Ukraine's non-aligned status for national security was more meaningless than the Budapest Memorandum, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said.

"The non-alignment imposed on Ukraine, from the point of view of ensuring national security, proved to be an even more useless tool than the Budapest Memorandum," he said in Kyiv on Friday at the 15th Annual Meeting of Yalta European Strategy (YES) organized by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation.

Poroshenko recalled the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, when it was declared that the alliance's door is open for Ukraine and Georgia, but nevertheless the two countries were not offered a membership action plan (MAP).

"What was it? How to call it? The pacification of a potential aggressor," Poroshenko said.

The head of state said that it did not work, because Russia took such actions not as pacification, but as a carte blanche to use force against any neighbor, and in the same year it attacked Georgia.

He explained that a threat to Ukraine had to become obvious at that time.

"Sometimes it seemed that everyone decided everything for us and without us, Ukraine was given back to the empire, turned into a colony and the European Union expanded without us. On the other hand, the Russian world was formed, in the vise of which Ukraine was being shoved. This was supposed to be the reality of a divided continent," Poroshenko said.

At the same time, he stressed that at present the dialogue between Ukraine and NATO had gone beyond the level of partnership to the level of the Allies.