Thursday, September 4, 2014

Kremlin warns Ukraine against joining NATO / Calls for Ukraine’s joining NATO aimed to derail peace process (Lavrov)


MOSCOW — The Kremlin on Thursday underscored Russia’s opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine, warning that such a move could derail efforts to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine, as leaders of the alliance gathered for a key summit in Wales.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also told the United States not to try to impose its own will on Kiev.
Lavrov’s comments came one day after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a plan to end the fighting that would entrench gains by pro-Russian rebels and hand a significant defeat to Ukrainian leaders who have sought to regain full control of their nation.

Lavrov said Ukraine’s attempts to abandon its nonaligned status by joining the NATO alliance could “derail all efforts aimed at initiating a dialogue with the aim of ensuring national security,” according to the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS.
He said Russia was ready to take “practical steps” to de-escalate the crisis under the proposals made by Putin. “We hope that the calls [by Putin] will be heard, especially by Kiev, [and the rebel leaders of] Donetsk and Luhansk,” he was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency............................http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/kremlin-warns-ukraine-joining-nato-could-derail-efforts-to-end-crisis/2014/09/04/2dadcb6f-e730-441b-b0a2-103194ad020a_story.html?wprss=rss_homepage
4/9/14
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  • Calls for Ukraine’s joining NATO aimed to derail peace process — FM Lavrov...

MOSCOW, September 04. /ITAR-TASS/. Initiatives of some political forces in Kiev concerning Ukraine’s drive to join NATO seems as attempts to ‘derail’ the peace process in Russia’s embattled neighboring Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday.

According to the Russian minister it was not coincidental that calls for Ukraine’s non-ally NATO status were voiced after the Russian and Ukrainian presidents held talks on the possible ways to resolve the conflict and after a session of the Contact Group was held in the Belarusian capital of Minsk.

“This is an obvious attempt to derail all efforts to initiate a dialogue aimed at providing national security,” Lavrov said during his meeting with Secretary General of the Council of Europe Thorbjorn.
“I am positive that until we refuse attempts to eternalize separating lines in Europe, until we seriously start dealing in practice with the principle of security inseparability in its all dimensions, in other words until we systematically resolve problems of the all-European nature, we will keep encountering from time to time situations similar to the crisis in Ukraine,” the top Russian diplomat added.

Ukrainian Minister of Justice Pavel Petrenko said on Tuesday that Ukraine might be granted a status of a US non-NATO ally this year and the issue would be in the focus of a forthcoming meeting between Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and US President Barack Obama.

He said the status of a US non-NATO ally would be an “intermediate stage” in Ukraine’s drive towards full-fledged membership in the North Atlantic Alliance.
The same opinion was also voiced by Mikhail Koval, a deputy chief of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.
  • The status of Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA) is granted by the United States government to close allies, which have strategic ties with US Armed Forces, but are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Nations enjoying the MNNA status, which officially emerged in 1989, are eligible for a number of benefits, such as the participation in cooperative defense-related initiatives, supplies of certain types of weapons, joint participation in space projects.
  • The United States’ major non-NATO allies are Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and a number of other states.
 http://en.itar-tass.com/russia/748036
4/9/14
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