Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking in Tianjin, China, said ‘root causes of the crisis’ in Ukraine had to be addressed.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sept. 1 that the issue of NATO’s eastward enlargement has to be tackled for there to be a sustainable peace deal in Ukraine.
Putin was speaking after talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Tianjin, China.
Putin said the crisis in Ukraine was partly due to “the West’s constant attempts to drag Ukraine into NATO,” which he said “poses a direct threat to Russia’s security.”
He said that the 2014 revolution in Ukraine was a “coup” in which “the country’s political leadership that opposed NATO membership was removed from power.”
“In order for a Ukrainian settlement to be sustainable and long-term, the root causes of the crisis, which I have just mentioned and which I have repeatedly mentioned before, must be eliminated,” he said.
Putin Calls for ‘Fair Balance’
Putin also called for “a fair balance in the security sphere” to be restored.
In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine—which has expressed interest in joining NATO—and its forces now control a fifth of the country, including Crimea and large swathes of the south and east of Ukraine.
Just days before the invasion, Putin delivered a speech describing the potential accession of Ukraine to NATO as “a direct threat to the security of Russia.”
In the wake of the Russian invasion, Finland and Sweden both waived policies of neutrality they had held for decades and joined NATO in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
NATO now has 32 members, including a string of countries that were once part of the Soviet Union—such as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—or were part of the Moscow-dominated Warsaw Pact alliance during the Cold War—such as Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria.
Apart from Ukraine, two other countries—Georgia and Bosnia-Herzegovina—have applied for NATO membership.
The alliance’s website states, “NATO’s door remains open to any European country in a position to undertake the commitments and obligations of membership, and contribute to security in the Euro-Atlantic area.”
During NATO’s 2008 summit in Bucharest, alliance leaders said in a declaration: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”
But after NATO’s summit in The Hague in June, there was no mention of Ukrainian membership in the declaration issued, which stated simply, “Allies reaffirm their enduring sovereign commitments to provide support to Ukraine, whose security contributes to ours.”
