KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s parliament backed a proposal to cancel the country’s nonaligned status, a decision that Russia denounced as a dangerous step toward seeking membership of NATO.
The legislation put forward by President Petro Poroshenko was supported Tuesday 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 on Tuesday. 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 today and Friday in Minsk, Belarus, after a phone call last night 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 Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Ending Ukraine’s nonaligned status “is the choice of the Ukrainian people,” Klimkin wrote on Twitter after the vote. “This is the choice for freedom and security.”
