"This can be ruled out absolutely, especially after August's developments in Georgia," said Alexander Khramchikhin. "It is clear now that Europe will never admit them into NATO under any circumstances. Maybe only in 20 years' time, when all this has been forgotten."
NATO foreign ministers agreed on Tuesday in Brussels to gradually resume contacts with Moscow, suspended after Russia's armed conflict with Georgia in August, but western European powers led by Germany put the dampeners on U.S. enthusiasm for granting Tbilisi and Kiev Membership Action Plans (MAPs), a key step for entry into the military alliance.
Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the alliance would instead "beef up" the NATO-Ukraine and NATO-Georgia commissions to help speed up reforms needed for the countries' eventual membership.
He also said that both Ukraine and Georgia had made progress towards NATO membership, but they still had much work ahead of them.
Russia's envoy to the 26-member alliance, Dmitry Rogozin, said earlier on Wednesday that none of the NATO members were happy about the prospect of any future membership of the alliance for either Ukraine, racked by financial and political turmoil, or Georgia.
"They cannot show that they have surrendered to pressure from Moscow, so they will make instead some fine statements and promises to Ukraine and Georgia...but no crucial decisions will be made," Rogozin told the Kommersant business daily.
Another Russian analyst, Sergei Markov, director of the Institute for Political Studies, said France, Germany, Italy, and Spain shared Moscow's fears that the Georgian leadership "dreamt of the start of military conflict between Russia and NATO."
On the topic of Ukraine, Markov said that any MAP deal could cause a political crisis in the ex-Soviet republic, where the vast majority of the population is against President Viktor Yushchenko's desire to see the country enter NATO.