Ukraine asks NATO for membership invite next week, letter shows

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha has urged his NATO counterparts to issue an invitation to Kyiv at a meeting in Brussels next week to join the Western military alliance, according to the text of a letter seen by Reuters on Friday.

The letter reflects Ukraine's renewed push to secure an invitation to join NATO, which is part of a "victory plan" outlined last month by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to end the war triggered by Russia's 2022 invasion.

Zelenskyy told U.K.-based Sky News that offering Ukraine NATO membership while allowing Russia to keep for the moment territory it had captured could be a solution to end the "hot stage" of the 33-month-old war.

Ukraine says it accepts that it cannot join the alliance until the war is over but extending an invitation now would show Russian President Vladimir Putin that he could not achieve one of his main goals - preventing Kyiv from becoming a NATO member.

"The invitation should not be seen as an escalation," Sybiha wrote in the letter.

"On the contrary, with a clear understanding that Ukraine's membership in NATO is inevitable, Russia will lose one of its main arguments for continuing this unjustified war," he wrote.

"I urge you to endorse the decision to invite Ukraine to join the Alliance as one of the outcomes of the NATO Foreign Ministerial Meeting on 3-4 December 2024."

Zelenskyy told Sky News an invitation had to be officially extended to the entire country as Ukraine had no legal right to recognise any of its territory as Russian. NATO membership could then initially apply to only the part of Ukraine that Kyiv controls.

"No one has offered us to be in NATO for one part or another part of Ukraine. The fact is, it is a solution to stop the hot stage of the war because we