I do not know what is your circle of friends and partners and how engaged they were in politics, but NATO summit did actually happen in 2008, and Ukraine would

I do not know what is your circle of friends and partners and how engaged they were in politics, but NATO summit did actually happen in 2008, and Ukraine would not be mentioned there if it would not ask about membership. That was few years after the Orange Revolution and country leadership was indeed pro-Western back then. They lost the next elections to Yanukovich, so nobody bothered about this topic until 2013-2014. Since you are living there, you know that Ukraine was a divided country, and it really depended on which bubble you belonged to.