Ukraine’s former top military commander and now ambassador to the UK has been quoted as saying there is no prospect of the country joining Nato. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, quoted by Ukrainian news website Evropeiska Pravda, told a meeting of Ukrainian ambassadors on Monday that Ukraine in no way met the military standards needed to join the alliance. “I know Nato really well. For about 12 years I personally worked on making sure we met Nato standards, and every year I heard tales about how we would join Nato any day now,” the site quoted him as telling the meeting. “Unfortunately, we will never actually join.” Zaluzhnyi said it was “impossible with the level of development that the armed forces of Ukraine have … to join an organisation guided by World War 2 doctrines”. Ukraine has enshrined in its constitution a strategic goal of membership of Nato and the EU, but has acknowledged it currently would not be welcomed into Nato by all its members. Zaluzhnyi was dismissed as Ukraine’s top commander in 2024 over differences with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on conducting the war with Russia.
Ukraine’s frontlines were little changed in July as its forces largely stalled Russia’s momentum, according to an Agence France-Presse analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War thinktank. The Russian army gained a total of less than 40 sq km (15 sq miles) in July, after gaining 30 sq km the previous month. The gains were down sharply from a year earlier, when the Russians were advancing by an average of 405 sq km a month. Kyiv has been carrying out effective strikes deep into Russia and on occupied Ukraine, even as Russia has kept up strikes on Ukraine. In July, the few Russian gains were made in the regions of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, Zaporizhzhia in the south and Sumy in the north-east. The Ukrainian army, for its part, gained 29 sq km in the Dnipropetrovsk region in the centre-east, confirming a trend that began in December 2025.
