Medvedev believes Ukraine’s NATO membership would mean war

(Reuters) – Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Ukraine’s membership in NATO would be a declaration of war against Moscow and that only “prudence” on the part of the alliance could prevent the planet from falling apart.

Leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) pledged at their summit last week to support Ukraine on an “irreversible path toward full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership,” but left open the date when that might happen.

Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council and a leading voice of Kremlin hawks, told the Argumenty I Fakty media outlet that Ukraine’s membership would go beyond a direct threat to Moscow’s security.

“This would amount, in essence, to a declaration of war – albeit with a delay,” he said in remarks published Wednesday.

“The actions that Russia’s opponents have been taking against us for years, expanding the alliance… are bringing NATO to the point of no return.”

In a standard Kremlin line since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Medvedev said Russia was not threatening NATO but would respond to the alliance’s attempts to advance its interests.

“The more such attempts multiply, the tougher our responses will be,” Medvedev said. “Whether this will break the entire planet into pieces depends solely on the prudence of the (NATO) parties.”

Medvedev, who during his presidency from 2008 to 2012 was seen as a pro-Western modernizer, has reinvented himself as an arch-hawk, warning the United States and its allies that arming kyiv could lead to a “nuclear apocalypse.”

Medvedev also reiterated Moscow’s position that the appointment of Mark Rutte as NATO head will not change the alliance’s position.

“For Russia, nothing will change, because key decisions are made not by NATO member countries, but by one state – the United States,” Medvedev said.

NATO was created after World War II as a defensive bulwark against a feared Soviet invasion of Western Europe, but its subsequent inclusion of Eastern European countries was seen by the Kremlin as an act of aggression.

(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and Ronald Popeski in Winnipeg; Writing by Lidia Kelly; Editing by Stephen Coates)