President Biden is scheduled to fulfill King Charles III and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Monday forward of a NATO summit in Lithuania and a go to to Finland. A serious focus of his three-nation journey shall be to rally assist for Ukraine, wanting providing it an imminent membership to the protection alliance.
In an interview with CNN, Biden known as for a “rational path” for Ukraine to affix NATO and mentioned a membership vote earlier than the conflict with Russia ends could be “untimely.” On the similar time, Turkey and Hungary are blocking Sweden’s bid for NATO membership, underscoring the divisions that would erode the alliance’s deterrent energy amid a harmful standoff with Moscow.
Right here’s the most recent on the conflict and its ripple results throughout the globe.
Evaluation from our correspondents
A fateful summit 15 years in the past hangs over the NATO assembly in Vilnius: As NATO leaders convene this week in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, Ukrainian officers are demanding that their Western counterparts bear in mind the legacy of the summit in Bucharest, Ishaan Tharoor writes. Through the 2008 NATO assembly within the Romanian capital, former Soviet republics Georgia and Ukraine have been supplied little greater than a imprecise dedication of coming into the alliance sooner or later sooner or later, with no established plan concerning how or when that might be achieved.
The halfhearted gesture mirrored division throughout the West on the time. On one facet, the administration of President George W. Bush, deeply unpopular overseas after the ruinous conflict in Iraq and eking out its last 12 months in workplace, sought to supply the 2 international locations a proper NATO “Membership Motion Plan.” On the opposite, a clutch of Western European governments, led by Germany, believed that neither Georgia nor Ukraine have been politically able to enter the alliance and regarded askance at initiatives that will “poke the bear” of the Kremlin.