The Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, has assured this Thursday, in a conference in Norway, that it depends on Ukraine when to sit down to negotiate on a possible peace agreement for the war:

“It is the Ukrainians themselves who must decide when they are willing to to sit down and negotiate”.

This clarification comes after Stian Jenssen, director of the Private Office of the NATO Secretary General, hinted last Tuesday that Ukraine could achieve peace by ceding ground to Russia.

“I think the solution may be for Ukraine to cede territory and receive NATO membership in return.I’m not saying it should be like this, but it’s a possible solution,” he said.

These comments sparked outrage among Ukrainian officials, including adviser to the head of the presidential office, Mykhailo Podolyak, who called the comments “ridiculous” and said such a move would only encourage Moscow’s “appalling leniency.” Similarly, from kyiv they described these statements as “unacceptable.”

In this same intervention, Stoltenberg asserted that the NATO allies want peace, and “military support for Ukraine is the solution,” according to the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK.

Tension in the Baltic states

After this controversy, the NATO Secretary General also explained that the “great powers” like Russia do not have the right to possess any type of “spheres of interest”. “Small countries like Latvia and Lithuania cannot accept that (just) because they are small neighboring countries, Russia governs them,” he said.

For this reason, and in view of the presence of the Wagner Group in Belarus (an ally of Russia), Lithuania already announced last Wednesday the temporary suspension of operations along the border of the country commanded by Lukashenko (president of Belarus).