Russia Insists NATO Withdraw Ukraine Membership Promise

By Dmitry Antonov and Guy Faulconbridge

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia on Tuesday demanded NATO scrap its 2008 promise to one day give Ukraine membership of the U.S.-led NATO military alliance and dismissed the idea that NATO member forces could be keepers of the peace under some sort of ceasefire deal.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said talks in Saudi Arabia, where he met Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. national security adviser Mike Waltz and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, had been useful and that both sides had listened to each other.

But as the meeting was under way, Russia's foreign ministry said Moscow's long-standing objection to NATO membership for Ukraine required more than just not letting Ukraine join the alliance for now.

"A refusal to accept Kyiv into NATO is not enough now," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in response to a question from Reuters.

"The alliance must disavow the Bucharest promises of 2008," she said in Moscow, referring to a NATO summit that year where both Ukraine and Georgia were told they could join the alliance, but without a timetable or any path for how to get there.

After talks with the U.S. delegation in Riyadh, Lavrov told reporters that he and Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov had underscored that NATO membership for Ukraine was unacceptable to Russia.

"We explained to our colleagues today what President (Vladimir) Putin has repeatedly stressed: that the expansion of NATO, the absorption of Ukraine by the North Atlantic alliance, is a direct threat to the interests of the Russian Federation, a direct threat to our sovereignty," Lavrov said.

He also dismissed the essence of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer's proposal to send British and potentially other NATO member forces to Ukraine as peacekeepers, in response to U.S. President Donald Trump's demands that Europe stop depending on the U.S. for its defence needs.

"We explained today that the appearance of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a false flag, under the flag of the European Union or under national flags, does not change anything in this regard," Lavrov said. "Of course this is unacceptable to us."

NATO'S MEMBERSHIP PROMISE TO UKRAINE

The 2008 Bucharest declaration was a compromise that papered over cracks between the United States, which wanted to admit both countries, and France and Germany, which feared antagonising Russia.

Russia has repeatedly cited the post-Soviet enlargement of NATO, and specifically Ukraine's membership ambitions, as a reason for the war in Ukraine.

NATO says it is a defensive alliance with no expansionist ambitions, and that it has not been a party to the war, although many of its members have individually supported Kyiv's resistance to Russia's invasion with money and weaponry.

Zakharova said Ukraine needed to return to the position of its 1990 declaration of sovereignty as the Soviet Union was collapsing, in which it said it would become a permanently neutral state, not participate in military blocs, and remain nuclear-free.

Ukraine became fully independent in 1991 and, three years later, agreed to give up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons in exchange for assurances of independence and sovereignty within its existing borders from Russia, the U.S. and Britain.

(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov, Writing by Guy Faulconbridge and Gleb Stolyarov; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Kevin Liffey)