Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK and former top military commander, told a meeting of Ukrainian ambassadors on Monday that Ukraine will never actually join Nato. He said he had spent about 12 years trying to bring Ukraine up to Nato standards, but still saw no prospect of membership.
“I know Nato really well. For about 12 years I personally worked on making sure we met Nato standards, and every year I heard tales about how we would join Nato any day now,” he said, adding: “Unfortunately, we will never actually join.”
Ukraine and Nato standards
Evropeiska Pravda quoted him from the meeting. Zaluzhnyi also said it was impossible for Ukraine to join an organisation guided by World War 2 doctrines with the current level of development of the armed forces of Ukraine. That goes to the heart of a contradiction now built into Ukraine’s own policy: Ukraine has enshrined Nato membership as a strategic goal in its constitution, yet Zaluzhnyi said Ukraine in no way met the military standards needed to enter the alliance.
He did not describe a checklist of missing standards, but his point was plain enough. In his telling, the gap is not only political. It is about whether the armed forces of Ukraine have reached the level of development expected by Nato members. Ukraine has also acknowledged that it currently would not be welcomed into Nato by all of its members.
Zaluzhnyi after 2024 dismissal
The weight of the statement comes from who said it. Zaluzhnyi was dismissed as Ukraine’s top commander in 2024 over differences with Volodymyr Zelenskyy on conducting the war with Russia, and he now speaks as one of Ukraine’s best-known military figures turned diplomat. That makes his view harder to dismiss as a passing comment from the sidelines.
For Ukraine, the immediate practical question is not whether the constitutional goal disappears, but what would have to change for the military standards he described to be met. Zaluzhnyi’s comments suggest the debate is moving from slogans about membership to the far more difficult task of defining what readiness would look like inside the armed forces of Ukraine.
Ukraine ambassadors meet Monday
The remarks came amid a wider wartime backdrop. In July, Ukraine’s frontlines were little changed, the Russian army gained less than 40 sq km after gaining 30 sq km in the previous month, and the army had previously been advancing by an average of 405 sq km a month a year earlier. Gains in July were made in Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Sumy, while the Ukrainian army gained 29 sq km in Dnipropetrovsk in July.
Separate attacks on Russia also featured in the same reporting: five people were killed and six were injured after Ukrainian drones attacked Russia’s Moscow region on Tuesday, Andrei Vorobyov said several fires broke out in the Novoselki industrial zone of the Chekhov municipal district outside Moscow, Alexander Drozdenko said a warehouse facility near St Petersburg was also hit by drones, and Finland established a temporary aviation restriction area in the eastern Gulf of Finland. Those developments did not change Zaluzhnyi’s message, but they show how the war still frames the debate over Ukraine’s long-term position.
