ANTALYA, Turkey (Dispatches) – NATO must not allow Russia’s conflict with Ukraine to spill over into an open war between the alliance and Moscow, its chief Jens Stoltenberg said Friday, warning a no-fly zone would likely lead to full-scale war.
NATO’s rejection of Ukrainian calls to provide air cover against Russian missiles and warplanes has drawn strong criticism from Kiev, which accused the alliance of giving Moscow the greenlight to press ahead with its assault.
“We have a responsibility to prevent this conflict from escalating beyond Ukraine’s borders to becoming a full-fledged war between Russia and NATO,” the NATO secretary general told AFP in an interview on the sidelines of a forum in Turkey.
He warned that a no-fly zone over Ukraine would “most likely lead to a full war between NATO and Russia”, causing “so much more suffering, so much more death and destruction”.
Stoltenberg said a no-fly zone over Ukraine would mean that NATO would have to take out Russian air defense systems not only in Ukraine, but also around Belarus and Russia.
“It will mean that we need to be ready to shoot down Russian planes because a no-fly zone is not only something you declare you have to impose it,” he told AFP at the Antalya diplomacy forum organized by Turkey.
Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky lashed NATO for ruling out a no-fly zone over his country saying the Western military alliance knew further Russian aggression was likely.
“Knowing that new strikes and casualties are inevitable, NATO deliberately decided not to close the sky over Ukraine,” he said.
“The most important thing is that President (Vladimir) Putin should end this senseless war,” he said.
“Withdraw all its forces and engage in good faith in diplomatic political efforts to find a political solution,” said Stoltenberg.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba on Thursday held talks in Antalya in the first such high-level contact since Moscow invaded its neighbor.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, who mediated Thursday’s tripartite talks in Antalya, said his Ukrainian counterpart Kuleba had reaffirmed that Zelensky was ready for a meeting with Putin, and Lavrov had replied that Putin was not against it in principle.
Putin said on Friday that there were some “positive shifts” in talks between Russian and Ukraine, two weeks into Moscow’s military campaign in the country.
“There are certain positive shifts, negotiators from our side reported to me,” Putin told his Belarus counterpart Alexander Lukashenko during a televised meeting in Moscow.
He added that negotiations are “now being held on an almost daily basis”. Russian and Ukrainian negotiators have held several rounds of talks since Putin sent in troops to the country on Feb 24.
The talks have led to the opening of several humanitarian corridors to evacuate civilians from combat areas. Both sides have accused each other of blocking these efforts.
Russian forces bearing down on Kiev are regrouping northwest of the Ukrainian capital, satellite pictures showed, in what Britain said could be preparation for an assault on the city within days.
Ukraine accused Russian forces on Friday of bombing and shelling cities across the country, including hitting a psychiatric hospital near the eastern town of Izyum where hundreds of patients were sheltering in the basement.
In Russia, prosecutors asked a court to declare Meta Platforms an “extremist” organization on Friday, after the owner of Facebook and Instagram allowed posts calling for the death of invading Russian troops.
“Russia is likely seeking to reset and re-posture its forces for renewed offensive activity in the coming days,” Britain’s Ministry of

Defense said in an intelligence update. “This will probably include operations against the capital Kyiv.”
The British update said Russian ground forces were still making only limited progress, hampered by persistent logistical issues and Ukrainian resistance.
Zelensky said Ukraine had “already reached a strategic turning point” in the conflict.
“It is impossible to say how many days we still have to free Ukrainian land. But we can say we will do it,” he said in a televised address.
In an overnight statement, the Ukrainian general staff said Russian forces were regrouping after taking heavy losses. Ukraine had pushed Russians back to “unfavorable positions” in the Polyskiy district, near the Belarus border to the rear of the main Russian column heading towards Kiev, it said.
In the latest move, sources said U.S. President Joe Biden would ask the Group of Seven industrialized nations and the EU to strip Russia of normal rights under global trading rules, known as most-favored nation status.
While Russia’s advance on Kiev has been stalled and it has failed so far to capture any cities in northern or eastern Ukraine, it has made more substantial progress in the south. Moscow said on Friday its separatist allies in the southeast had captured the town of Volnovakha north of Mariupol.
On Friday, three air strikes in the central city of Dnipro killed at least one person, state emergency services said, adding that the strikes were near a kindergarten.
Ihor Polishshuk, the mayor of the city of Lutsk, said four people were killed and six wounded in an attack on an airfield there, a rare strike on a target deep in western Ukraine far from the battlefields in the north, east and south.
Russia has been hit by a barrage of sanctions since Putin sent troops to Ukraine. But the Russian leader, who is also a former KGB agent, brushed these off on Friday.
“The USSR really lived in the conditions of sanctions and (still) developed and achieved colossal successes,” Putin said.
Asked about the prospects of NATO membership for Ukraine, Stoltenberg said it was up to Kiev.
“It is for Ukraine to decide whether they aspire for membership or not. And then at the end of the day, it will be 30 allies to decide on the membership issue,” he said.
In an interview aired on ABC News, Zelensky said he is no longer pressing for NATO membership for Ukraine, a delicate issue that was one of Russia’s stated reasons for invading its pro-Western neighbor.
European Union leaders on Thursday refused Kiwv’s appeal for rapid accession to the bloc and differed over the reach of sanctions against Moscow.
The Russian assault - the biggest assault on a European state since World War Two - has upended Europe’s security order and spurred EU capitals into rethinking what the bloc should stand for, its economic, defense and energy policies.
Cracks have appeared in the bloc’s united front, from its reaction to Kiev’s demand for an accelerated membership of the bloc to how fast it can wean itself off Russian fossil fuels and how best to shape an economic response.
“Nobody entered the European Union overnight,” Croatia Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said as talks among the 27 national leaders ended at wee hours on Friday.
Others also made clear Ukraine would not be allowed to join hastily.
“There is no fast-track process,” said Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, a prominent opponent of EU enlargement.
“Can we open a membership procedure with a country at war? I don’t think so. Can we shut the door and say: ‘never’? It would be unfair. Can we forget about the balance points in that region? Let’s be cautious.”
More than 2.5 million people have fled the country, thousands of civilians have been killed, and Putin’s troops laid siege to several Ukrainian cities.
Some EU leaders pushed for tougher sanctions that would hit Russia’s oil and gas industries even if that meant repercussions for those European nations reliant on Russian fossil fuels.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz did not comment on whether the bloc should ban Russian oil imports, which Berlin has ruled out so far. Russia supplies about a third of Germany’s gas and crude requirements.
But the EU should stop using Russian fossil fuels by 2027, von der Leyen said, adding she would propose a roadmap for that in mid-May.
“The war in Ukraine is an immense trauma... But it is also most definitely something which is going to lead us to completely redefine the structure of Europe,” said French President Emmanuel Macron.
The U.S. Congress passed a huge omnibus 2022 spending bill Thursday including almost $14 billion in humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine.
The blueprint provides more than $780 billion in military funding -- an increase of 5.6 percent over last year -- and $730 billion in non-military cash, a 6.7 percent hike.