Hesitation in allies! Washington and Berlin are firmly against the invitation to Kiev for NATO membership

"When NATO leaders gather this summer to celebrate the 75th anniversary of their military alliance, the last thing they want to see is a resurgent Russian army marching through Ukraine because Europe has been too weak to provide Kiev with the support it needs", writes The New York Times.

After all, Ukraine wants a formal invitation to join NATO. But representatives of the alliance agree that this will not happen at the celebrations planned in Washington in July.

"NATO has no desire to accept a new member who, due to the alliance's collective security pact, would involve it in the biggest land war in Europe since 1945," the American media wrote.

That has prompted NATO to seek some middle ground -- something that isn't membership but is serious enough to show that it supports Ukraine "for a long time," as Jens Stoltenberg, NATO's secretary general, put it this week .

According to senior Western diplomats involved in the discussions, what will be is so far proving elusive.

Proposals presented this week at a meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels to give NATO greater control over the coordination of military aid, funding and training of Ukrainian forces were immediately met with scepticism.

The United States and Germany remain opposed to offering Ukraine the start of membership talks in Washington, as they did at last year's summit in Vilnius, and want the issue off the table in July, despite a similar process in the European Union was approved last winter. But they want to provide Ukraine with concrete commitments to fulfill. Efforts to clearly define the conditions that Ukraine must fulfill in order to start negotiations with NATO.