial. The nationalist Azov regiment in particular has repeatedly served Moscow as justification for the more than 16-month war of aggression and for the claim that it is allegedly “liberating” Ukraine from “fascists”. Nevertheless, she later deported several commanders of the regiment to Turkey.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has now criticized the return of the Ukrainian soldiers as a “direct violation of existing agreements” by both the Turkish and Ukrainian sides. The liberation of the Azov commanders from Russian captivity was conditional on their remaining in Turkey until the end of the war, he said. The Kremlin spokesman speculated that NATO had apparently exerted great pressure on Ankara so that Zelenskyy could demonstrate success before the NATO summit and in view of the “defeats in the counter-offensive”.
Pray for victory
The political leadership of Ukraine ended the 500th day of defense against the Russian war of aggression with a large church service in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Zelenskyy said at the memorial event that thousands of Ukrainians had shown courage and strength in the fights for their homeland since the beginning of the war. Almost 50,000 were honored during this period, 298 of them with the country’s highest order as “Hero of Ukraine”.
