President Duda in Kyiv: Poland and Lithuania will do their best to ensure Ukraine joins NATO

NATO members are close to agreeing incremental steps to strengthen ties with Ukraine by the Vilnius summit but have yet to resolve differences over how to address Ukraine's desire for membership.

Lithuania and Poland have been among the staunchest supporters of Ukraine in NATO and the EU, and have been calling for accepting it into both.

In a joint news conference in Ukraine's capital, Polish President Andrzej Duda said that Poland and Lithuania will do everything they can to ensure that Ukraine becomes a member of NATO as soon as possible.

"We will do everything to make this happen as soon as possible," Duda told a press conference. "We are trying to ensure that the decisions made at the (NATO) summit clearly indicate the perspective of membership, we are conducting talks on this issue with our allies."

"We truly believe and do everything we can so that this (Vilnius NATO summit 2023) summit becomes a summit of decisions, so that it will strengthen security in this part of Europe. We deeply believe that the security of Ukraine is all our security, those are our common interests that NATO has to be as dense as possible here and that Ukraine in the nearest future becomes a member of the alliance," Duda added.

"We also talked a lot about the latest situation with the Wagner group, about decisions that were made in Russia about it. We interpret them as something that calls for very close vigilance from NATO," the Polish leader stressed.

"We cannot exclude that the Wagner group's presence in Belarus can be a potential danger for Poland that has a border with Belarus, for Lithuania with the longest border with Belarus from among our countries, and potentially Latvia that also is a neighbour of Belarus."

Lithuania is purchasing two NASAMS air defense launcher systems for Ukraine, President Gitanas Nauseda said on Tuesday (June 27).

Lithuania purchased the NASAMS for 9.8 million euros ($10.7 million) and will deliver them within three months, according to a statement from its defence ministry on Wednesday (June 28).

Lithuania was reacting to an urgent Ukrainian request to help strengthen air defences in the face of Russian attacks against military and civilian targets, the Lithuanian ministry said.

As part of the deal, Norway will supply maintenance equipment for the launchers.

Lithuania will handle the delivery of the NASAMS to Ukraine and will include a donation of 10 M113 armoured personnel carriers in the package.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the security situation in northern Ukraine was unchanged and under control after Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin flew into exile in Belarus.

Prigozhin flew from Russia to exile in Ukraine's northern neighbour on Tuesday (June 27) following an aborted mutiny, and Russian President Vladimir Putin said fighters in Prigozhin's Wagner mercenary group would be offered the choice of relocating there.

"Our army believes that the situation in the north of our country is unchanged and is under our control," Zelenskiy reassured.

"Wagnerites are in occupied territory in Ukraine - they were and are in the (eastern) Luhansk region. And the truth is also that many of them were destroyed near Bakhmut by our forces, over 20.000 of them," he added, confirming that some of the group's fighters remained on Ukrainian soil after fighting in the east.

"Our army thinks that the situation in our country's north due to the presence of Wagner mercenaries there hasn't changed, and that the situation is under control."

Zelenskiy also said Ukraine understood it could not join NATO while the war was ongoing. "However, we need to be sure that after the war, we will become (member). That's the signal we want to get: after the war Ukraine will become NATO member. I think this is the second, very fair signal."

"What should we do while we're not in NATO? We're being supported by our (partner) countries, and we would like to get the third signal on the summit, security guarantees not instead of NATO, but for the period that we're not in NATO yet," the Ukrainian president added.