BURSTRussian President Vladimir Putin claimed Tuesday that Moscow has never been against Ukraine joining the European Union (EU) but reiterated that the country’s potential ascension into NATO is “unacceptable.”
"As for Ukraine's membership of the EU, we have never objected to this," Putin said while in China, according to Reuters.
"As for NATO, this is another issue ... Our position here is well known: we consider this unacceptable for ourselves,” the Russian leader told Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico.
Ukraine began its bid to become a member of the EU after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In June of the same year, Putin said Russia has “nothing against” Ukraine’s wish to be a part of the European Union. Russia later dismissed the possibility of Ukraine's ambition to join the 27-member bloc as "hardly real" in November 2023.
Kyiv has previously said that Moscow cannot dictate which alliances Ukraine can join.
The Russian leader also said that he talked about potential security guarantees for Ukraine during his April 15 meeting with President Trump in Alaska and argued that there might be a way to find “consensus.”
"There are options for ensuring Ukraine's security in the event of an end to the conflict," Putin said Tuesday. "And it seems to me that there is an opportunity to find consensus here."
Following the summit with Trump, Russia appears to have been slow-walking the effort to bring an end to the three-and-a-half-year war in Eastern Europe. Trump has pushed for a meeting between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but so far, Russian officials have rejected it. Ukraine has shot down prospects of making large territorial concessions.
Trump cast doubt about a face-to-face meeting between the leaders but expressed confidence that a trilateral huddle between himself, Putin and Zelensky could still take place.
“A [trilateral] would happen. A [bilateral], I don’t know about, but a tri will happen," he said in a recent interview with The Daily Caller. "But, you know, sometimes people aren’t ready for it."