“Jens Stoltenberg explained why NATO refused to create a no-fly zone over Ukraine at the beginning of the invasion.”, — write: www.pravda.com.ua
Source: Stoltenberg in his memoirs On My Watch (“In my time”), excerpts from which are cited by The Sunday Times, “European Truth”
Details: In particular, in his memoirs, the former NATO Secretary General describes the “painful moment” in February 2022 when he rejected President Volodymyr Zelenskyi’s desperate request to introduce a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
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Stoltenberg said he feared their conversation could be the Ukrainian president’s last phone call, as the West feared for his life.
“He called me from a bunker in Kyiv, when the Russian tanks were already very close. And he said: “I accept your decision not to send NATO ground troops, although I do not agree with it. But please close the airspace. Don’t let Russian planes, drones and helicopters fly and attack us,” Stoltenberg recalled.
Stoltenberg recalled that in the past, NATO did close the airspace over certain countries for reasons of protecting the civilian population, in particular, over Bosnia and Herzegovina or over the northern part of Iraq, where it was necessary to protect the Kurds.
However, the then Secretary General of the North Atlantic Alliance refused Zelensky’s request.
He explained his refusal by the fact that if NATO were to close the skies over Ukraine, it would destroy Russian air defense systems in Belarus and Russia, since Western fighter jets would not be able to fly over Ukraine if Russian air defense missiles targeted them.
“And if there is a Russian plane or helicopter in the air, we will have to shoot it down, and then a full-scale war will break out between NATO and Russia. And we are not ready for that. As Biden, who was the president of the United States at the time, said, we will not risk a third world war for the sake of Ukraine,” Stoltenberg noted.
He recalls that it “pained” him to end that phone conversation with Zelensky, “knowing that his life was in danger.”
In his memoirs, Stoltenberg also talked about the tense negotiations in 2022 about joining the Alliance of Finland and Sweden, in particular how he snapped at the then head of the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu.
In addition, he mentioned how US President Donald Trump, during his first term, considered the exclusion of several countries from NATO.