Georgian Parliament Speaker: after four years of war, Ukraine learns NATO membership was never intended

Georgian Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili on Friday said that after four years of war waged by Ukraine, including for its own right to become a NATO member, it was told at the end of the war that there had never been any intention to admit Ukraine to alliance.

Papuashvili’s comments came in response to former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s statement that there was not even the slightest chance that Ukraine would become a member of NATO.

He noted that it was harmful to create the perception for a country that it was standing at an open door and would soon step through it, when in reality there was no intention of admitting it to NATO.

“We understood this after the 2008 Bucharest Summit; every year we heard about the ‘open door’ and that Ukraine and Georgia would definitely become NATO members. Every year Ukraine was told that it would certainly become a member, and now it has become clear that, apparently, they never actually wanted Ukraine to join NATO at all. There are two explanations for this”, Papuashvuli said.

“One is naivety, which some Western politicians may have had. And the second is harmful intent - to encourage a country, to create the perception that it is right there, already standing at the threshold of an open door, just a little more and it will step in, and thus, emboldened by this, to go toward any kind of escalation, as Saakashvili did in 2008, and as we have seen many times in Ukraine. In the end, when it came down to it - when war began - not a single NATO soldier stood in a trench. This is the truth that we are, unfortunately, once again seeing today”, he concluded.