The challenge of getting Zelenski safely out of Kiev for NATO summit in Madrid
Macron, Scholz and Draghi visited Kiev, Ukraine, on Thursday, amid heavy security measures to meet with the country’s president, Volodymir Zelenski. It was a symbolic visit, but also with a lot of political content in view of the upcoming negotiations.
It has also made public today that the Ukrainian president has been invited to the NATO summit to be held on the 29th and 30th in Madrid. The intention is that Zelenski will not participate telematically, as he has already done in some parliaments since the invasion began, but that he will travel in person to Madrid.
This would be the first time Zelenski would leave Ukraine since the war began. This is not only an important event politically and symbolically, since Russia wants to keep the Alliance as far away from its borders as possible, but also poses a logistical challenge.
NATO has leaked that the operation to get him out of Kiev has already been designed. In this sense, it is a secret logistics given the circumstances.
However, Zelenski’s presence in Madrid is still an unknown. Everything suggests that he will decide at the last moment depending on the situation in the country. In fact, Zelenski has taken advantage of the meeting to ask the leaders of the 3 most important economies of Europe for more armament as the Ukrainian reserves are depleted while Russia depends on itself.
Whether the Ukrainian president attends or not, Madrid is preparing for a major deployment to ensure the security of the leaders during the course of the Summit. The Spanish authorities are also expected to deploy some 25,000 agents from the various state security forces to cover all the meeting points.
