KYIV — I was about 25 miles from the Russian border when I read the news that President Biden declared Ukraine cannot join NATO until the Kremlin’s invasion of the country has ended.

I’m finishing this piece on the week’s NATO summit from Kyiv to the sound of bombs rocking the capital. 

In Kharkiv, a city Russia came perilously close to occupying when it invaded a year and a half ago, I was interviewing a young man in a special-forces brigade under Ukraine’s intelligence office when I saw Biden’s statement.

I showed him the news story, and he chuckled.

“Sure, I understand,” he told me through a translator.

“Just give us what we need to win the war so then we can join NATO.” 

If only the leader of the free world would do so — instead of delaying for a year and a half the weaponry that would allow the American ally to stop a war in which Russia has mercilessly targeted civilians far more than military marks. 

Everyone I’d talked to in Ukraine, from Lviv to Kyiv to Kharkiv, expected the Lithuanian NATO summit to spell out a clear path to membership for the country defending the West against the most imperialist Russian government since the Cold War’s height. 

Even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said before world leaders met in Vilnius — where Biden skipped the opening dinner because he was sleepy — he understood the technical rules said a country with an active conflict couldn’t join the alliance. 

But anyone who gives the matter a modicum of thought understands that Biden explicitly repeating that Ukraine gets no membership until war ends just gives Russian dictator Vladimir Putin an incentive to always keep active conflict here.

And hours after the summit ended, he’s sent bombs to the capital to prove the point. 

Eyes on the skies 

So what does Ukraine need to win the war so it can join the alliance — and teach NATO how it’s been battling the better-resourced Russian army and winning? 

I’ve asked almost every Ukrainian I’ve met what America and the West can do to help.

Every person’s first word in reply has been either “F-16s” or “weapons” — from a commander I interviewed in Donbas to the governor of the Kharkiv region to an adviser to the defense minister to a teacher in Balakliia whose students were under Russian occupation for months. 

I watched Biden and Zelensky hold their press conference to end the summit from the back seat of a car driving from Kharkiv to Kyiv as Member of Parliament Maria Mezentseva and Kyiv City Councilman Yuriy Serhiyovych Fedorenko listened intently on an iPhone. 

“I think Article Five is already in place — we can call it 5.1,” Mezentseva told me as we arrived in the capital.

She echoed what everyone in Ukraine has told me: Just give us the weapons we need — we will fight to the death with them to defeat Russia. 

Fedorenko, by the way, is not just a councilman — he’s in charge of a drone program in the 92nd Brigade, one of the country’s most famous and bravest. 

“We’re the only NATO country fighting with the NATO weapons,” he noted. And “we are using the NATO weaponry effectively.”

The problem with entry into the alliance, he declared, “is at the political level. All these rules are written by human beings.”

“Some NATO members are showing Russia can go on with its aggression” by delaying Ukraine’s membership, he said. “We see them, and the world sees them.”

And as I listen to bombs go off in the capital as Russia claims it aims to liberate this country, I write to make sure America sees what is happening too. 

Kelly Jane Torrance is The Post’s op-ed editor.