In fresh comments NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte confirmed that NATO membership for Ukraine is off the table when it comes to negotiations with Russia to end the war.

Rutte in an interview Friday was asked by Bloomberg TV’s Annemarie Gordern if Trump has definitely removed the issue of Ukraine’s accession to NATO from the negotiating table. Rutte answered "yes" and nodded in the affirmative when pressed.

The issue of NATO constantly expanding right up to Russia's borders, which especially ramped up in the mid-2000s during the Bush era, has been consistently identified by President Putin as a key motive in his ordering hundreds of thousands of Russian troops into Ukraine in February of 2022.

Russia sees this as a continuation of a war in Donbass that was already burning since 2014, which saw CIA and Western intelligence assist Kiev in seeking to push back Russian influence. But the reality has always been that natives on the Donbass are overwhelmingly Russian-speaking and pro-Moscow.

Rutte’s predecessor Jens Stoltenberg made a bombshell admission in a televised 2023 speech stating that the bloc's refusal to stop expanding east as a key reason for why the Ukraine war started.

"President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement," Stoltenberg said at the time. "That was what he sent us. And [that] was a precondition for not invade [sic] Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that."

Previous to those words, this was considered a 'pro-Kremlin talking point'. NATO chief Stoltenberg had even emphasized in the remarks that Putin "went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders."

But apparently no lessons have been learned, and mainstream Western media has still by and large failed to feature the Stoltenberg admission as part of the narrative on the build-up to war.

As for Rutte, he explained in the new Friday Bloomberg TV interview Europe could normalize ties with Russia when the war is over. "It’s normal if the war would have stopped for Europe somehow, step by step, and also for the US, step by step, to restore normal relations with Russia," he stated.

Rutte just met with Trump in Washington on Thursday, and then said this...

"The Trump administration, the president himself, broke the deadlock in this war because he started to engage with the Russians. I think that’s positive for the Ukrainians," he stated, in another rare admission.

This is a turning point in the rhetoric, as it means NATO's leadership has just backed Trump's efforts to negotiate a final settlement, but likely it will be a difficult, long path - also as Moscow clearly holds the cards on the battlefield at this point, resulting in all the leverage in diplomacy.