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Rada votes on medical cannabis as Kyiv presses NATO
Summary
A look back at a day when Ukrainian politics combined a domestic health-policy vote with an appeal for faster NATO membership.
What did Ukrainian politics look like on 7 April 2021? One answer came from the Verkhovna Rada, which voted that day to legalise the use of medical cannabis products.
The vote sat alongside a very different item on the political agenda. On 6 April 2021, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called on NATO to speed up Ukraine's accession to the military alliance. He framed the request as a response to a growing build-up of Russian troops and military hardware on the country's borders.
He also asked NATO to help end the continuing conflict with pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas.
Taken together, the two items show a government handling routine legislative business while pressing a major security request abroad. The reports from those days do not link the cannabis vote to the appeal to NATO, and the two should be read as separate developments.
