It was a moment that haunted him for years, a call from a bunker in Kyiv that could have been the Ukrainian president’s last.
In his newly revealed memoirs, former NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg describes the “painful moment” in February 2022 when he refused Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s desperate plea to close Ukraine’s skies as Russian forces surged toward the capital.
The decision, Stoltenberg says, was agonising, but necessary.
“We feared it might be his last call”
The call came as Russian troops stormed into Ukraine, launching their full-scale invasion and threatening Kyiv itself. Inside a bunker, Zelenskyy pleaded with the NATO chief to impose a no-fly zone to stop Russian aircraft, drones, and missiles pounding Ukrainian cities.
“Zelenskyy knew we wouldn’t send ground troops,” Stoltenberg recalls. “He accepted it, though he clearly disagreed.”
The Ukrainian leader reminded him that NATO had once enforced a no-fly zone over Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s to protect civilians from Serbian air attacks. Surely, he argued, Ukraine deserved the same.
But Stoltenberg told him the grim truth: enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine would mean taking out Russian air-defence systems inside both Russia and Belarus, and that would drag NATO directly into war with Moscow.
“I feared that call might be his last,” he writes. “It was extremely painful, but I knew what saying yes would mean. It would mean world war.”
A choice between war and restraint
NATO’s dilemma was clear. Step in to save Ukraine and risk a global conflict, or hold back and face accusations of abandonment. Stoltenberg, now looking back, insists the alliance made the right decision under impossible circumstances.
“The decision not to send NATO troops or enforce a no-fly zone was the only viable one,” he writes. “But that didn’t make it any easier.”
Instead, NATO poured weapons, ammunition, and intelligence support into Ukraine, though Stoltenberg admits Western help was “too little and too late” in those first critical months.
“If Kyiv had received sufficient backing earlier,” he adds, “Russia might have thought twice about launching the invasion at all.”
Two years on, and lessons still unlearned
Nearly three years later, Stoltenberg’s reflections cast new light on the behind-the-scenes turmoil of those early days. His account underscores how close the world came to an even larger catastrophe, and how that one “painful moment” still defines NATO’s balance between deterrence and restraint.
For Zelenskyy, the plea for protection above Ukraine remains the one unanswered call. For Stoltenberg, it was the hardest “no” he ever had to give.
