Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said it would be up to Ukraine to decide when it wanted to negotiate peace with Russia, as he sought to downplay comments by a key aide about a land-for-Nato-membership agreement.
The head of the military alliance was speaking at the Arendal democracy festival where a couple of days earlier his chief of staff had caused controversy by suggesting that Ukraine could “give up territory” for peace and Nato membership.
Stoltenberg argued that the path to a settlement was “to support Ukraine militarily. If you want a lasting, just peace, then military support for Ukraine is the way to get there. There is no doubt about that,” he said in an interview at the event.
“It is Ukraine, and only Ukraine, that can decide when the prerequisites for negotiations are present. And who can decide, around a negotiating table, what is an acceptable solution. Our task is to support them,” he added.
It was the third effort in three days to smooth over the row caused by Stoltenberg’s aide Stian Jenssen on Tuesday. Nato issued a statement that evening insisting its policy of support for Ukraine had not changed, while on Wednesday Jenssen apologised and said he had made a mistake in speaking as simplistically as he did.
Ukraine and Russia show no sign of wanting to negotiate an end to the 18-month-long war, with Kyiv focused on trying to expel the invaders from within its borders while Moscow aims to consolidate the territory, roughly the size of Portugal, it has seized since February 2022.
But the slow progress of Ukraine’s counter-offensive has prompted questions about how long the war could last and whether there could eventually be any kind diplomatic trade off, a scenario generally feared by Kyiv’s political elite, as it could imply a settlement being imposed on the country.
On Thursday, Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, criticised the idea of handing over territory. “Criminals must not be encouraged by the phrase ‘land for peace,’” he wrote on the X social media network, formerly Twitter.
The aide continued: “The territories of Crimea and Donbas are the unconditional territories of Ukraine, and therefore the only way to really stop the war is to return international law to these territories.”
Podolyak, who had previously criticised Jenssen’s comments as ridiculous, was primarily taking aim at Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, who gave an interview to Le Figaro calling for “diplomacy, discussions and talks” to end the war.
Sarkozy said there was an ongoing risk of military escalation if the war continued. “Without compromise, nothing will be possible and we run the risk that the situation will degenerate at any moment. This powder keg could have frightful consequences,” he said.
Nato members have increasingly set aside concerns about escalation by increasing weapons supply to Ukraine, with modern artillery, long-range missiles and tanks, while Russia has made no efforts to strike at Nato targets, although its leaders say they are engaged in a direct struggle with the west.
But there remain limitations. Although the west has committed to help Ukraine obtain F-16 fighter jets and train pilots and ground crew, progress has been halting. Yuri Ihnat, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian air force, acknowledged on Wednesday: “It is already obvious that we will not be able to defend Ukraine with F-16s this fall and winter.”
Last week the Washington Post reported that the first batch of six Ukrainian pilots would not be ready to fly the planes until the summer of 2024.
