President Biden met with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at Downing Street, his first stop in a three-nation trip focused in part on rallying the support of U.S. allies for Ukraine. Later Monday, Biden will travel to Windsor Castle to meet with King Charles III, before attending a NATO summit in Lithuania and visiting Finland, which recently joined the alliance.
In an interview with CNN, Biden said a NATO membership vote for Ukraine would be “premature” while the war with Russia is ongoing and called for a “rational path” for Ukraine to join the bloc. At the same time, Turkey and Hungary are blocking Sweden’s bid for NATO membership, underscoring the divisions that could erode the alliance’s deterrent power amid a dangerous standoff with Moscow.
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
Analysis from our correspondents
A fateful summit 15 years ago hangs over the NATO meeting in Vilnius: As NATO leaders convene this week in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, Ukrainian officials are demanding that their Western counterparts remember the legacy of the summit in Bucharest, Ishaan Tharoor writes. During the 2008 NATO meeting in the Romanian capital, former Soviet republics Georgia and Ukraine were offered little more than a vague commitment of entering the alliance at some point, with no established plan regarding how or when that could be achieved.
The halfhearted gesture reflected division within the West at the time. On one side, the administration of President George W. Bush, deeply unpopular abroad after the ruinous war in Iraq and eking out its final year in office, sought to offer the two countries a formal NATO “Membership Action Plan.” On the other, a clutch of Western European governments, led by Germany, believed that neither Georgia nor Ukraine were politically ready to enter the alliance and looked askance at initiatives that may “poke the bear” of the Kremlin.