Seems more likely he wants assurance that Ukraine will NOT become part of NATO
Seems to me the predictor winds should consider that Ukraine has formally applied to NATO, but has NATO actually voted upon and given Ukraine NATO Official Aspirant status?
For crying out loud. Russia had that assurance from Ukraine before they even launched the SMO.
There were two attempts to negotiate peace before the March talks. The first was led by Putin’s ghostwriter.
The second was by Russia’s former deputy PM, Dmitry Kozak, who secured concessions from Ukraine on exactly this point... but Kozak was then told that Putin had decided to extend his war aims to annexing the entire south of Ukraine therefore assurances from Kyiv that Ukraine would not apply to join NATO weren’t good enough. (https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/09/14/putin-rejected-early-ukraine-peace-deal-to-pursue-expanded-annexation-goals-reuters-a78787)
On March 15th 2022, during the third attempt at peace negotiations, the Ukrainian negotiators pitched that concession again and the Russian negotiators actually agreed to it. And just to make sure the regime in Russia couldn’t deny that they’d already made these assurances, Zelenskyy went on national television and explained that Ukraine would not apply to join NATO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_eDyZfJh84
Putin’s intransigent “nyet!” even when Ukraine agrees to the condition he publicly insists Ukraine must accept, is not just unfathomable, it’s completely pointless... because even if Ukraine applied to join NATO, it falls too far short of satisfying the qualifying criteria. Even Biden’s told that to Putin, directly.
So... count the assurances. (1) Ukraine wasn’t going to apply to join NATO, (2) if it reneged on that promise and did apply it wouldn’t qualify any time this side of 2040, (3) even if Ukraine bent over backwards to satisfy all possible preconditions for membership before 2030, the chances of all existing members of NATO unanimously approving it were zilch because Hungary and France have already said they would veto it.
If you read the 2021 demands Moscow sent to NATO, they are clear that the NATO open door policy must be completely rescinded... and every time Putin insists on slapping that back on the negotiating table as if UKRAINE can sign that off, or the USA can unilaterally rewrite the NATO charter against the wishes of EU-NATO, Putin kills whatever progress has been made toward a peace agreement.
The assurances Putin demands are utterly impossible for Ukraine to say yes to, because they’re demands to NATO. But they’re also impossible for NATO to agree to, because even if the USA did put a motion on the NATO table to take the Article 5 umbrella away from the Baltic states, EU-NATO would never agree to it.
But Putin keeps insisting on the NATO charter rewrite. If Putin watered down his demands to telling NATO to end its open door policy from 1st April 2024, NATO might vote for that. But vote to do that retrospectively, and effectively expel every NATO accession state that joined after 1997? It’s for the birds, and what I’d really like to hear from the “Boris killed the peace deal” crowd is how on earth they think Ukraine, the USA, the UK, and 30 other countries including the Baltic States, could’ve UNANIMOUSLY agreed to those terms.