Ukraine’s best option to ensure national security will be to join Nato in the “near future,” President Andrzej Duda said on January 15 as he hosted his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Warsaw.

Zelenskiy arrived in Warsaw to announce what might be a breakthrough in the long-standing issue of exhumation of Polish victims of Ukraine nationalist insurgents in the 1940s. Ukraine and Poland have now agreed to exchange a list of sites in which Polish and Ukrainian victims of the conflict were buried to carry out exhumations, identification, and formal burial. Works are expected to start in April.

The background to Zelenskiy’s visit was Ukraine’s ongoing struggle against Russia. Poland has been one of Ukraine’s strongest allies since the start of the war in 2022.

Warsaw has said time and again that ensuring a favourable result of the war – on the battlefield and via diplomacy – is in the interest of Poland and other CEE countries. Should Russia prevail in Ukraine, it might become emboldened to target the Baltic States and Poland next, Warsaw has long said.

“Ukraine’s best security guarantee would be – and I believe it soon will be - admitting it to Nato and covering it with guarantees of Article 5,” Duda told a press conference after meeting Zelenskiy.

Zelenskiy has been pushing very hard for accelerated Nato membership as part of his “victory plan” that he touted around Western capitals at the end of last year, but to little avail. More recently he has softened his stance and suggested that Ukraine would accept “partial” membership, suggesting that only the parts of Ukraine under government control be admitted to Nato – the so-called “Western Germany” scenario.

But Zelenskiy has repeatedly said that any ceasefire talks would be meaningless unless Ukraine is offered real and strong security guarantees by its Western partners.

On January 15, Russian President Vladimir Putin repeated the conditions that Russia will demand in any of the mooted talks. A guarantee that Ukraine never joins Nato and returns to neutrality tops the list, but Putin said Russia is not against Ukraine signing individual bilateral security deals with individual countries.

The West so far has been very reluctant to offer Ukraine any sort of security deals, preferring to sign so-called security assurances that commit partners to providing long-term financial support and military supplies.

Nato’s Article 5 states that an attack on a member state equals an attack on the alliance as such.

Duda added, however, that Ukraine’s Nato membership would be possible only after the war with Russia ends.

The Polish president’s hawkish stance came in contrast to an earlier statement by Prime Minister Donald Tusk who preferred to talk about Ukraine’s membership in the EU but did not mention Nato.

Tusk and Duda are from opposing political camps, fielding their candidates in this May’s presidential election. A Tusk candidate, Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, leads the polls ahead of Karol Nawrocki, who runs for Law and Justice (PiS), Duda’s patron party.