AKIPRESS.COM - Ukraine will decide whether to join NATO in a referendum at the end of this decade once it moves from “empty declarations” and completes “real” policy changes needed for membership, President Petro Poroshenko said, according to the media reports.

“We have worked out an intense plan for the next six years, so that the country meets the criteria to join the EU and to join NATO,” Poroshenko said in Kiev on November 24. “And only then the Ukrainian people will decide on joining or not joining, in a referendum.”

Ukraine’s government said September 26 that it seeks to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the “short term.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has criticized the U.S. and European Union countries for encroaching into former communist Europe, saying they have violated agreements signed at the end of the Cold War and pose a threat to his country’s national security.

More than 4,300 people have been killed during the conflict and much of the local infrastructure has been laid to waste in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine along the Russian border.

The EU and the U.S. accuse Russia of not abiding by a September 5 truce signed in Minsk, Belarus. Ukraine says Russian troops and vehicles continue to cross the frontier. Russia denies it’s fomenting the war.