Ukraine Parliament Votes to End Non-Aligned Status in NATO Move

Ukraines parliament backed a proposal to cancel the countrys non-aligned status, a decision Russia denounced as a dangerous step toward seeking membership of NATO.

The legislation put forward by President Petro Poroshenko was supported yesterday by 303 of 357 lawmakers in the chamber, hours after the announcement of fresh talks to try to end the conflict with pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine. The bill will help Ukraine as it seeks to achieve all criteria of membership for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin told parliament.

The vote in Ukraine is counter-productive and will increase confrontation, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Moscow yesterday. It will have extremely negative consequences and amounts to an application to join NATO, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev wrote on Facebook.

The decision follows an announcement that the Ukraine Contact Group will meet Dec. 24 and Dec. 26 in Minsk, Belarus, after a phone call on Monday between Poroshenko, Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande. A two-week truce has tempered the bloodshed in a conflict that has killed more than 4,700 people since April in fighting between government forces and separatists in Ukraines Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Ending Ukraines non-aligned status is the choice of the Ukrainian people, Klimkin wrote on Twitter after the vote. This is the choice for freedom and security.

Poroshenko said in November that Ukraine would hold a referendum on seeking NATO membership at the end of this decade after it had completed real policy changes. Germany and France have signaled that they are opposed to Ukraine joining the 28-member alliance because of concerns that this will inflame tensions with Russia.

NATO should be open to new members, Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz told reporters in Warsaw yesterday. Its up to Ukraine to decide whether they want to join.

The contact group, which has representatives of Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, last met in September to try to resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine. The four leaders emphasized the need to fulfill agreements made at those talks, including withdrawal of troops and heavy armament, as well as immediate liberation of all prisoners, Poroshenko said in a statement on his website.

The main task at the moment is to stop the violence, Alexei Panin, deputy director of the Center for Political Information, a Moscow-based research group, said by phone. The confrontation may evolve into a frozen conflict that could encourage the European Union to lift sanctions against Russia by mid-2015, though U.S. measures imposed over the crisis will remain, he said.

Defense spending is Ukraines top priority, Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko told parliament yesterday as she presented the governments draft 2015 budget for what she called the robbed and fighting country. Ukraine is in its most difficult situation since independence, she said.

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Ukraine Parliament Votes to End Non-Aligned Status in NATO Move