KYIV: Foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Friday “Ukraine rejects any efforts to get it to scrap its plans to join NATO as well as any ‘guarantee’ sought by Russia to ease tensions on the border.”

Moscow wants to see an end to NATO’s eastward expansion, after much of Eastern Europe joined the alliance following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday called on his US counterpart Antony Blinken to provide ‘security guarantees’ that NATO would not come closer to Russia’s borders.

Agreeing to abandon its plans to jPolicemen detain a man after a group of protesters, some of them carrying flags of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, demonstrated near the premises of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons on Johan de Wittlaan street in The Hague, on Friday. AFP photo in the alliance ‘is not an option’ for Kiev, Kuleba told AFP in an interview on the sidelines of an OSCE meeting in Stockholm.

He said “I reject this idea that we have to guarantee anything to Russia. I insist that it’s Russia who has to guarantee that it will not continue its aggression against any country.”

NATO officially opened the door to Ukraine membership in 2008, though no progress has been made since.