Ukraine votes to drop neutral status

Ukraine's parliament has taken a historic step towards NATO membership by overwhelmingly voting to revoke the nation's neutral status.

The country adopted its previous position under Russian pressure in 2010.

The Verkhovna Rada parliament voted 303-8 in favour of dropping the country's "non-aligned nation" status, which prevents states from joining other military alliances.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said he will apply for NATO membership due to the danger posed by Russia to Ukraine's territorial integrity.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Ukraine's adoption of the bill was "absolutely counterproductive".

The move "creates an illusion that through this bill, through an aspiration to drop non-aligned status and join NATO, which Ukrainian politicians openly talk about, one can settle a deep crisis of the Ukrainian state," Mr Lavrov said.

Russia sees NATO's eastward expansion as a threat to its own security.

Any accession to the Western military alliance is likely to take years.

However, a NATO spokesman in Brussels said: "Our door is open and Ukraine will become a member of NATO if it so requests and fulfils the standards and adheres to the necessary principles."

Addressing politicians in Kiev before the vote, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said scrapping Ukraine's neutral status underscored its determination to pivot towards Europe and the West.

"This will lead to integration in the European and the Euro-Atlantic space," he said.

Ties between Russia and Ukraine are at an all-time low since Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in March and a pro-Russian separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine.

The pro-Western authorities in Ukraine accuse Russia of orchestrating and arming the uprising in the east after the overthrow of a Ukrainian president sympathetic to Russia.

The Kremlin denies that it is behind the revolt.

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