KYIV — While NATO is teetering, Ukraine is watching on with astonishment — and a grain of hope.

U.S. President Donald Trump this week said he was seriously considering withdrawing his country from the alliance. The statement alarmed NATO members like Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who said the scenario "looks like Putin's dream plan."

But Alyona Getmanchuk, Ukraine's ambassador to NATO, reacted to the news with surprising optimism, telling POLITICO the current turbulence could lead to the alliance's renaissance.

“Instead of talking about the collapse of NATO, I would prefer to speak about the reinvention of the alliance,” she said on Friday.

Getmanchuk argued that, "paradoxically," the turmoil could open up more opportunities for Ukraine's integration into the alliance, a result she said would help NATO become "far more effective, lethal, innovative, and capable of countering the Russian threat."

The head of Ukrainian mission pushed back about Trump's characterization of the alliance as a "paper tiger" that fails to intimidate Russian President Vladimir Putin. She pointed out that although the Kremlin has spent decades attempting to undermine NATO, it has never yet dared to attack any of its member countries directly.

And she said Article 5 of the NATO Treaty — which commits the alliance to come to the defense of any of its member countries if they are attacked — remains a "role model" for security guarantees in a way in which the EU's own mutual defense clause simply does not.

Ukraine has long sought to join NATO to benefit from that kind of defensive backing, and that ambition has only been reinforced following the Russian invasion of its territory. But Trump has firmly opposed Kyiv's accession, and last year the alliance's secretary-general, Mark Rutte, said the country could not join without the support of all current members.

Given NATO membership is "currently politically out of reach," Getmanchuk said Kyiv was striving for "an Article 5–like arrangement," which she likened to a guarantee of Ukraine's sovereignty.

The desire to join NATO has not blinded Ukraine to the substantial cracks within the alliance.

The ambassador admitted that the country's faith had been shaken, in part because of NATO's "behavior in the first years of the war, when it deliberately tried to distance itself from all key processes related to providing Ukraine with the most necessary support — lethal weapons."

Following Trump's reelection and Washington's decision to scale down its support of Kyiv, NATO took a more active role in the country's defense, and today the alliance coordinates more than 80 percent of all military assistance to Ukraine.

While a majority of Ukrainians still wish for their country to join NATO, support for the alliance has been steadily dropping since 2022, when a record 89 percent of citizens expressed support for membership. In the years that have elapsed since then, the pressures of war have led Ukraine to gain defensive experience and develop its own effective weapons systems.

Getmanchuk said Kyiv is today positioned to be a partner that has something to offer the alliance in return for aid.

“Even without being a NATO member, we are the only country that, in practice, is already implementing the Alliance’s Strategic Concept," she said, referring to the document that lays out key objectives and explicitly names adversaries whose aggressive behavior must be halted.

Ukraine, she said, was the alliance's key partner in "confronting its most direct and significant threat, which has been defined as Russia."