The German Foreign Ministry ruled out the possibility of admitting new members to NATO during the conflict in Ukraine

NATO cannot discuss the admission of new members to the alliance during the conflict in Ukraine. This statement was made by German Foreign Minister Annalena Burbock upon her arrival in Oslo for an informal meeting of the heads of the foreign affairs agencies of the NATO states. The broadcast was on the website of the military bloc.

“Each country can decide for itself which alliance, defensive alliance it should be a member of. This is NATO’s open door policy. <...> At the same time, it is clear that in the midst of the war we cannot talk about the entry of new members,” she stressed.

Burbock noted that the NATO open door policy is confirmed by Finland’s entry into the bloc. The minister also expressed her hope that Sweden would soon join the alliance.

In mid-May 2022, Sweden and Finland simultaneously applied to join NATO against the backdrop of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine. On April 4, Finland officially joined the alliance.

Sweden’s accession to NATO was complicated by tensions with Turkey. On January 21, Danish politician Rasmus Paludan burned a Koran outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm. After that, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Sweden should no longer wait for support for its application to join NATO. In May he saidthat Ankara still does not support the admission of Sweden to the alliance.

At the same time, Ukraine is also striving to join NATO. On September 30, 2022, in response to the admission of the DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions to Russia, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky informedthat Ukraine will apply for NATO membership in an expedited manner.

In April, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg informed about reaching a consensus by NATO members that Ukraine should become a member of the alliance. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban reacted to this statement on Twitter with the phrase “What?!” The newspapers Financial Times and Le Monde, citing sources, wrote about the differences between NATO countries on this issue. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell in May emphasizedthat the decision on this depends on the countries participating in the alliance, and not on Stoltenberg.

In the Kremlin considered the expansion of the alliance with the admission of Finland into it, an encroachment on the security and national interests of Russia and the next step towards escalation. Commenting on the words of Stoltenberg about the consent of countries to accept Ukraine into NATO, the press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov declared about the correctness of the decision to conduct a special operation. Prior to that, he noted that the exclusion of the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO is still one of the goals of the special operation.