EIf Ukraine receives security guarantees from other states, it will use them, and what is “written in the Constitution regarding NATO are promising visions for the future,” said Parliament Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk
Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine
The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine will not change the paragraphs in the Constitution about the country’s intention to join NATO, the speaker of the Parliament Ruslan Stefanchuk said in an interview with “Ukrainian Truth”.
According to the Chairman of the Rada, changing the Constitution “will never be an end in itself, it is a tool”. “Well, we made some changes, others. They are effective only when they have an effect. We can write anything in the Constitution 150 times, but if there is no effect from it, then these are declarative norms,” he noted (quoted by Ukrinform).
Stefanchuk said that the main priority for the authorities is the safety of every citizen of Ukraine, for this the country needs to get security guarantees. Kiev will use them, and what is written in the Constitution regarding NATO, regarding the EU, are our perspective visions for the future.
On March 19, Stefanchuk, amid negotiations between the Ukrainian and Russian delegations, admitted that the Basic Law could be amended in terms of Ukraine’s course in NATO. “Since the path to Euro-Atlantic integration is spelled out in the Constitution of Ukraine, we have a fairly high level of legitimization of this direction. Therefore, we will look at which way the negotiators will go, and then we will look for the model that either will not contradict the Constitution, or we will change the Constitution in this part,” he said (quoted by Interfax-Ukraine).
At the same time, the representative of the Ukrainian President in the Constitutional Court, MP from “Servants of the People” Fyodor Venislavsky stressed that as long as hostilities continue in the country and martial law is in effect, the course of joining NATO cannot be removed from the Basic Law. However, he admitted that the consolidation of a neutral status in the Constitution with “reinforced concrete legally verified security guarantees” could be discussed at the international level, RBC-Ukraine reported.
The Ukrainian authorities amended the Constitution of the country, defining accession to the EU and NATO as a strategic goal of the state, in February 2019. They oblige the government to implement a course to join both blocs, and assign the president the status of a guarantor of this course.
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Ukraine’s accession to NATO has been discussed since 2008: at the Bucharest summit, the alliance countries stated that they welcome the Euro-Atlantic aspirations of Kiev and Tbilisi and that Ukraine and Georgia will soon become NATO members. So far, this has not happened, although the bloc has confirmed its readiness to accept these countries into its ranks in the summer of 2021 without specifying a time frame when this will happen.
On March 1, against the background of the start of the Russian military operation, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky announced in an interview with Reuters that if the countries are not ready to accept Ukraine into the defense alliance, they must work out security guarantees. The head of the Ukrainian delegation at the negotiations with Russia, David Arakhamiya, in turn, noted that Kiev demands guarantees at the conclusion of a peace treaty by analogy with the fiftharticle of the NATO Charter (it refers to the fact that an attack on one of the members of the alliance is equivalent to an attack on the entire alliance as a whole).
Russia calls Ukraine’s refusal to join the North Atlantic Alliance one of the conditions for normalization of relations between the two countries.
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