Ukraine's ambassador to the UK and former army chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, has explained his widely reported remark that Ukraine will never join NATO, saying he strongly backs the Alliance but believes it must rebuild its outdated doctrine before it could even admit Kyiv, according to Interfax-Ukraine. The war, he argued, has pushed Ukraine technologically ahead of the bloc.

Ukraine's push for lasting security now runs on several tracks at once — NATO membership, European guarantees, and its own rising weight as a security provider whose battlefield lessons allies increasingly want.

The remark that went in circles

Days earlier, at an ambassadors' meeting in Kyiv, Zaluzhnyi said Ukraine would never join NATO as things stand, arguing it cannot join an organization that still holds Second World War-era doctrines — a line that drew wide attention. 

He recalled 12 years chasing NATO standards while hearing yearly "fairy tales" about imminent membership. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry later said the words had been taken out of context.

"I am for NATO"

Asked to explain himself at a diplomatic club in Kyiv, Zaluzhnyi said he is firmly a supporter of the Alliance. He noted he led the 2019 shift of Ukraine's forces to NATO standards, rewriting almost 37 laws. 

"I made so many enemies you cannot even imagine. I am for NATO," he said.

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Why he says NATO must change

Politically, though, "NATO raises many questions, as a bloc that guarded the old world," he said. In 2026, Ukraine used nearly every weapon NATO fields — save Tomahawks, nuclear arms, aircraft carriers, and F-35 jets — and applied their doctrines in combat. 

"The resource is exhausted. Russia found a counter to all of it," he said. NATO, he added, "is in the doctrine of the end of the Second World War, while we are technologically ahead."

Only once the Alliance adopts a completely new doctrine, Zaluzhnyi said, will it be ready to admit Ukraine. He again called for "an absolutely new" security bloc, likely anchored in Europe, citing the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force as a model. 

One of Ukraine's most respected generals has said out loud that the country's constitutional goal of NATO membership will never happen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine's ambassador to Britain, does not see Kyiv's path to NATO membership, he said in a discussion on Euro-Atlantic integration at a meeting of ambassadors in Kyiv, European Pravda reports.

The statement is striking because of who made it and from where. Zaluzhnyi, the former commander-in-chief, is, as ambassador to a leading NATO member, formally part of the machinery pursuing the alliance path.

"I know NATO very well. For about 12 years, I personally worked on us mastering NATO standards and listened every year to fairy tales that said that any moment now we'd join NATO. Unfortunately, we will never join it," he said.

His case against joining

Zaluzhnyi argued the obstacle runs both ways. Ukraine cannot join at the level of development its Armed Forces have reached, "an organization that holds the doctrines of the Second World War," he said, dismissing NATO's capabilities despite the membership of Britain, the US, and others.

He was blunt about the alliance's trajectory. NATO will most likely stay in the same form it is now, he said, and would need 12 years, as Ukraine has, to reach the standards required to match even half the Russian level.

Despite this assessment, Zaluzhnyi acknowledged that "Ukraine needs technologies that are currently still held by NATO countries, including in areas such as anti-ballistic missile defense and space capabilities."

What he proposes instead

That view aligns Ukraine's security future with the European defense architecture now under discussion, the coalition of the willing, and the anti-ballistic coalitions Ukraine has helped assemble, rather than with the transatlantic alliance.

Zaluzhnyi's remarks are his own assessment, delivered in a diplomatic discussion, and Ukraine's official policy remains the constitutional Euro-Atlantic course.