Ukraine says letter was sent to show that NATO invite not off the table

KYIV: Ukraine said on Friday it understood there was no consensus yet among its allies to invite it to join the NATO military alliance, but that it had sent a message to its allies to show that the matter of the invitation was not off the table.

According to the text of a letter seen by Reuters earlier, Ukraine's foreign minister urged his NATO counterparts to issue an invitation during a meeting in Brussels next week to Kyiv to join the Western alliance.

"We have sent a message to the allies that invitation is not off of the table, regardless of different manipulations and speculations around that," Olga Stefanishyna, deputy prime minister in charge of NATO affairs, told Reuters.