In an article published in December last year, Ukraine’s foreign affairs minister Dmytro Kuleba dismissed neutrality as a policy that could “do nothing to abate Putin’s appetite”, but would rather feed it further. Kuleba also stressed that Ukraine would not abandon its stated ambition to join NATO, which has been enshrined in the country’s constitution since 2019, “no matter how much pressure we face from Russia”.
Three months later, faced with Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyi has already acknowledged that Ukraine “would not be able to join” NATO and that this “needed to be recognised.”
Zelenskyi’s response has fuelled speculations that a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality would be the centrepiece of a possible diplomatic settlement with Russia. However, after years of official repudiation of the idea, the sudden embrace of a permanently neutral status may be harder for Kyiv than it might seem. It may now be up to NATO itself to open the path to a Russian-Ukrainian settlement.
