President Zelensky Opens NATO Summit With Plea For Missiles and Alliance Membership
NATO would be wise to welcome Ukraine as a member of the alliance and should hurry to send more missiles to Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky told the Ankara Summit on Tuesday.
World leaders have arrived in Ankara, Turkey, for the two-day North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit, including U.S. President Donald Trump who flew from Washington with both Air Force One aircraft, disembarking from the new red-white-and-blue refurbished Boeing 747-8 on Tuesday afternoon. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was one of the first world leaders to address the summit and spoke at the NATO Defence Industry Forum after his personal jet touched down, using his time at the podium to call for more missiles for Ukraine, and for NATO membership.
While membership of the alliance has been frequently discussed for Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion, the difficulties of admitting a new member that is already at war and one-fifth occupied by Russia has so necessarily precluded any progress on the matter. Nevertheless, it is something Ukraine has persistently raised — often as leverage against other wants — and that continued on Tuesday afternoon, with a pitch to the floor from the national President that attempted to portray admitting Kyiv as a slam-dunk.
Zelensky Tells NATO he Wants ‘Strong Decisions’ Ahead of Trump Meeting at This Week’s Crunch Summithttps://t.co/j436m8munX
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) July 6, 2026
President Zelensky said:
…we have raised our interception rate against Russian Shahed drones to over 90-per-cent… and with all due respect no other country has the capability to defend against attack drones at this scale… I have a question for you. Do you really believe it would be right to leave outside NATO a country and a people with this level of defensive capability?
If we already have these capabilities, if Ukrainians already know how to fight like this, then it does make sense for these capabilities to become part of the alliance’s collective defence. That would make all of us stronger. And we already see each other as reliable partners, and it would only be natural to become part of one common security community.
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